SOCIAL MEDIA, CUSTOMERS' EXPERIENCE, AND HOTEL LOYALTY PROGRAMS

In the last decade, hospitality companies have broadly adopted new technologies and social media tools for marketing purposes. One important application is the engagement with customers through a relationship approach. In this article, we focus on understanding how hotels employ these tools to boost their loyalty programs. First, we analyzed how the main Spanish hotel chains make use of social media in their marketing activities. In this stage, we employed information from the website and social media sites of hotel chains and their corresponding brands. Secondly, we tested for the influence of customers' experience on declared satisfaction with loyalty programs. By relying on questionnaire data, we tested for three main working hypotheses analyzing the interactions among benefits of hotel loyalty programs, customers' expertise with the hotel industry, and degree of satisfaction with those programs. The main results show that the degree of expertise of hotel customers clearly detennines their level of satisfaction with loyalty programs. Managerial implications from the research remark on the effectiveness of social networks and the necessity of customizing the message according to the profile of the client to get higher impact of the campaigns.