The Effects of Service Quality on Customer’s Relationship Quality and Loyalty to Travel Website

• Main Authors: Yu-Ta Lin, 林佑達
• Other Authors: Ming-Hsien Yang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/04444078061678583688

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 資訊管理學系 === 94 === The mass usage of the Internet makes the travel website industry grow drastically and becomes a very fruitful business during the past years. Among the emergent Internet business models, the virtual travel is one of the few industries that have been implemented successfully. Due to its success, the firms in the virtual travel industry and the conventional travel firms having websites are facing a merciless competition. In this highly competitive market, how a firm can maintain its customers’loyalty is very crucial to sustain its competitive advantage and make itself a standout among the competitors. Higher website service quality may lead to better customer relationship and may thus increase customer loyalty. The purpose of this study is to empirically test the hypothesized relationship that the service quality of a travel website will positively affect its customers’ relationship quality and loyalty. We conducted an experiment to test the above-hypothesized relationship. This study designed a virtual travel website. The independent variables corresponding to the service quality of websites consist of security, responsiveness, and reliability and the dependent variable is customers’ relationship quality and loyalty. The subjects of the experiment were asked to browse the website following the experiment guidelines set by the researcher. After having browsed thoroughly the illustrated website, the subjects were asked to fill a questionnaire. The response data were then analyzed by using the method of analysis of variance (ANOVA) to test our hypotheses. The analysis of our experiment result supported the following three hypotheses: 1.The security and reliability of a travel website positively affects its customers’ relationship quality. 2.The customers’ relationship quality of a travel website positively affects its customers’ loyalty. 3.The service quality of a travel website positively affects its customers’loyalty. The result of this research shows that the service quality of travel website indeed affects relationship established between website and online customers, and the quality of relationship influences the customers’ loyalty significantly. Hence, this study suggests that website manager must improve the service quality of website continually in order to promote customers’satisfaction and trust of website, therefore not only maintain the better relationship, but also achieve an objective of customers’loyalty.