Abstract:
This new century has witnessed a change in the focus of business i.e. to fully understand
and maintain customers at best. Relationship Marketing therefore, as a paradigm shift
which originates from Service Marketing has been put more and more importance to in
recent years. Most of the literatures have educed that as a new concept its fundamental
breakthrough is to position customer as the principal start for every kind of business action
which evokes an organizational wide mobilization among different functions. Also
literatures acclaim that there should be an intimate correlation between Relationship
Marketing and Service Quality, with the latter the main issue in Service Marketing, but
there are not enough researches to support such a relationship especially in tourism industry.
Again, there is no consensus on what create a “good relationship”, say the dimensions of
relationship or relationship quality so that it makes the investigation on the relationship
between Relationship Marketing and Service Quality more difficult. Therefore, based on
previous works, the main aim of this study is to separately find whether there are
relationships between customers’ perceived service quality and 3 other elements assumed
as relationship dimensions namely customer satisfaction, customer intention to re-contact
an agent for the next trip and their intention to keep a long term relationship with the same
travel agency in the context of Pakistan tourism industry. Survey was conducted among
100 Pakistani people who had ever experienced service offered by a Pakistan travel agent.
Results go along with 3 hypotheses in showing that customers’ perceived service quality is
the antecedent of good customer-supplier relationship (in terms of customers’ satisfaction,
intention to re-contact a travel agent and the intention to keep the relationship for long).
Comparison with previous researches is included in the discussion part in which a
recommended way to construct relationship is offered. Other recommendations drawing
from the findings and the limitations of the research are discussed at the end.
