ABSTRACT
Brand loyalty is considered one of the most valuable assets of fi rms (Shugan, 2005). Although leisure travel is generally considered to be motivated by “novelty seeking” (Lee and Crompton, 1992), a concept almost the opposite of loyalty, tourism marketers have also long focused on cultivating customer loyalty. This is evidenced by the wide employment of customer loyalty programs (Morais, Dorsch, and Backman, 2004) and increasing research attention on tourist loyalty (Alegre and Juaneda, 2006; Morais et al., 2004). Despite extensive research efforts, what determines customer loyalty development is not yet well understood (Agustin and Singh, 2005). Numerous variables have been suggested as plausible antecedents of loyalty. Nevertheless, the sometimes confl icting results imply that a whole picture of the loyalty-building process is yet to emerge. Fundamentally, this seems to result from a lack of theoretical support for the inherent social psychological mechanism of loyalty formation.
