Value co-creation, delight and satisfaction on tourism loyalty: A conceptual framework

Purpose – The antecedents of loyalty, in general, and in tourism have been profusely examined by researchers worldwide for the last decades. Marketing and leisure/tourism literature suggests that perceived service quality, perceived value, place attachment, destination image, customer satisfaction, and customer delight are pronounced antecedents of loyalty towards a tourism attraction, destination, resource, or player. Still, one important challenge of today in the hospitality sector is delight as customer satisfaction is not enough as an antecedent of tourist loyalty (Ali et al., 2018). Delight and satisfaction share common characteristics, but satisfaction and delight are two separate constructs (Finn, 2005; 2012). In tourism, previous research has worked to explain the significance of customer delight as an antecedent to customer loyalty, for instance in five-star hotel spas in Portugal (Elias-Almeida et al., 2016) or in hotels, restaurants, retail, and theme parks (Torres et al., 2020). This study examines the growing importance of delight in tourism and proposes a conceptual framework to assess the influence of selected antecedents of tourist loyalty and the effect of delight compared to satisfaction on hospitality and tourism. Moreover, originally, connects these constructs with value co-creation as an antecedent of delight and satisfaction, considering that there are numerous outcomes resulting from customer value co-creation, but conceptual models about customer value co-creation in the hospitality and tourism industry that integrate empirical and conceptual knowledge are still unknown (Carvalho & Alves, 2023). Theoretical framework – In this research, different currents of thought are included, namely the Expectancy-Disconfirmation Model (Oliver, 1980) stating that customers are expected to compare pre-purchase expectations with the actual experience of a product or service. If perceived performance fails expectations, dissatisfaction or outrage will occur. If perceived service quality exceeds ...