Increasing Hotel Loyalty Through Psychological Ownership

Abstract

The hospitality industry has long emphasized guest satisfaction as key to building loyalty. However, in such a highly competitive and service-oriented market, interventions to increase satisfaction may often be too costly relative to their marginal impact on guest loyalty. This research proposes a new and potentially lower-cost avenue for increasing guest loyalty to the hotel: guests’ sense of ownership of their hotel rooms. An analysis of 14,689 online reviews on TripAdvisor, a naturalistic field experiment in a hotel (N = 82), as well as two controlled lab simulation studies (combined N = 1,002) jointly demonstrate that increasing psychological ownership of a hotel room significantly increases guest loyalty to the hotel, independent of customer satisfaction. This work extends our current understanding of psychological ownership and customer loyalty by demonstrating how psychological ownership of a tangible service element can enhance brand loyalty via a mechanism that does not rely on changes in satisfaction. In doing so, we highlight the role of psychological ownership as an underexplored and cost-efficient driver of loyalty in hospitality settings.