Mediating effects of customer satisfaction and customer delight on perceived value and customer loyality in Iran's hotel industry

Creating and maintaining customer loyalty is an important strategy to maintain a competitive advantage. Customers decide to purchase services based on perceived value or the degree of satisfaction of their needs and expectations about service quality and perceived price as value components. The main objective of this research is to identify and analyze factors that affect customer loyalty in hotel industry. This research is conducted to offer an integrated model, a continuum from value components to customer loyalty. A conceptual model was developed to examine the effect of service quality and perceived price on customer perceived value directly and on customer satisfaction, customer delight and customer loyalty indirectly. Quantitative method was applied. This study focuses on hotel sector in Esfahan city in Iran. 414 guests from nine hotels (3 and 4-star) participated in the survey. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was utilized to examine the research hypotheses by the aid of SmartPLS application. The results indicated that customer perceived value, customer satisfaction and customer delight are significant antecedents of customer loyalty. Furthermore, service quality and perceived price have significant impact on customer perceived value. In addition, customer delight has a key role as a mediator between customer perceived value and customer satisfaction on customer loyalty. The results provide practitioners with a more integrated model in understanding customer loyalty, especially in hotel sector. The results offer factors which help to create a seamless relationship with customers in order to gain customer loyalty, specifically for the hotel industry.