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that customer loyalty is essential in hotel industry
as this industry had matured and competition is
strong. A study done by Shoemaker and Lewis
(1999) stated that customer loyalty is not the same
as customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction
will measure how well a customer's expectation is
met by a given transaction. Meanwhile, customer
loyalty measures how likely a customer to repur-
chase and engage in partnership activities.
Hence, this study had identified customer loyalty
antecedents that will help the hoteliers or academia
to view that those antecedents will give an input
to them in executing their strategies, which simi-
lar dimension of customer loyalty antecedents in
Azdel, Azizan, Bakhtiar and Ahmad (2014) study.
The antecedents that had been review and dis-
cussed in this study are perceived value, familiarity
and attachment.
Velazquez, Saura and Molina (2011) noted that
customer perceived value will engage the evaluation
of the customer between what is attain which is the
result and benefits and what has been invested that
means money, time and effort that the customer
need to pay. Perceived value is important as it will
give an impact as the customer will consider it when
seek information about certain hotel, comparing
with other hotels and also their willingness to buy.
A study done by Cronin, Brady and Hult (2000)
has some distinction as the authors mentioned that
perceived value that the customer gained will be
the better measurement of repurchase of a prod-
uct or service than the customer satisfaction or the
quality of the product or services.
Previous study by Williams and Vask (2003)
mentioned that place attachment refers to the
emotional and symbolic relationship that individ-
ual form with a certain place. Besides that, place
attachment also can be referred to the experience
of a long term affective bond to a particular geo-
graphic area as had been defined by Hay (1998)
that a person will has a feeling of affection or a
sense of belonging of that place if they lives in a
particular place over an extended period of time.
According to Hummon (1992), people form
emotional bonds to a place and also to other peo-
ple and the attachment to a place reveal the embed-
dedness of individuals within their socio-physical
environments. It had been agreed by Hidalgo and
Hernandez (2001) as the authors stated that the
place attachment will comprises of cognitive and
emotional linkage of a customer to the place.
Familiarity is being defined by Moorthy, Ratch-
ford and Talukdar (1997) as the customer percep-
tion on how much he/she knows about the place
that means the hotel. Familiarity also undertake in
the marketing as the customer will go or purchase
product or service that they familiar (Moore &
Lehmann, 1980).
Gursoy (2001) notified that besides using the
product which means the internal source, customer
familiarity can also be acquired from external
sources that are word of mouth and advertising.
Meanwhile, Gefen (2000) mentioned that familiar-
ity will act as a mechanism in reducing uncertainty
and it had been agreed by Bhattacherjee (2002)
that familiarity had works as a risk reduction and
consequently it had effect the customer's trust for
the product and service.
2.2
Customer satisfaction and behavioural loyalty
Recent study done by Prayag and Ryan (2012)
agreed that as satisfaction levels increase, the pro-
pensity of the customer to return and recommend
will increase as well. The authors also stated word-
of-mouth recommendations are critical for loyalty.
Moreover, Choi, Cho, Lee, Lee and Kim (2004)
in their study noted that the customer who feels
satisfied with the service that they get will make a
repeat purchase and recommend about the service
provider to other people.
However, study done by Walsh, Evanschitzky
and Wunderlich (2008) found that satisfaction with
behavioural loyalty was only moderately significant
as the authors indicated customers with weakly
held satisfaction have a greater risk of defection
than the customers that have more strongly held
satisfaction. The statement showed if the customer
felt only a little bit of satisfaction, the probabil-
ity of them to return or recommend to others is
slightly low.
3 METHODOLOGY
A quantitative approach was used to gather the
data by distribution of questionnaire to the sam-
ple that has been determined. It involves gathering
numerical data using structured questionnaires to
collect primary from individuals. The research took
place at the 5 stars hotels around Kuala Lumpur.
The customers that had stayed and experienced the
services at five star hotels in Kuala Lumpur were
the target population. From the recent record,
there are 25 hotels in Kuala Lumpur are 5-stars
rating. The researchers choose the 25 hotels that
involved in this study. A total of 169 valid samples
were gathered and analyzed.
4 FINDINGS
Among the 169 respondents who answered the
questionnaires, it appears that majority (57.4%) of
them were female while almost half (42.6%) were
men. Meanwhile, most of the of them (38.5%)
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