Testing comparative business-to-business value co-creation models: Differences in hotels and travel agencies in Spain

Research on value co-creation (VCC) in business-to-business (B2B) contexts is of growing interest for understanding tourism ecosystems, but it shows heterogeneities and lacks consensus in two ways: a) there is no consensus on the nomological position of VCC as antecedent or as a central construct in a chain of effects, and b) the same models work differently in different sectors and for different actors within the same chain. To test these contingencies, this work assesses relationships between trust, commitment, VCC and economic satisfaction and social satisfaction in a comparative approach (rival models) for two tourism services: hotels and travel agencies. Two different models are tested with partial least squares on two samples: the managers of 269 hotels and 256 travel agencies in Spain, evaluating their relationships with their main partner. For both hotels and travel agencies, the model where VCC starts the chain of effects has better results than the one where VCC is a central construct. However, no model is entirely supported in any of the samples, evidencing a high contingency effect in VCC for B2B tourism services. There are contributions for scholars, as comparative studies on VCC are scarce in tourism literature, and for managers, as relationships among tourism partners show heterogeneities but a consistent social satisfaction-economic satisfaction effect.