Investigation of factors influencing customer loyalty in Malaysia and Jordan hotel industry

The ever increasing establishment of various star hotels in Malaysia and Jordan has leverage the choice options of guests and tourist in these countries. While the guests were been offered multiple choices, the management of hotels are staggering to keep their existing guests and attract new ones through service provision to mitigate effects of competition. This study aims to proffer solutions to customer loyalty challenges at these destinations by proposing and validating customer loyalty model using relationship marketing and social exchange theory. Based on the underpinning theories, this study analyzed the direct and indirect influence of brand image, trust, convenience and emotion on customer loyalty of five star hotels in Malaysia and Jordan. Further, the mediating effect of customer satisfaction on the relationship between exogenous latent variables and endogenous latent variable was investigated. A total of 384 and 371customers respectively of three famous hotels under the management of Starwood were sampled using convenience sampling method for data analysis from Malaysia and Jordan. SPSS version 21.0 software was used for the analysis. The results of empirical analysis supported all the hypothesized relationships. In Malaysia, customers considered brand image and convenience as the most significant influencer of customer loyalty. While Jordanian 5 star hotels customers considered emotion, brand image and convenience as the most significant factors of customer loyalty. However, the empirical results showed partial mediation effects on the relationship between brand image, trust, convenience, emotion and customer loyalty in respect of Malaysian hotel customers. In Jordan hotels, satisfaction does not mediate the relationship between trust and customer loyalty but partially mediate between emotion, brand image, convenience and customer loyalty. In summary, the findings of this study will narrow the perception of the top echelon of these hotels on the actual factors to focus in order to earn loyalty of their valued customers. This study also contributed to frontier of knowledge by integrating the variables of relationship marketing from the perspectives of two developing countries. The study made useful recommendations that will benefit hotel industry generally and suggest direction for further research.