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Rural tourism makes considerable contributions on the development of rural areas (Meccheri & Pelloni, 2006; Fotiadis, Yeh, & Huan, 2016; Lee & Jan, 2019), for instance, infrastructure improvement and the conservation of the natural environment (Cánoves, et al., 2004). Rural hospitality enterprises are the firms in rural areas that serve consumers seeking contact with a rural way of life and local culture. Rural hospitality enterprises arrange activities that involve contact with traditional and nature ways of life, for instance, traditional cooking and horseback riding (Kastenholz, et al., 2012; Polo-Peña, et al., 2012; Njoya & Seetaram, 2018).
There is a consensus in marketing literature that firms benefit greatly from the creation of consumer loyalty (Dick & Basu, 1994; Qiua, et al., 2015). Loyal consumers can return and spread positive word-of-mouth. Retaining existing consumer is more economical than acquiring new one (Reichheld & Sasser, 1990). Marketers of hospitality firms pointed out that it is not easy for businesses to remain alive just by attracting new consumers as competition is so fierce (Yooa & Baib, 2013). In hospitality context, Shoemaker and Lewis (1999) pointed out that consumer loyalty is the future of hospitality firms. Consequently, practitioners and academic have to seek ways to create consumer loyalty.
Prior studies attempted to identify the antecedents of consumer loyalty such as satisfaction (Wu, 2011; Orel & Kara, 2014; Lee, et al., 2009; Meesala & Paul, 2018), trust (Martínez, et al., 2013; Iglesias et al., 2018) and perceived value (Soledad Janita & Javier Miranda, 2013; Lin & Wang, 2006). Studies continue to give substantial interest to these social exchange factors in order to understand the service dynamics (Harris & Goode, 2004). However, little attention has paid to the integration of these factors into holistic framework (He, et al., 2012). To date the little attention has paid to the association between CSR, satisfaction, trust and consumer loyalty and has not yet incorporated them into a holistic framework.
Furthermore, considerable researchers begin to incorporate CSR into loyalty model. In this sense, a positive significant association between CSR and consumer loyalty has been demonstrated by He and Li, (2011) and Khan and Fatma (2019). According to these researchers, corporate social responsibility directly creates more consumer loyalty, without incorporating of mediating factors.
The current study suggests that the impact of CSR on consumer loyalty is explained better by incorporating in the model the important roles of social exchange factors such as satisfaction and trust. Although numerous studies have linked CSR to consumer responses, the association between CSR and consumer loyalty is under research (Marin et al., 2009; La & Choi, 2019). Indeed, little studies have provided a holistic framework in order to investigate and understand the relationship between corporate social responsibility and consumer loyalty (Mason et al., 2006). To the best of our knowledge, prior studies in the rural hospitality industry did not incorporate consumer loyalty into a more holistic model by incorporating the mediating roles of satisfaction and trust as well as the moderating effects of religiosity. Therefore, our study distinguishes itself by extending previous studies on the effects of corporate social responsibility dimensions on consumer loyalty by including the mediation roles of social exchange variables along the path from corporate social responsibility to consumer loyalty as well as the moderating effects of religiosity.