Nowadays, the traditional four P's of marketing are not enough, especially in hospitality services, because of the permanent need to satisfy the customers, in order to keep them loyal. This chapter aims to understand the application of customer relationship management (CRM) in order to manage client retention and how this can translate into a competitive advantage for the hospitality industry. The chapter has a theoretical framework on the main concepts, such as relational marketing and CRM, and their importance and application to hospitality. The Estoril Coast in Portugal was chosen because it is considered as an international brand due to the importance for national and international tourism. For that, the authors made online questionnaires to hotels in this geographical area. The results allow to measure the use of CRM in the sample hotels and understand the importance of relationship marketing.
TopIntroduction
Relationship Marketing assumes large importance nowadays, due to tourist’s behaviour and the needs of the hotels to have some differentiating factor and competitive advantage. In fact, this is a current topic, as such, given the current economic status experienced all over the world, in all sectors of activity, companies have to make an increased effort to please and retain their customers.
Additionally, new communication and information technologies and new media have turned tourists into an increasingly informed client and, as a consequence, more demanding consumer. Therefore, hotels must live up to customers’ expectations who wait for a different treatment while using the service.
Customer-centricity is important, and in today’s market companies must make customer relationships their top priority. Service providers in hospitality are becoming too competitive as customers are most informed and demanding (Inversini, De Carlo & Masiero, 2020).
This study focuses on Estoril Coast hospitality. This geographical area and brand were chosen by the authors considering some aspects related mainly to its importance for national tourism. In fact, Estoril Coast itself represents an international tourist brand in line with the guidelines of the Portuguese National Strategic Plan for Tourism, in 2006.
In addition, in the past, this area was chosen by royalty as a seaside resort and was an area with an anticipated tourist development when related to other regions in the country. Also, it should be noted that, even today, Estoril Coast receives many tourists from several foreign markets and also national tourists, as it boosts a large hospitality infrastructure.
According to Turismo de Portugal (2020), Estoril Coast destination shows a positive performance in all indicators, whether volume or economic, compared to other national destinations, the economic return is vastly higher than the national average.
This chapter aims to verify if the hotels in this area are using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools as a way to improve customer loyalty. If not, the authors desire to understand the factors that lead to non-use and also the perception of their importance.
As far as the chapter organisation, the literature review is organised into topics. The first one is about relationship marketing and the different tools. The other topic is specific about CRM and its advantages for hospitality. In fact, it must be noted that it is not easy to manage hotel services, given that the optimisation in services is much more complex than in products. Next, we present the case study target of analysis - Estoril Coast - where the results obtained are discussed. Afterwards, possible recommendations and solutions are presented, as well as future directions and limitations of investigation. The chapter ends with the conclusions.