Effects of Customer Experience on Customer Loyalty in Upscale Hotels in China

Managers in the hotel industry who want to strengthen customer loyalty must prioritize their marketing strategies generating value through distinctive experience. To carry out such strategies, hotels can mainly orchestrate the three customer experience clues concerning the functioning, tangible quality, and employee quality of product and service. The three clues set can create a deep preference for a specific experience thus for a hotel's products and services over their competitors. The current study is aimed at exploring the effects of these customer experience clues on both customer attitudinal and behavioral loyalty. 8 hotels located in the city-center of Beijing, which includes 2 local brands and 6 international brands have been chosen by convenient sampling methods to conduct the survey. It took about 2 weeks to collect the data, and a total of 400 questionnaires were distributed and an 83% useable rate of the questionnaire has been achieved. The collected data was then analyzed by SPSS 14.0. The research findings identified the corresponding factors of each customer experience clues and revealed that the functional, mechanic, and humanic clues have positive effects on attitudinal loyalty, while the mechanic and humanic clues directly affect customers' behavioral loyalty. Furthermore, the mechanic clues and the humanic clues are the best predictors for customer attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty.