Business-To-Customer Relationship Marketing for Travel Industry

Due to its interactive capability, e-commerce has been considered a promising tool for relationship marketing. However, as competition increases among the online travel businesses, the pressure not just to attract new customers, but to retain existing ones, is intense. Relationship commitment is crucial to a vendors survival. This book develops a theory-based model of relationship commitment in an online travel domain. Leaning on the foundations of marketing literature and the three theories of relationship commitment (the investment model, organizational commitment theory, and commitment-trust theory), this study develops a conceptual framework that explains how customers develop commitment. The results showed the pivotal role of affective commitment as an antecedent to positive WOM communications. Of the two forms of commitment, affective commitment had a stronger positive impact on word-of-mouth. Moreover, the results have shown that satisfaction leads to higher affective commitment, which in turn has a strong influence on positive word-of-mouth communications. This study also highlighted the importance of trust for establishing long-term relationships with a travel retailer.