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The purpose of this study is to define a model of social technology diffusion, comprising constructs that explain guests’ likelihood of recommending their hotel loyalty program to their peers.

The diffusion effect is explained by commitment-trust, satisfaction with user-to-user interactivity, satisfaction with user identifiability and word of mouth. A total of 2,812 usable responses were obtained through an online questionnaire sent to guests with two or more transactions with the loyalty program.

The results suggest that commitment and trust and word of mouth are crucial to enact social diffusion. As such, hotel loyalty programs need to be leveraged through enacting social diffusion.

Tourism and hospitality practitioners dealing with loyalty programs should create and post new trustworthy content that might be beneficial for the hotel loyalty program in their efforts to provide a more valuable experience for guests.

The paper provides empirical evidence that the likelihood of sharing with other guests or the intention to belong to a hotel loyalty program community exists and then goes on to offer a range of possible responses based upon four relational mediators.

This chapter aims to assess how effective loyalty programs are in contributing to retaining guests for hotels. The effectiveness is measured by means of a Bass model which allows the measurement of the diffusion patterns of adopters within potential adopters. The data used to perform this model allow the depiction of the effect of geographical localization over a time frame of three years. Results suggest that the loyalty card’s acceptance was measured from the internal and external parameters, based on the concept of diffusion theory. The results indicated a need for innovation of the loyalty program from 2019. Due to the existence of several hotels with different typologies in different countries, a segmentation of clients by nationalities is suggested with a “waterfall” strategy being placed in the hotel chain loyalty program.

The main purpose of this work is to evaluate the long-term effectiveness of a hotel’s chain loyalty program from a behavioral perspective.

A Dirichlet model was estimated to assess purchase frequency and hotel choice within one of the biggest hotel chains in Portugal. The sample comprises hotels where a loyalty program was implemented, with a total of 176,099 reservations. Data were extracted from the customer relationship management (CRM) systems of the hotel group.

The results suggest that instead of being loyal to a certain hotel, customers are loyal to the branded hotel chain. As the hotels are all part of the branded group, this polygamy is not only accepted but also very welcome.

The level of penetration and purchase frequency of CRM was measured. Nevertheless, a thorough understanding of these will be critical for the success of this program.

This research is a step toward assessing hotel chain competitiveness, by improving and suggesting segmented groups of brands/hotels and to induce cross-selling products accepting polygamous loyalty as the only way to sustain long-term relationships with customers.

This is one of the few research studies, if not the only one, to assess loyalty with tangible indicators, such as purchase frequency. Further, the results suggest that loyalty programs are more effective if multiple options are available and as such, cross-selling is perhaps the only way to fix customers.