This article investigates the research online, purchase offline (ROPO) behaviour patterns of holiday packages buyers during the planning and buying process and identifies the socio-economic factors (gender, age, education, number of people, including minors, in a household, place of residence or financial status, etc.) determining its occurrence. The research purpose was achieved based on the research results covering the behaviour of the holiday packages buyers (N = 989). To analyse the factors determining the ROPO behaviour, the methods of multidimensional statistical analysis – classification and regression tree – were used and confirmed the existing correlation between age, educational level and residence of tourist services buyers and the occurrence of their ROPO behaviour. Interestingly, the conducted research did not show the correlation between economic factors and the occurrence of ROPO behaviour of holiday packages buyers.
Customer loyalty to a destination and accommodation services constitutes a frequent object of research; however, customer loyalty to travel agencies is rarely analyzed. The presented article is an attempt to fill in this research gap. Its purpose is to construct and verify the model covering the impact of the selected factors on the loyalty level of customers of travel agencies operating in Poland. The conceptualization of the loyalty model of travel agency customers (based on the European path-based EPSI model) proposed in the article was first used to illustrate the existing correlations in customer behavior to analyze and explain the development of the loyalty phenomenon vis-a-vis travel agency customers. The aforementioned assumptions—having applied the structural equation modelling (SEM)—were reflected in the development of the theoretical model of travel agencies customer loyalty, the empirical verification of which (N = 1151) allowed us to determine the impacts of selected factors (i.e., the perceived quality of the travel agency’s offers, its image and the satisfaction with its service buyers) on the loyalty level of travel agency customers. It has been shown that two major factors have positive impacts on the loyalty of travel agency customers: (i) the perceived quality of travel agency offers, and (ii) its image. Furthermore, the conducted analysis highlights the positive influence of the perceived value of travel agency offers on the loyalty of customers.
1 September 2021 in EUROPEAN RESEARCH STUDIES JOURNAL