The Influence of Customer Experience on Brand Loyalty Within Smart Hotel Chains in China: The Intermediary Function of Customer Trust and the Influencing Role of Technological Preparedness

Abstract

Smart hotel chains are rapidly growing in China, taking the traditional business of hotels to a new level with the assistance of artificial intelligence, mobile applications, rooms fitted with IoT, automated check-in, digital payment systems, service robots, and personalised recommendation systems and integrated customer relationship platforms. In this context, the experience the customer has in the hotel is one of the key factors that influence the customer's response to the hotel brands. Meanwhile, customer trust is an important relational mechanism as customers need to assess the quality and convenience of hotel services as well as the reliability, security and consistency of the technology-enabled communication with the hotel. Accordingly, the present study analyzes two links between customer experience and customer loyalty (H1) and customer trust (H2) based on the conceptual model of smart hotel customers in China. This study is a quantitative, cross-sectional research with a questionnaire based survey of the customers who have experienced the smart hotel service in the major cities of China. Customer experience is perceived as functional, affective and social and customer trust is perceived as reliability, integrity, security and confidence in the hotel brand. Operationalisation of brand loyalty consists of revisit intention, preference, resistance to brand switching and intention to recommend. The selected statistical method for the proposed analysis is Partial Least Squares (PLS) Structural Equation Modelling because there are some latent variables and predictions. As shown with illustrative results, customer experience is positively related with brand loyalty and the relationship is statistically significant with estimated standardised coefficient (β) = 0.642, t = 15.287 and p < 0.001. In the other results, customer experience is shown to have a significant positive relationship with customer trust, with the value of the beta = 0.716, t = 19.438 and p value < 0.001. The illustrative findings suggest that customer experience is an important antecedent of customer behaviour loyalty and of relational customer confidence in the context of smart hotels. It is the study's innovative contribution to the hospitality marketing research field that it identifies customer experience as a common antecedent for customer trust and brand loyalty, and places both these relationships within the context of China's technologically-driven hotel industry. The results offer implications for smart hotel chains for issues of service consistency, digital convenience, personalisation, privacy protection, human interaction and service design through technology.