Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research – Special Issue

* FREE for a limited time

Amid a new marketing era featuring increasingly dynamic and interactive business environments, the concept of customer engagement (CE) has sparked growing interest among scholars in mainstream marketing as well as in the hospitality and tourism domain. Recent empirical research has shown that CE enhances customers’ brand evaluations and future purchases intentions, and is hence described as the ‘expanded domain of relationship marketing’. Given such findings, service organizations – particularly those in the hospitality and tourism industry, such as hotels, airlines, and even destinations – have implemented CE strategies to connect with customers at various stages of consumption, including pre-consumption, during and post-consumption.

This special issue covers several important topics in CE in the hospitality and tourism domain, including:

• Research agenda for customer engagement
• Customer engagement in service organizations
• Social media and customer engagement
• Branding services and customer engagement

The results of these studies provide significant theoretical and practical implications for the industry. We sincerely hope readers will find this special issue informative and useful. More importantly, we hope that this issue offers some directions for future scholarly inquiry into CE’s nature, dynamics, and evolution.

* FREE for a limited time