IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE

There is a globalizing demand to consume as much as possible and travel offers the best opportunity to expand the scale and scope of consumption, mainly due to which tourism exports have become an important sector as a growing source of foreign exchange earnings. In addition to this, tourism also alleviates balance of payment problems, creates employment, and contributes significantly toward the increase of income, savings, investment, and economic growth. Tourism, though one of the oldest of trades, has not been focused by the community of management academics and researchers as worthy of any serious attention till recently mainly because of which academic contribution to the practice of tourism business has been very limited (Ross, 1990).

Christopher et al., (1991) express the view that there has been a change in the focus of marketing in general: transactional marketing emphasizes the individual sale, whereas relationship marketing is designed to expect a long-term, on-going relationship. Gronroos (1990) argues that developing and maintaining long-term relationships of commitment is of paramount importance to a firm’s competitiveness than ever before. If the way tourism services are designed and delivered is unrelated to what customers’ value, marketing strategies will fail (McGuire, 1999). Leading service organizations are keen to do this in an effort to gain customer loyalty (Zeithaml & Bitner, 1996). And, a service organization’ s long-term success in a market is

D

Holiday Attachment: The construct, measure, and its relation with customer loyalty

essentially determined by its ability to expand and maintain a large and loyal customer base. Marketing decisions and strategic planning of tourism provisions to generate this patronization interest unavoidably require knowledge of factors affecting holidaymakers’ choice and re-choice; what are the underlying factors, which of them are important, and how they take an algorithmic shape. Theories of consumer behavior w.r.t. the above aspects of customer choice have always been helpful to managerial decisions involving development and launching of new products, segmentation, timing of market entry, and brand management. From the design of a new product to the extension of a mature brand, effective marketing strategies depend upon a thorough understanding of the theories of motivation, learning, memory, and decision processes that influence what consumers buy and consumer behaviour theories have provided many valuable inputs towards this end. Implications of this study may also be viewed in this backdrop.

Individuals extol the virtues of those simple yet ethereal associations that make life joyous, that give meaning to existence far beyond conventional boundaries. Objects are kept, cared, and cherished in special ways long after their instrumental value has passed. To a rational, independent observer this may appear irrational and venal. Holiday loyalty is the holidaymaker’s conscious or unconscious decision, expressed through intention and/ or behavior, to repurchase a holiday continually. The present study suggests that there is an inverse relationship between the tendency to switch brands and the intensity of holiday identity. Mere repurchase as observed behaviour is representative of inauthentic loyalty (Yi-Ting Yu & Dean, 2001) and this per se does not put across anything about the genuine attachment that tourists hold onto vacations (Butz & Goodstein, 1996). Oftentimes, destinations may be attracting repeat visitors only due to situational factors and such visitors may stop patronization given alternate opportunities. Enterprises in the holidaying market should gear their relationship marketing strategies towards developing an identity consciousness in the holidaymakers with their bundle of offerings and this is a sure bet to have truly loyal customers. Surely this cannot be achieved in a quick go, since identity especially reflects the slow developmental progression of individuals.

Those who feel dense identity value may not only repurchase, but also spread good news about the holiday to their kith and kin. They must be good Samaritans to the long-term sustainability cause of the destination, too. Applying the sociological theory of contact hypothesis into tourism, Anastasopoulos (1992) observes that most of the guest-host tussles at the destination occur because their contacts are hemmed in the utilitarian plain. A similar view was expressed by Hirchman (1970), according to which when exit is possible, one of the principal determinants of readiness to resort to voice, by the customers, is clearly their special attachment to the product and the firm offering this. An emotionally attached customer will often seek ways to make himself influential, particularly when the firm moves in the wrong direction. This constitutes the true purpose of the firm’s customer feedback system, market research, and other market communication channels.

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Holiday Attachment: The construct, measure, and its relation with customer loyalty

There is formidable potential to employ attachment styles as market segmentation variables too. For instance, Price & Arnould (1999) identified a “relationship averse” segment in the market, the existence and characteristics of which may be explained by the holiday attachment construct when it comes to tourism consumption. Equipped with this information, tourism marketers can serve this segment better. Successful businesses will be the ones that can identify different market segments in terms of functional, psychic, and cultural motivators and can strategize organizational competencies to match the defining characteristics of these segments.

Marketing creates narratives, images, and brands that mediate a holiday to the potential tourist in the traveler generating regions. Yet, how much can marketers wheedle their resources to the development of an identity consciousness in holidaymakers is doubtful and debatable (Poon, 1993) not the least because a holiday’s identity is often shaped by powerful discourses that are the outcomes of historical, political, and ideological processes themselves (Coulter et al., 2003; Rose, 1993). “Post-fordist” tourists are seekers of volatility, asserts Ioannides & Debbage (1997). Thus, it is not avowed that the present model is a good explanatory model to predict long-term holiday trends in anyway. Society, economy and research are not close pursuit systems. Even a fairly accurate prediction of individual holiday choice behavior should be attempted only after incorporating into it the logic of random utility theory and the probabilistic approach, which however is in itself a task, certainly well beyond the scope of the present dissertation.

Lastly, as detailed in the chapter-2 of this report, the present researcher aligns himself with the viewpoint of Holbrook & Hirschman (1982) in that consumer research is the study of consumption for its own sake that need not satisfy the managerial relevance criteria. Not only that, as identified long back, practitioners rarely conform to technical-rational templates (Kotter, 1982; Mintzberg, 1976). While the previous few paragraphs suggested some of the practical implications of this research, the same were not envisaged as much as the need to ground the study in a central preoccupation with consummation, independent of any extrinsic interests or compulsions.