THE COMPARISON OF CRITICAL FACTORS BETWEEN FIRST TIME CUSTOMER AND REPEAT CUSTOMER FOR HOTELS IN HIGH POTENTIAL TOURISM AREAS; A CASE STUDY OF BANGKOK, HUAHIN (PRACHUAP KHIRI KHAN) AND NAKHON PATHOM

Abstract

Nowadays, Thailand tourism is growing in every year and hotel tourism is a big role to get a lot profit to Thailand. The first time customer and repeat customer are very important in hotel industry. The hotel should understand what factors are influencing the customers when they are looking for a hotel. Therefore, the hotel must make improvements in these critical areas to increase customer satisfaction, and hence retaining them in the future. Research methodology used in this study was quantitative method by distributing the set of questionnaire with 400 respondents in order to examine the relationships among the variables of the study. Reliability and Factor analysis were used to test with the set of questionnaire. Correlation & ANOVA analysis were used to analyse the relationships among the factors considered in the study. This research found that customer satisfaction was important factor when choosing a hotel for both first time customer and repeat customer. Between these two groups of customers, they showed some different on some factors such as 1) customer retention, 2) service quality, 3) location, 4) facilities, 5) safety & security in impacting their decision to choose a hotel. By looking closely, first time customers seem to have higher expectation than repeat customers on customer retention, service quality, location, facilities and safety & security. On the other hand, there are some factors that showed no significant different on opinion when choosing a hotel between first time customers and repeat customers were customer satisfaction, switching cost, promotion, brand preference, credibility and cleanliness.