Conclusion and Recommendations
The main aim of this research was to determine differential impact of customers’ perceptions regarding SERVQUAL dimensions on their hotel brand loyalty.
Based on study findings, it can be concluded that customers’ perceptions regarding hotel brand quality dimensions such as “tangibles”, “reliability” and “empathy” contributed to build their brand loyalty.
Interestingly, favorable perceptions on hotel tangibles predicted relatively stronger brand loyalty than did reliability and empathy perceptions.
Today, competition is a primary challenge in the hospitality industry and the solution lies not only in increasing market share, and then preserving it accordingly, but also keeping them intact with the brand. As discussed earlier, in highly competitive war-field, a brand loyal customer profile is critical for a hotel brand.
Our study recommends a stronger role of service quality and one of the strategies to create such a loyal customer profile is to develop a unique ambiance, an exclusive tangibilized atmosphere and a service delivery ensuring empathy and
reliability.
The staff’s politeness, responsiveness, timely service and empathy plays a strong
positive role in instigating a sense of belongingness in the customers; which means a strong brand loyalty because employee’s behavior and attitude shape customers’ overall perceptions about the brand.
This study also has several limitations. Firstly, this study targeted only four/five-star hotels.
So the results cannot be generalized on the entire hotel industry.
Secondly, conducting this research by using probability sampling method will compensate the limitation of non-probability sampling method used in this study.
In spite of a lot of literature on brand equity, it has been difficult to offer a full description of the nature of the hotel brand equity construct.
To the best knowledge of the researchers, this research examined the impact of only two dimensions of brand equity for hotels.
Still, there may be some other dimensions that have not been identified in the conceptual framework of this study.
There is a dire need to extend this study to the categories in chain restaurant, cafe and motel settings.