Enhancing hotel brand performance through fostering brand relationship orientation in the minds of consumers

Hotels are becoming increasingly oriented towards developing relationships with their consumers (patrons/guests), giving rise to a heavy focus on consumer-brand relationships in tourism and hospitality research. This study examines the extent to which consumers' perceived relationship orientations of hotel brands (i.e., PBRO) influences their identification with and anticipated emotions towards hotel brands, which in turn drives desirable performance outcomes for hotels such as the share of wallet, consideration set size, and revisit intention. To test our hypotheses, we recruited 376 respondents via Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk). We found that consumer-brand identification and anticipated emotions mediate the relationship between perceived brand relationship orientation and all performance outcome variables. These mediating effects are moderated by consumer involvement with hotel choice. Specifically, consumer involvement positively moderates the link between PBRO and consumer-brand identification and negatively moderates the effects of PBRO on anticipated emotions.