Loyalty and word-of-mouth as outcomes of South African Airbnb customers’ relationship quality

Abstract

Airbnb, a worldwide giant in the sharing community, has shown tremendous growth in the past few years, especially in developing countries such as South Africa. The next big challenge for Airbnb is probably to understand how to develop long-lasting relationships with its customers. It is well-known that relationship quality not only aids in forming long-term relationships with customers, but also helps to strengthen the relationship between firms and customers. This paper fills a gap in literature by considering both composite and disaggregate approaches to study customer loyalty and positive word-of-mouth as outcomes of relationship quality. Snowball sampling was used to collect data from 250 South African Airbnb users. The findings show that although both approaches to relationship quality predict loyalty and positive word-of-mouth, a disaggregated approach better predicts these relationship quality outcomes.