The mediating role of customer satisfaction through the impact of destination image on brand loyalty: A study in a hotel business

The customer satisfaction is a satisfaction indication that occurs after anticipating the customer needs and desires. Especially, it plays a vital role in hotel business. The main reason of customer satisfaction is that buyer and seller of service are entirely humans. The brand loyalty is based upon some factors such as customer satisfaction and destination image. While brand loyalty affects the product or service related thoughts, destination image indicates quality and trust for customers. Tourists are quite conscious already and gaining the knowledge with regards to chosen destination. Whilst the tourism notion changes both nationally and internationally, the biggest factor underlying this change is a difference between the attitudes and actions of individuals belonging to various classes and groups. On the other hand, the customer needs and desires either change or strongly increase. By meeting customers expectations and ensuring recreational services the manufacturing enterprises gain competitive advantage with respect to marketing terms. The business companies with those strategies aim to build a strong brand and create loyal customers. In this context five star hotels try to ensure long-lasting service and product for customers. In order to have a brand loyalty, customers should hold a strong belief in it. The aim of this reserch is to show the role and importance of destination image and brand loyalty on the customer satisfaction in a five-star hotel running in Antalya city. To collect a data the questionnaire-based survey was utilized. In this study, quantitative research methotds were used to obtain the findings and the data were evaluated on SPSS 22.0 software. As a result of the research, the effect of destination image and brand loyalty on customer satisfaction was determined regarding the participants responds. In addition, the role of customer satisfaction in the structural model proposed in the thesis was found to be statistically significant. Moreover, the correlation relationship between all variables were completely supported in this study. Keywords: Brand loyalty, customer satisfaction, destination image, hotel business.