Validating a Theoretical Model for Hotel Brand Love Amongst Young Indian Tourists

Abstract

This empirical article investigates various factors that would create hotel brand love in tourist’s mind, and potential outcomes of such hotel brand love in the context of emerging Indian hotel sector. Based on reviewing relevant extant research, a set of hypotheses are formulated. Data are collected by doing survey amongst young Indian travelers, and analysed using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. The study findings support that other customer perception, hotel service quality, hotel brand foreignness and hotel location emotion significantly predict hotel brand love among young Indian tourists. Hotel brand love in turn predicts conative hotel brand loyalty and tourist’s emotional labour. This study contributes to the existing body of hotel service theory by validating some important causal relationships between various tourist psychological factors associated with hotel brand love in a comprehensive theoretical framework for the first time in the context of young Indian tourists. The model validated is expected to guide the emerging market hotel managers to elicit hotel brand love among young adult tourists.