Customer engagement for evaluating customer relationships in hotel industry

Abstract Customer engagement can be used as a proxy in customer behaviour research for evaluating customer relationships towards a company and/or brand. Companies are increasingly recognizing the value of establishing close customer relationships. The objective of the research was to explore the associations among customer engagement dimensions and loyalty for evaluating customer relationships in hotel industry. Furthermore, the study evaluated the level and influence of new customers and repeat customer segments. The questionnaires were completed by 240 customers from five star hotels (30% customers) and four star hotels (70% customers) in Jammu and Kashmir, India. Descriptive, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and regression analysis were used to test the constructs. The results suggested that customer engagement (CE) makes a substantial contribution to the prediction of loyalty in building customer relationships. The findings proposed that hoteliers can actively incorporate strategies to enhance CE, which eventually develops a sustainable loyal customer relationship. The results could be effective to hoteliers in engaging customers while marketing, branding, differentiating and segmenting its products and services in building loyal customer relationships. Moreover, segmenting the customers offers a deeper and more inclusive knowledge of nature of customer relationships and how engagement can be fostered and developed among diverse customer segments.