Consumer loyalty and switching in e-commerce travel websites

Abstract

Customer loyalty is one of the major concerns both in physical retail stores and also in online stores. This is due to the fact, that having loyal customers will result in repetitive purchases and also more promotion. Given the element of customer loyalty, companies will be gaining free promotion through word-of-mouth as satisfied consumers are more likely to recommend the brand to their peers. Thus, for most companies it is highly important to always satisfy their consumers throughout the purchase stage in the decision making process whilst providing them with a positive experience. Dick and Basu (1994) where one of the first researchers that proposed four key forms of loyalty which are comprised of pure loyalty, spurious loyalty, latent loyalty and no loyalty. Given these four forms of loyalty, different types of consumers can be attributed towards a certain group. Therefore, companies would be able to distinguish the type of loyalty that the consumers they currently hold have. The purpose of this study is to provide a better understanding of consumer loyalty and the switching factors with regards to E-Commerce Travel Website. Moreover, these two elements can ultimately contribute to consumer inertia, which is also being investigated throughout this study. Through the use of Microsoft Excel and SPSS, visuals and statistical calculations were conducted in order to provide a better understanding of the measured being studied. Throughout this study the factors that make consumers want to switch from one provider to another were established. In fact, from this study reliability, trust and a cheaper price emerged as the key factors that contributes towards switching actions taken by consumers.