Building E-Loyalty Formed by E-Recovery Service Quality Mediated by E-Service Recovery Satisfaction and E-commitment on Online Travel Agent Customers in Indonesia

Abstract

On current situation, competition to get the highest number of visitors among online travel agents in Indonesia is getting tighter. Online travel agents have tried to create long-term relationships with customers, but for online travel agents, there is a situation can be happened about the service failure that can’t be avoided. Online travel agents need to adjust e-service quality, especially when a service failure occurs where quality service recovery through websites or applications needs to be provided. The level of e-service recovery satisfaction and e-commitment is felt to be very necessary to get e-loyalty. This study's objective is to analyze the role of e-service recovery satisfaction and e-commitment in building e-loyalty customers for online travel agents in Indonesia. The analytical method in this study used the SEM-PLS (Structural Equation Model - Partial Least Square) method with a total of 232 respondents who were taken by purposive sampling from the customer that had used online travel agent during the last 2 years. This study shows the results that e-recovery e-loyalty is influenced favorably by service quality and found that e-commitment has a role as a partial mediation in the relationship between e-recovery service quality and e-loyalty, while e-service recovery satisfaction does not act as a mediation e-recovery service quality on e-loyalty. The findings conclude that the positive experience of customers in experiencing e-recovery service quality allows online travel agents to get closer and build e-loyalty customers online travel agents in Indonesia. This study's originality comes from its examination of the relationship between e-service recovery satisfaction and e-loyalty without using a mediator. This is possible because online travel agents in Indonesia are transitioning from conventional to Information Technology, where customers are divided into two generations with different needs and IT capabilities.