Managing Customer Relationship Quality in Wellness Hotels and Resorts in India: A Netnography Approach

Abstract

There is no time for relaxing in today’s fast-paced and stressful environment. Then there’s wellness tourism to save the day. People are opting for wellness therapies that may revitalise and detoxicate the body, making it feel youthful and healthy as awareness of a healthy lifestyle grows. India can distinguish itself by delivering indigenous medical therapies through the AYUSH healthcare system, including Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, and Homoeopathy. Recently, the Indian Ministry of Tourism expressed concern over the quality of services in organised and unorganised wellness care hotels and spas. The study is driven by a desire to solve the underlying issue and comprehend the critical factors influencing service quality in the wellness tourist business. The research examines how these wellness hotels and resorts have undertaken strategies to improve service quality management. This study is inspired by research on consumer sociability, service provider expertise, organisational service quality characteristics, and their significance in building customer relationship quality based on trust, commitment, and satisfaction. The current study fills gaps in the literature by studying firm-level service dimensions and personnel-level attributes and their direct influence on driving customer relationship quality. The Indian wellness hotels and resorts served as the research backdrop to achieve the research aims. The information was gathered as unstructured data from TripAdvisor user reviews. The respondent sample was drawn through convenience and purposive sampling. The collected reviews were subjected to preliminary evaluations to filter and refine the data for subsequent research. Following these assessments, sentiment analysis was used to understand customer sentiment toward the services provided at the selected resorts, both at the firm and therapist levels, using supervised, unsupervised machine learning and LEXICON approaches. The proposed model was then evaluated and validated using multiple linear regression. RIDIT and GRA precedence analysis were used to prioritise the service quality dimensions. vii The findings show that therapist characteristics are essential when a customer’s primary goal is to engage in wellness treatment. Furthermore, firm-level factors are vital in driving customer connections. The most influential dimensions that drive consumer trust, satisfaction, and commitment are tangibility, responsiveness, expertise, mindset-similarity, and sociability. Customer orientation was discovered to be minimal in improving customer relationship quality. These findings add to the knowledge on service quality and relationship quality by empirically explaining their determinants and outcomes. The study also demonstrates how social media and data analytics may acquire customer insights. The findings provide fresh insights for designing focused engagement and relationship-building strategies for wellness hotels and resorts from a managerial standpoint. Furthermore, the study envisions the future development and application of data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in management and social science.