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This paper aims to investigate a guest’s subjective appraisal of a hotel’s green marketing program, or green equity, along with value, brand and relationship equities on guest loyalty.

Study 1 presents three models to explicate the role of a luxury hotel’s green initiatives in influencing guest loyalty. By means of structural equation modeling, one model emerges with the best fit. Study 2 examines how tourists assign economic value to a hotel’s green programs.

Green equity plays a significant role in customers’ overall assessment of a hotel’s marketing programs; however, the effect is weaker when compared with the other indicators, including a hotel’s value proposition, brand image and loyalty programs. Furthermore, the results reveal that tourists are willing to pay a price premium for a hotel’s green marketing programs.

The paper links green marketing to the customer equity model and clarifies the impact of green marketing programs on loyalty and profitability. However, the study was conducted among luxury hotel guests and tourists in Macau, a leading gambling destination; thus, these customers might not have been concerned with green marketing initiatives.

The results show that green initiatives are beneficial as long as managers include these initiatives in their overall strategic marketing programs that also promote firm value propositions, brand images and reputation.

The paper clarifies the role of green marketing programs in hospitality and shows how hotels can benefit from enhanced guest loyalty and decreased operational expenses by implementing green initiatives.

The purpose of this study is to explore polygamous program loyalty in hotel loyalty programs and the relationship between members’ behavioral loyalty and their perceptions of the program effectiveness.

Descriptive statistics, discriminant analysis, ordinary least square regression and one-way ANOVA methods.

This study suggests that the flexibility to purchase points in a loyalty program is significantly associated with the polygamous program loyalty. Members will stay in only one program if they perceive such flexibility. Although members tend to emphasize purchasing accommodation from the loyalty programs’ hotels, they do not necessarily advocate or pay price premiums for the brand. Compared with basic members, elite members exhibit higher levels of loyalty behaviors in general, but not in terms of paying price premiums.

The results suggest that how customers value a loyalty program can differentiate the number of membership(s) they have. Increasing the flexibility of point purchase in hotel loyalty programs encourages customers to stay in only one program. With a majority of the participants in the study being senior travelers, the results and implications should be generalized only in the senior market. A larger and more diverse sample is recommended for future research.

If loyalty programs seek to keep members from joining other loyalty programs, they should increase members’ likelihood to achieve their expected benefits such as increased flexibility of point purchase. In addition, loyalty programs should encourage, recognize and incentivize members’ reciprocal behaviors based on the norm of reciprocity to build a reciprocal chain in loyalty programs. However, in seeking sustained loyal behavior, loyalty programs need to demonstrate value beyond transactional rewards.

This paper explores the reason why customers join multiple loyalty programs (i.e. polygamous program loyalty) and identifies a broken reciprocity link in hotel loyalty programs. Many members primarily focus on the utilities of loyalty programs rather than contributing back to the program; therefore, the norm of reciprocity is suggested to improve loyalty program effectiveness.

This study aims to use a sample of 2,120 individual hotel properties between 2011 and 2013 to evaluate the impact of loyalty programs on hotel operational and financial performance.

This study provides empirical support for the impact of loyalty program based on both cross-sectional and panel data analyses and uses the instrumental variable technique to avoid potential heteroscedasticity, autocorrelation and simultaneity issues.

Findings of this study show that loyalty program expenses have a significant and positive impact on all three operational performance indicators of RevPAR, ADR and Occupancy and the financial performance indicator of gross operating profit.

This study suggests that the benefits of loyalty programs should be understood against the backdrop of a reasonable set of controlled variables such as e-commerce, franchise, advertising, other marketing expenses, hotel size and hotel chain scales.

Given the conflicting viewpoints about the positive and negative impacts of loyalty programs, and that the literature is scant on empirical validation of the impact of loyalty programs on the overall operational and financial performance of hotel properties, this study is an early attempt to empirically test the impact of loyalty programs on a number of hotel operational and financial performance indicators by using an extensive list of individual hotel properties between 2011 and 2013.

This study attempts to examine customers' perceived value of hotel loyalty programs, to identify the relationship between perceived program value and active loyalty, and to examine the effect of perceived program value in determining customers' active loyalty.

An extensive sample of 15,000 respondents was randomly selected from a pool of US domestic tourists who previously requested tourism information from the Convention and Visitor's Bureau (CVB) websites across the country. The data for this study were collected using online survey questionnaires. The researchers sent out e-mails, embedding a link to a brief questionnaire and consent form to potential respondents.

This study substantiates the impact of perceived program value, particularly the psychological value, on active loyalty. In addition, the study identifies significant differences in perceived financial value and externality value of the loyalty programs.

This study breaks down loyalty program practices into individual brand levels and compares the perceived program value of 11 major hotel loyalty programs. This provides a better understanding of the perceived program value that may affect active loyalty and explains how the value varies by different hotel loyalty programs. This study offers recommendations on how hotels might craft value opportunities to cultivate the continued engagement of consumers. The results of this study offer insights into the under-researched domain of the drivers of active loyalty in the hospitality context and suggest methods for better strategic management of this loyalty form.

This study aims to investigate ways in which hotel loyalty programs can be designed to enhance customer’s identification with a hotel brand and develop a sustainable customer-brand relationship.

The study adopted a cross-sectional design survey questionnaire for data collection and used structural equation modeling data analysis to test the conceptual model.

The three loyalty program experiences proposed (member-to-member similarity, memorable loyalty program experience and loyalty program social benefits) exerted significant positive effects on customer-brand identification (CBI), which, in turn, influences customer-brand relationship elements, including trust, commitment and switching resistance.

This study expands the scope of CBI literature, which previously focused substantially on brand level experiences, by being the first to explore a new set of CBI antecedents with a focus on loyalty program experiences. Furthermore, the current study’s findings delineate specific strategies to uphold the social and experiential aspects of loyalty programs that can develop sustainable customer-brand relationships.

In 1999, Shoemaker and Lewis declared customer loyalty as “the future of hospitality marketing”. This paper aims to evaluate the state of research and practice in hotel loyalty and reward programs in the subsequent 15 years to determine if the tenets set forth have occurred. The loyalty circle provides a conceptual framework within which to evaluate progress and trends in hotel loyalty marketing.

Three approaches were used: a comprehensive review of hotel loyalty and reward program literature from 2000 to 2015, a classification and analysis of program benefits for major hotel companies and in-depth interviews with industry professionals.

The literature shows a progression from process-focused research to a greater emphasis on brand relationships. Communication is neglected compared to the other loyalty circle components. Reward programs still depend largely on financial benefits but have added greater flexibility and customization of rewards.

The literature search was limited to hotels and did not consider other hospitality segments. The sample of interviews was small and may not represent the opinions of all loyalty professionals.

The findings have practical implications for developing more effective loyalty programs and theoretical implications for expanding research horizons.

Shoemaker and Lewis (1999) was a landmark article that led to a period of prolific research on hospitality loyalty. During that time, loyalty programs were progressing and permeating the industry. This study applies the loyalty circle to provide a framework within which to evaluate both research and practice in hotel loyalty marketing.

Analyses the variety of loyalty programmes that exist within the UK corporate hotel sector. A literature review leads to the proposition that in order to be cost‐effective in stimulating repeat business, loyalty programmes should reflect the business environment in which they operate. Loyalty programmes vary in the extent to which they collect, analyse and use customer information. A conceptual framework is developed in which information management and customisation are related to each other. This proposition supports the argument that there is no single formula for the development of a successful loyalty programme within the hotel sector. Although questions are raised about how the effectiveness of a loyalty programme can be measured, the proposition that market characteristics, information intensity and level of customisation can influence the effectiveness of a loyalty programme, is accepted.

The hospitality industry values segmentation and loyalty programs (LPs), but there is limited research on new methods for segmenting loyalty program members, so managers often rely on conventional techniques. This study aims to use big data-driven segmentation methods to cluster customers and provide a new solution for customer segmentation in hotel LPs.

Using the k-means algorithm, this study examined 498,655 profiles of guests enrolled in a multinational hotel chain’s loyalty program. The objective was to cluster guests according to their consumption behavior and monetary value and compare data-driven segments based on brand preferences, demographic data and monetary value with loyalty program tiers.

This study shows that current tier-based LPs lack features to improve customer segmentation, and some high-tier members generate less revenue than low-tier members. Therefore, more attention should be given to truly valuable customers.

Hotels can segment LP members to develop targeted campaigns and uncover new insights. This will help to transform LPs to make them more valuable and profitable and use differentiated rewards and strategies.

As not all guests or hotel brands benefit equally from LPs, additional segmentation is required to suit varying guest behaviors. Hotel managers can use data mining techniques to develop more efficient and valuable LPs with personalized strategies and rewards.

This paper aims to offer empirical insights on how investing in e-commerce capabilities affects the relationship between loyalty programs and hotel operating performance so as to aid in identifying proper resource allocation strategies.

This study extended the model in Hua et al. (2015) by testing the interaction of e-commerce and loyalty programs.

The findings illustrate that proper allocation of company financial resources to e-commerce initiatives can help improve the impact of loyalty programs on hotel operating performance.

The results of this study illustrate that hotel performance can be improved by the synergy between loyalty program and e-commerce initiatives. Thus, hotel managers and owners can use results from this study to improve the efficiency of their asset allocation strategies, with five practical implications offered.

Theoretically, this study adapted and extended an integrative model of hotel operating performance (Hua et al., 2015) by identifying critical factors that elucidate the variance in firm performance. In addition, the moderating role of e-commerce provides a new conceptualization of information technology. Practically, this study makes several important contributions as well.

This study aims to investigate the impact of the loyalty program members’ satisfaction toward the hotel loyalty program benefits and the customer management relationship initiatives of individual hotels on the brand relationship quality (BRQ), i.e. their relationship quality with the hotel brand, and its outcomes. The moderating impact of membership level on the hypothesized relationships was also investigated.

A usable sample of 920 active members of a hotel loyalty program was obtained. Structural equation modeling with partial least squares method was used to estimate the structural relationships and to investigate the moderating effect of membership level.

Employee’s customer orientation, membership communication and hotel stay-related benefits are determinants of the loyalty program members’ BRQ. BRQ is also confirmed as a higher-order construct of three latent variables which include trust, satisfaction and commitment. Moderating effects of the membership were partially supported in this study. The strongest effect of BRQ is on members’ word of mouth followed by shares of purchase. BRQ is found to have negative relationship with members’ willingness to serve as marketing resource, but the impact was small.

This is a cross-sectional study with a population of active loyalty program members of only one luxury hotel group. The sample size of the top-tier members is also smaller in comparison to the other two groups.

This study contributes to the understanding of the antecedents and consequences of BRQ and the body of knowledge about loyalty program for hotel industry.

This is one of the few studies investigating the effectiveness of hotel loyalty programs from the active members’ perspective and the moderating effect of membership level on the relationships among BRQ, its antecedents and its outcomes.