The Role of Value Co-Creation, Delight and Satisfaction on Tourism Loyalty: An Empirical Study in Hospitality

Abstract This paper investigates the relationship between value co-creation, delight, satisfaction, and loyalty in the hospitality sector, considering the perceptions of hotel customers in Portugal. To gain deeper insights into hotel customers‘ perception of delight, developing and testing an integrated model was undertaken by examining the relationship between these variables to expand the theory of customer delight when related, as a novelty, with value co-creation, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. The data for this investigation was collected through a questionnaire administered to 178 hotel customers. The gathered data was then subjected to both descriptive and inferential analysis. To test the integrated model, the researchers used the partial least squares (PLS) technique and validated it using Smart PLS 4.0 software. On the one hand, the results show that value co-creation has a direct positive effect on customer delight and, subsequently, influences the effect of customer delight on customer loyalty. On the other hand, value co-creation has a direct positive effect on customer satisfaction, which, in turn, positively influences loyalty. All four proposed hypotheses are supported.