Understanding the dimensions of customer relationships in the hoteland restaurant industries

Abstract

tThe purposes of this research were, first, to examine the dimensionality of hospitality customer rela-tionships and, second, to develop a multi-dimensional customer relationship scale validated with bothantecedent measures of marketing effectiveness and effect measures of financial performance. Whilehospitality marketing research has frequently focused on the relationships between various marketingactions and different dimensions of customer relationships, there is a lack of research examining cus-tomer relationships as a multi-dimensional construct. For both the hotel and restaurant industries, scaledevelopment procedures with confirmatory factor analyses were used to identify the dimensions of cus-tomer relationships: engagement, motivation, commitment, cross-buying, word of mouth, and defection.The nomological validity of these dimensions was tested using the antecedent of service quality and theeffect of customer lifetime financial value. The paper concludes by articulating, first, the theoretical andpractical applications of the proposed scale and, second, an agenda for future research.