Customer loyalty in the tour operator industry: an exploration of its determinants : Towards a new customer loyalty model including social media engagement

Due to the competitive tourism industry, customer loyalty is becoming more and more important for tour operators in order to be successful. Looking at the existing literature, several researchers suggest that customer satisfaction, trust, perceived quality and communication are positively related to customer loyalty. In addition, nowadays social media is globally used to engage with customers and can lead to customer loyalty. Therefore, the research question of this paper is: How are customer satisfaction, perceived quality, communication and social media engagement related to customer loyalty in the tour operator industry? In total 286 participants filled in the questionnaire. They were selected via the database of the case company, Cirkel Vakanties. Looking at the results of the regression analysis, only customer satisfaction and trust have a significant positive relationship with customer loyalty. However, based on additional analyses, caution is advised when rejecting the other hypotheses.