Relationship Between Customer Perceptions and Customer Loyalty Among Star-Rated Hotels in North Rift, Kenya

With business rivalry getting fiercer, the most essential challenge that organizations confront is how to acquire client loyalty in order to maximize customer lifetime value. Customer perception is vital in anticipating purchasing behaviour, achieving long-term competitive advantage, customer retention, and relationship management. A successful engagement with customers is likely to boost customer loyalty. Nonetheless, the formation and longevity of client loyalty are becoming increasingly difficult to attain as the competitive environment evolves. Thus, it is critical to assess the impact of customer perception on customer loyalty. As such, the purpose of this study was to assess the impact of consumer perceptions on customer loyalty in star-rated hotels in Kenya. The study was influenced by assimilation theory. A cross-sectional study approach was utilized to randomly select 384 hotel customers using the Multi-Stage Sampling Method. Data was acquired using a questionnaire distributed to respondents. The Cronbach Alpha Coefficient was used to assess the reliability of the questionnaire items, and it was found to be 0.7. The questionnaire items’ validity was assessed by expert evaluations. The outcomes were presented using statistics that were both descriptive and inferential. Descriptive statistics were utilized to summarize the data, and simple regression analysis was employed to test the hypothesis regarding the influence of the relationship between customer perceptions and customer loyalty. The study indicated that customer perception has a positive and significant effect on customer loyalty (F 467.760, P<0.05, R= 761, R² = 0.579). The study found that customer loyalty has a favourable and significant impact on consumer loyalty. As a result, the study recommends that hotels continuously improve on their customer perceptions by improving the image, customer recognition, provision of social-relational benefits, being close to customers, prioritizing customer services, and supplying particular products and services to meet the expectations of client service quality. 

Keywords: Customer loyalty, Customer perceptions, hotel image, relational benefits