Investigating British customers’ experience to maximize brand loyalty within the context of tourism in Egypt: Netnography & structural modelling approach

The concept of ‘customer experience’ has evolved as an imperative area of study within themarketing discipline. Despite its importance and the positive attention this concept hasreceived during the last few years, the explanation of customer experiences have remainedvague and lack a thorough theoretical foundation. Furthermore, practitioners across manyindustries claim that there is a connection between customer experience and loyalty, yet thereis a paucity of research to validate this theoretical assumption. This study aims to address thisgap in the literature and to facilitate better understanding of the concept of 'customerexperience' and its antecedents and focus on brand loyalty as consequence from the consumerperspective.Accordingly, a mixed-method research design was adopted that consisted of two phases. Thefirst phase involved a netnography study to gain better understanding of the notion ofcustomer experience and refine a conceptual framework that has been developed on the basisof the existing literature. In the second phase this framework was tested by means of a surveyof British customers to examine their experience with resort-hotel brands in Sharm El Sheikh,Egypt. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the survey responses. The structuralmodel showed a very good fit to the data and good convergent, nomological and discriminantvalidity and reliability stability.The findings of this study identified four aspects of customer experience in the resort-hotelsin Egypt; i.e. educational, aesthetics, relational and novelty. Those aspects are congruent withprior work in the tourism literature. Additionally, the study found that customers rely onsome service cues such as: price, core service and WOM to predict and assess their experiences. The findings also indicated that perceived service quality has a mediating role inthe relationship between customer-contact employees and core service and customerexperience.A key contribution of this research is offering a robust model that explains the nascentphenomenon of customer experience and demonstrating that experience has a definitepositive impact on brand loyalty. The use of netnography to identify customer experiencedimension is also considered as a methodological contribution in the area of marketingresearch. Moreover, the present study adds novel perspective to the growing body of brandliterature (particularly service brand) and suggests directions for future research. Finally, thestudy provides managerial implications for service managers to identify the experientialneeds of their customer and properly design the customer experience.