Investigating the Influence of Human Resources Management Activities on Customer Loyalty in the Hoteling Industry Using a Multilevel Approach

Considering the fact that customer loyalty is regarded as one of the most important concerns of hotel managers, this study sought to investigate the influence of human resources management activities on customer loyalty using a multi-level approach. The statistical population of the study comprised of managers, staff, and customers of four-star and five-star hotels in Mashhad. Moreover, the statistical sample size of the research at the organization level consisted of thirty-four, one-hundred and forty, two-hundred and forty managers, staff, and customers at organizational, staff, and customer levels, respectively. On the other hand, Sam’s 12-item questionnaire (2008) and the 17-item questionnaire developed by Al-Rafiei et al. (2013) were used to measure the human resources management activities and the staff’s satisfaction and loyalty, respectively, whose validity and reliability was tested using the Content validity method and Cronbach's alpha, respectively. Finally, HLM 7.02 and the SPSS software were used to analyse the collected data. The results proved the positive influence of human resources management activities on the staff’s satisfaction and loyalty, and in turn, on the satisfaction and loyalty of the customers. Therefore, it could be argued that hotel managers can increase the loyalty of their customers by emphasizing human resource management activities and improving their staff’s satisfaction and loyalty, which would increase the profitability of hotels in the long term by reducing marketing costs.