Yu-Bing Wang^1,, Ching-Wei Ho¹

Since 2020, the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus, border closures, and flight cancellations have directly or indirectly affected people’s decisions and altered their travel plans. The current post-COVID-19 pandemic has changed people’s daily lives, and it has also dramatically changed their travel habits and the tourism retailing industry. For this reason, new technologies are significantly altering the retail experiences of customers in an attempt to solve all of the difficulties associated with the pandemic. For example, customers today are accustomed to book hotel rooms and flight tickets online, are willing to use self-check-in systems, and also accept a variety of contactless services. This study utilized a PLS techniques to investigate how customer loyalty is affected by the characteristics of an online brand community-in this study, the Booking.com travel community, and to gain further insight into the mediating effect of the customer citizenship experience. The results show that online brand community is the antecedents of customer citizenship behavior and customer loyalty. The findings additionally suggest that the service quality offered by the online brand community has a direct impact on customer loyalty. Furthermore, it influences customer loyalty by acting as a mediator through the customer citizenship experience. Furthermore, the relationship quality of the online brand community has a direct influence on customer loyalty through the mediating role of customer citizenship experience. However, it does not directly affect customer loyalty on its own.

customer citizenship experience, COVID-19 pandemic, service quality, relationship quality, information quality, booking.com