No abstract

A study of 892 luxury-hotel guests, most of whom travel frequently and primarily on business, supports the idea that relationship marketing can benefit luxury-hotel marketing. The authors developed a model of service relationships based on focus groups and customer-loyalty studies. This study primarily tested benefits that hotels could offer guests to foster loyalty. Benefits that garnered strong support were room upgrades, flexible check in and check out, personalized services, and expedited registration; being able to request a specific room; and employees who take guests' problems seriously. Trust is also an antecedent of loyalty; hotels can foster trust by ensuring guest safety, providing consistent service, seeing that employees follow through on guest requests, being truthful, and communicating accurately. Unfortunately, the respondents felt that their hotels fell short on the benefits that foster loyalty and the attributes that foster trust.

The reasons members of the senior market travel forpleasure are used to segment that market into smaller homogenous groups. Findings suggest that the senior market is not one large homogenous group but many submarkets, each with its own needs.

No abstract

A review of the literature on senior travelers revealed no studies that investigated how the senior market has changed over time. Nor did the search reveal any replications of previous studies. While this is not surprising, it is somewhat disappointing, especially given that measuring how attitudes change over time can be very enlightening. The study presented in this article adds to the prior literature on the mature market by examining how the mature market has changed over a 10-year period. While the study does not track the same people over a 10-year period (obviously, this would have been the ideal situation), it does replicate a study that was undertaken in 1986 (published in 1989).