Brand Loyalty In Tourism

Intro

In today’s high competitive hospitality and tourism industry, brand loyalty generates various benefits like building barriers to competitors, generating bigger sale and revenue amount, reducing client acquisition prices, and inhibiting customers' susceptibility to marketing efforts of competitors (Knox and Walker, 2001; Rundle-Thiele and Mackay, 2001).

As such, service encounter would play an integral part in create brand loyalty. In order for customers to be loyal to a brand, it requires a huge amount of involvement in organising marketing campaigns that would attract the attention of existing and potential consumers. These campaigns would have an impact on the current mindsets of the consumers in which would result in different types

Seasonal and part-time employees have been found to focus on performing their core duties but not to contribute beyond their immediate duties, to such things as knowledge-creating processes, for example (Stamper & Dyne, 2001). Other studies have shown that tourism employees are often too focused on maintaining professional attitudes and delivering professional services. The employees are hyper-professional (Sundbo, 2011) and take pride in delivering what they perceive to be high quality service, but they tend to ignore inputs, personal needs and special desires of users that do not fit within the predefined service schema (Sundbo, 2011). Thus certain commonly observed characteristics of tourism service encounters can limit the knowledge-creating potential of those encounters. In standardised and efficient service encounters it is the company and the employees who guide the interaction in the service delivery process (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004). This provides little incentive for users to communicate with front-line employees more than is needed to receive an efficient service delivery. Additional communication will mostly be limited to complaints or brief statements of satisfaction. The focus on providing efficient and standardised services is a paradox in an experience intensive sector such as tourism. Customisation (rather than commoditisation), engagement and participation of users are central elements of experiences (see Section 3 below) (Boswijk, Thijssen, & Peelen, 2007; Pine & Gilmore, 1999, 2013) but such aspects are often ignored e or at least downplayed e in tourism service encounters. The barriers to knowledge development mentioned above can therefore all be related to one general characteristic of typical tourism service encounters: