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An investigation of customers' satisfaction as a mediating effect
A.A. Azdel, M.F.S. Bakhtiar, M.S.Y. Kamaruddin & N.A. Ahmad
Faculty of Hotel and Tourism Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Shah Alam, Malaysia
N.C. Ahmat
Faculty of Hotel and Tourism Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Penang, Malaysia
ABSTRACT: Customer's satisfaction come in nature and individualized as each customer will face dis-
similar experience. The attributes of customer loyalty will come after the experience that the customer
gained and it will trigger them to be a loyal customer. This paper studies the antecedents from the per-
spective of the hotel's customer in Malaysia and sees whether it will lead to customer satisfaction and
behavioral loyalty. The customers that had stayed and experienced the services at five star hotels in Kuala
Lumpur were the target population. Bootstrap Analysis had been used to test customer satisfaction as
the mediating variable between customer loyalty antecedents and behavioral loyalty. Most of the findings
were statistically significant. This study had shown the consequence of understanding the customer loy-
alty antecedents as it can give an impact towards retaining the loyal customer.
Keywords
:
Customer loyalty antecedents, satisfaction, behavioral loyalty
1 INTRODUCTION
Conversely, there is a distinction regarding this
relationship as Mohsan, Nawaz, Khan, Shaukat
and Aslam (2011) noted that customer loyalty is
vulnerable because even if consumers are satisfied
with the services they will be disloyal to the pro-
vider if they think they can get better value, con-
venience or quality elsewhere. Furthermore, the
same authors also stated customer satisfaction and
loyalty were the different things as satisfaction is
essential but not a sufficient condition of loyalty.
Therefore, it raised an interest for the researcher
to investigate the antecedents from the perspec-
tive of the hotel's customer in Malaysia and see
whether it will lead to customer satisfaction and
behavioural loyalty. Furthermore, this study will
help the hotel industry to figure out the customer
loyalty antecedents and make use of it to tackle
this target customer. Hence, this study will be using
different settings from the previous research.
Customer's satisfaction come in nature and indi-
vidualized as each customer will face dissimilar
experience. The attributes of customer loyalty
will come after the experienced that the customer
gained and it will trigger them to be as a loyal cus-
tomer. The customer will face different experience
even though they are staying at the same hotel and
received the same service. Different person con-
veys a different background, values, attitudes, and
beliefs to the situation as each experience is derived
through his or her individual lens (Knutson, Beck,
Kim & Cha, 2009).
When the customer is gaining more experience
over time, the cumulative satisfaction become
more important and it will contribute to the loy-
alty. Furthermore, the experienced customer and
the customer that have cumulative satisfaction will
not defect just because one unsatisfying experience
(Brunner, Stöcklin & Opwis, 2008).
The study that had been done by Lee and Back
(2009) had mentioned that the loyal customer will
give lots of advantages for the firm and perhaps
for the hotel too as it can help the hotel to reduce
their marketing and operation cost, increase their
revenue, positive word of mouth and also it will
reduce the possibility for the customer to switch
for the other competitors.
2 LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1
Hotel customer loyalty antecedents
Customer loyalty can be defined from various
definitions. Bowen and Shoemaker (2003) stated
that customer loyalty is the measurement of the
probability that the customer will revisit or come
again to a property. The same authors also noted
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