Customer experience and brand loyalty in the full-service hotel sector: The role of brand affect

This study proposed a comprehensive causal model to examine the relationships between customer experience and four key factors in brand building, i.e., brand loyalty, brand trust, brand affect, and brand involvement. The dimensionality of customer experience in full-service hotel is also particularly examined in relation to brand building. Three steps of data collection were employed: interviews of 50 customers on their experiences of staying full-service hotels, a small survey of 176 hotel guests to establish the measurement scale of customer experience and a major survey of 732 hotel customers in 10 major Chinese cities to test the model of brand loyalty. Customers’ experiences with full-service hotels is proposed to be categorised into functional, affective and social. There is a chain effect from customer experience to brand trust and to brand affect, and then to brand loyalty. The brand involvement does moderate relationships between customer experience and brand trust, and brand affect, but not brand loyalty. For full-service hotels, social and functional experiences are critical in building brand loyalty and therefore they need to be the focal points in the enhancement of customer experience. Also hoteliers are advised to develop emotional connections between the customers and the hotel brand - effective way of building trust and affection. This paper is one of the first few studies to link customer experience to brand loyalty with comprehensive causal effect analysis. The study also contributes to the knowledge of customer experience in the context of the full-service hotel sector