ANTECEDENTS OF CUSTOMER ROYALTY OF DUTY-FREE SHOPS IN THAILAND
A duty-free shop is a retail outlet whose goods are exempt from the payment of certain local or national taxes and duties on the requirement that the goods sold will be sold to travelers who will take them out of the country. Tourists travelling around the world will experience in buying duty free goods at the captioned shops in international airports, seaports and in town causing an increase of their competitiveness. During the past few years when Thailand has faced the pandemic of Covid-19, the duty-free shops have unavoidably been affected due to lock-down measure whereas this captioned business lacks of market power, customer royalty enhancement and marketing strategy to achieve its operating results. This research is therefore aims to 1) examine the level of variables; satisfaction, digital marketing strategy, information quality, product value recognition, service quality and customer royalty of duty-free shops in Thailand, 2) examine the influence of the aforementioned variables towards customer royalty of duty-free shops in Thailand, and 3) develop the customer royalty model for duty-free shops in Thailand. The mixed research method between the quantitative and qualitative terms was conducted. In view of quantitative one, the sample group consisted of 400 customers of duty-free shops in Thailand and sampling size was defined based on the multi-stage sampling method with 20-time criteria of the observed variables. Data collection was conducted through questionnaires that were later analyzed by the structural equation modelling. For the qualitative term, an in-depth interview was made with the main group of 20 informants that were customers of duty-free shops in Thailand. The findings revealed that 1) satisfaction, digital marketing strategy, information technology quality, product value recognition, service quality and customer royalty of duty-free shops in Thailand were all at high level, 2) the satisfaction, digital marketing strategy, information technology quality, product value recognition, service quality influenced the customer royalty of duty-free shops in Thailand with statistical significance value of .05, and 3) the model for customer royalty to duty-free shops as developed by the researcher was called “2S2QRL Model” (S = Digital Marketing Strategy, Q = Information Quality, Q = Service Quality,S = Satisfaction, R = Product Value Recognition, L = Customer Loyalty). In addition, the qualitative findings revealed that to enhance the customer royalty of duty-free shops in Thailand, the entrepreneurs should apply the digital marketing strategy with innovation and technology to effectively respond to their customer requirements. The research findings can be further applied as a guideline for policy determination of duty-free shop business to promote sustainable customer royalty of these captioned shops in Thailand.
Antecedents/Customer Royalty of Duty-Free Shops/Thailand