Developing relationship quality in economy hotels: the role of perceived justice, service quality, and commercial friendship

With a paradigm shift to relationship marketing, how to build high-quality relationships between customers and firms has become a key for companies, particularly hospitality companies to achieve success. Other than the well-documented antecedent of service quality, this study provides an integrated model that investigates the development of high-quality relationships between customers and the firm from a social perspective by incorporating perceived fairness and interpersonal relationship between customers and employees, i.e. commercial friendship into the model. Moreover, acknowledging a scarcity of academic investigation of the economy hotel sector despite its increasing significance in China, this study collected data from economy hotels in various regions of China. The empirical results of this study provide insightful implications for both scholars and practitioners. Findings clearly suggest that customers' perceptions of distributive, procedural and interactional justice contribute to the evaluation of service quality and the development of commercial friendship, which ultimately results in higher relationship quality.