Original Research

The relationship between Eservice quality, Evalue, Esatisfacton and eLoyalty in online tourism portals

K Wood, CH Van Heerden
South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences | Vol 10, No 3 | a692 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.4102/sajems.v10i3.692 | © 2013 K Wood, CH Van Heerden | This work is licensed under CC Attribution 4.0
Submitted: 11 July 2013 | Published: 11 July 2013

About the author(s)

K Wood, University of Pretoria
CH Van Heerden, Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa

Full Text:

PDF (350KB)

Abstract

Customer satisfaction and loyalty are important drivers of business profits. In the online arena, acquisition costs are high, switching costs are low, the service encounter is non-personal and the Internet is often used only as a source of information. The aim of this article is to determine the relationship between critical eService quality elements utilised in online tourism portals in order to
establish eLoyalty. The target population of this study was South African tourism accommodation establishments who advertised on online tourism portals during 2005. A personalised branded HTML email with a clickable link to the online survey was mailed to all respondents. One hundred and nine valid responses were received. A multi-item questionnaire was used to measure the relationship between eService quality, eValue, eSatisfaction and eLoyalty pertaining to online tourism portals utilised by the respondents. The findings imply that online tourism portals would increase their eLoyalty (and thus increase profits) if they first satisfied their suppliers’ needs by providing them with a secure, visually pleasing user interface with which they could identify. Secondly, there is a need for online tourism portals to provide services that add value, making it easy for suppliers to add and change details on their own pages, as well as ensuring that their suppliers receive a substantial income stream through the portal.


Keywords

No related keywords in the metadata.

Metrics

Total abstract views: 3266
Total article views: 3550

 

Crossref Citations

1. Critical review of the e-loyalty literature: a purchase-centred framework
Aikaterini C. Valvi, Konstantinos C. Fragkos
Electronic Commerce Research  vol: 12  issue: 3  first page: 331  year: 2012  
doi: 10.1007/s10660-012-9097-5