DO SERVICE QUALITY AND SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING IMPROVE CUSTOMER RETENTION IN HOTELS? TESTING THE MEDIATION EFFECT

Customer retention is a critical factor in companies’ survival, and both service quality and social media are important means of retaining customers. However, despite this importance of these antecedents, only a few studies considered the effects of these factors in the hotel industry literature. With the application of social exchange theory, the current research aims to evaluate the effect of service quality and social media marketing on customer retention in hotels, and evaluates how customer satisfaction, brand awareness and brand image mediate this association. After pretesting the questionnaire, data of this research was collected from 4- and 5-star hotel customers in various cities of the Czech Republic. Before testing the hypotheses, data have been tested in term of checking reliability and validity. Moreover, the probability of common-method bias was also tested in order to ensure there is no variation caused by study method or instrument. Testing the hypotheses was done using correlation and regression analysis afterwards. Findings of this research indicated that service quality and social media marketing improve customer satisfaction, brand awareness, and brand image. Moreover, customer satisfaction, brand awareness, and brand image are also antecedents of customer retention. Findings also confirmed that these three factors (customer satisfaction, brand awareness, and brand image) play the mediation roles between Service quality and revisit intention, and also between social media marketing and revisit intention. Results of this research showed the importance of both service quality and social media marketing in order to achieve better customer outcomes and encourage clients to revisit the hotel. The findings can provide important managerial and practical implications to the hotel industry.