Exploring customer engagement in tourism: Construct proposal and antecedents

Customer engagement (CE) creates economic value for tourism firms. However, tourism companies still lack enough knowledge to properly measure CE and manage its drivers. We address this gap by proposing a behavioural CE measurement and by exploring some of the antecedents on this construct (relationship quality, rewards, company identification, self-enhancement, learning and social integration). We test our propositions using survey data (466 respondents). Our results provide empirical support for our proposed CE construct, while corroborating four of the six hypothesized antecedents. In closing, we discuss theoretical and managerial implications, study limitations and future research directions