Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research

Over the past decade, customer engagement has attracted significant interest from academics and practitioners. This article reviews and synthesizes customer engagement research published in seven leading hospitality and tourism journals between 2009 and 2019. It systematically analyzes publication outlets and trajectories, study sectors, methodological approaches, analytical techniques, conceptualizations of customer engagement, classifications of antecedents and consequences, and key mediators and moderators. This article also presents a model summarizing extant customer engagement research and identifies critical avenues for future scholarly inquiry into customer engagement. The comprehensive review and analysis offered in this article contribute to the literature by detailing the status of customer engagement research and the evolution of relevant literature over the past 11 years.

The hospitality and tourism industries now acknowledge that engaging with customers via social media is an essential element of marketing strategy. Given the high variability of success with which firms have been attracting customer interest online, however, it is clear that businesses are having a difficult time determining the best way to use these emerging technologies. This study investigates the impact of certain social media post attributes on customer engagement, using restaurants on Facebook as an example. We introduce a novel set of text analytic features that positively affect customer engagement and test them against a big data set (174,000 posts). Findings indicate that appeals to a feeling of belonging to the community have a significant positive effect on engagement. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on customer engagement and offers concrete recommendations for how restaurants can interact with customers online.

Tourism and hospitality service providers have been seeking ways to engage customers in the value creation process to deliver personalized experiences. Such practices have been facilitated by the rapid development of information communication technology. Extant research on online customer engagement focuses mostly on computer-based platforms. Mobile instant messaging (IM) has rarely been explored despite its substantial potential for firm–customer interactions. On the basis of service–dominant logic and computer-mediated communication theories, this study examines customers’ perceived co-creation experience facilitated by mobile IM. It empirically tests the influencing factors and effects of such co-creation experience. The findings extend the theoretical framework of value co-creation to a context mediated by mobile IM. Managerial suggestions are provided for tourism and hospitality organizations.

The increased usage of digital communication technologies has transformed online engagement into a key aspect of the modern customer experience in the hospitality industry. The flow theory is especially important for understanding customer engagement in the online environment. The purpose of this study is to examine the antecedents of flow and to investigate its influence on the positive attitudes and continuance intentions among the users of social media. The study’s results show that challenge, information quality, and system quality all play significant roles in flow; and flow leads to positive attitudes and continuance intentions, which indicates the importance of creating flow to increase customer engagement. Academically, this study contributes to the limited body of literature on the flow experience and customer engagement in the hospitality context. Additionally, it provides practical insights how to gain competitive advantages by strategically managing customer engagement with social media marketing through flow.

The purpose of this study is to examine customer–brand experience and customer involvement as two drivers of customer engagement (CE) and investigate brand relationship quality as a major outcome of CE with a hotel’s Facebook brand community. It is essential for hotel marketers to understand more about how to engage customers with brand communities embedded in Facebook, to understand what the antecedents of such engagements are, and to recognize what outcomes they can gain from engaged customers. This article adopts structural equation modeling and analyzes data collected from a sample of 347 Facebook users who are hotel customers. The results of the empirical research confirm the significant effect of the two antecedents on CE and the role of engaging customers in building customer–brand relationships. Furthermore, CE with hotel brand communities embedded in Facebook has a mediating effect on the path from customer–brand experience to brand relationship quality.

Resource branding has become a cocreated process carried out within virtual brand communities (VBCs), which boost the social connectivity of users and contribute to placemaking. However, due to the very nature of VBCs, branding strategies rely on user engagement to succeed. The present study has performed a multidimensional and mixed-method analysis of almost 4,000 entries in the Facebook and Twitter VBCs of two renowned European music festivals, Sónar and Primavera Sound (Barcelona), to show the benefits of understanding the different components that comprise festival engagement and the relationships between them. Results show the importance of considering different festival brands and their main VBCs to develop a strategy based on the structure of each VBC user as well as the most prominent dimensions of user engagement and the inherent relationships between them. In addition, the consideration of “ongoing” engagement is a potential research pathway for exploring brand engagement beyond mere attendance.

With growing number of hotel brands in the market, the lodging industry is facing intense competition more than ever, and managers are realizing the importance of developing strong customer–brand relationship. As a result, the concept of brand love is gaining increased attention in hospitality literature and academics are examining various antecedents of this concept. However, among prior studies’ exploration of its antecedents, the relationship between engagement process and brand love has been relatively neglected. Hence, the present study explores the relationship among customer–brand engagement, cognitive brand loyalty, and brand love. Specifically, this study focuses on the role of cognitive engagement on the development of brand love, as the advent of online environment and social networking service has significantly changed customer’s pre- and post-purchase decision-making process. The conceptual model illustrates that cognitive engagement, which is operationalized as a second-order construct of attention and absorption, has a significant positive effect on brand love directly and indirectly via the mediation of cognitive brand loyalty. Consequently, the findings indicate that “how” customers process brand information (cognitive engagement) is equally important as “what” they process (content, e.g., quality) to evoke cognitive brand loyalty and ultimately brand love among hotel guests.

Customer engagement involves customers’ interactive experiences with a brand or service provider. Focusing on the hotel industry, this study investigates the role of customer interactivity, positive affect, and employee motivations in enhancing employees’ innovative behaviors under the S-O-R (stimulus–organism–response) framework. Using data collected via a mixed-mode quantitative survey of 830 Chinese hotel employees, the authors developed and tested a structural model. The findings suggest that customer interactivity, positive affect, and motivations as influential factors affect employee innovative behavior. Specifically, customer interactivity influences employee innovative behavior directly and indirectly through positive affect and intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Theoretically, the study clarifies the mechanisms underpinning the effect of customer interactivity on employees’ innovative behaviors and extends the S-O-R model by applying it in the organizational behavior domain. Practically, the results highlight a need for reward systems to incorporate measures of employee performance in relation to fostering customer interactivity and engagement.

This research seeks to address a void in the literature by exploring both individual and organizational attributes that associate with customer engagement. At the individual level, it builds a chain of relationship leading from customer engagement to attitudinal and behavioral loyalties through impulsive behaviors; and at the organizational level, it purports a cross-level influence from the service environment and brand equity on this relationship chain. Drawing on two independent surveys, results reveal that the service environment emanates direct and moderating effects on customer engagement, while brand equity exerts moderating effects only on certain loyalty attributes. The proposed model thus offers new insights into how research could synthesize both individual and organizational factors, thus enabling better understanding of the role of customer engagement.

Marketing research shows that customer relationship management can reduce consequences of service failures. The question is how long a former customer engagement can still have an effect on a current critical incident. In extreme cases, this means whether and how interactions between company and customer during childhood can still influence the effects of a service failure. This article proposes that engagement with a company during childhood (childhood engagement) can affect later perceptions of the relationship. An experiment with 152 participants showed that perceived controllability and childhood engagement moderated the effect of disappointment on repurchase intention. Customers with childhood engagement evaluate a service failure more favorably than customers without childhood experiences. Furthermore, customers are likely to react negatively if the responsibility for the failure is attributed to the company. Accordingly, from a managerial perspective, childhood engagement and credible communication can prevent the ending of a customer relationship after a failure.