Exploring competing models on sacrifices, quality, value, satisfaction and loyalty with PLS and partial correlations

Abstract

Analysing the order and intensity of the links between sacrifices, quality, value, satisfaction and loyalty has deeply interested tourism researchers for the last decade. This work reviews previous contributions on modelling these variables in tourism literature, analysing each of the links and depicting areas of consensus and controversies. This work seeks to add to this stream of research pursuing two objectives. The first is to contrast two competing models of the relationships between these five constructs: Cronin et al. (2000)’s model, then replicated in Brady et al. (2005) and an alternative model that contemplates the consensus (the relationships quality-value, quality-satisfaction, value-loyalty and satisfaction-loyalty) and proposes a contrast of three of the controversies: relationships sacrifices-quality, value-satisfaction and quality-loyalty. The second objective, methodological, is to propose the study of partial correlations as a technique for exploring relationships between constructs for building a better global causal model. After testing the psychometric properties of the scales, both models are contrasted with PLS (MBPLSPM) on a sample of 400 hotel guests, finding improved results for the model that proposes a chain of effects sacrifices-quality-value-satisfaction-loyalty. The discussion of the results suggests conclusions on the richness and particular features of these structures for consumer behaviour in tourism.