Online published on 28 February, 2020.
In 21st century extremely competitive scenario, customer is the centre for each and every business transactions in any sector. In this cutthroat economy, it's a difficult task for professionally managed service organizations to retain and sustain customers by providing services differentiation and innovative branding strategy. Specifically, in hospitality industry maintaining long-termrelationships for retaining customers and expecting loyalty from them is very much difficult. It is a major task for today's smart marketers and hoteliers to cater the diverse and specific needs of their customers in a very profitable and mutually satisfied manner. Hence, it requires a comprehensive blending of marketing intelligence, innovative supply chain, and high standard of customer service. Through which a holistic marketing value can be delivered to gain competitive edge over the market rivals. Accordingly, relationship marketing plays a pivotal role in retaining prospective customers and providing them value augmentation through qualitative service delivery. Relationship marketing approach also helps service industry to create strong bonding with their prospective customers. Customer loyalty and relationships are two sides of the same coin and thus relationship marketing helps in establishing an intact linkage between an organization and its customers and further converts a customer into a loyal one. Hence, the challenge for a service firm is how to convert a transactionbased relation into an emotionally bonded loyal one, which only can be facilitated with synergistic approach of relationship marketing elements along with high standard of service quality delivery. Although relationship marketing strategy is the area of interest both for the academicians and practitioners since lastthirtyyears. But, themajority of thestudieshavebeen conducted in International context and limited research has been done in Indian context, especially Odisha. This research explores the customer relationship marketing strategies adopted by different star hotels of Bhubaneswar. The sole aim of this study is to investigate in to how star hotels of Bhubaneswar practice relationship marketing in their service operations through the strategic use of innovation and technology.
Theobjective of the study is toproduce astute results by carrying out research in theareas of relationship marketing in hospitality context and within the limits of star hotels in Bhubaneswar. The findings of the study are based on the data collected from primary and secondary source. Secondary sources of data collected with help of Emerald insight, ProQuest, Ebscohost and Google Search.
Primary data conducted through quantitative as well qualitative procedure. Quantitative survey was conducted througha samplesizeof 365 guests fromall the five numberof star hotels in Bhubaneswar. For the qualitative analysis 30 numbers of personal interviews were conducted with target group of managerial staffs of the hotels.
The result of the study suggests that customer relationship elements along with service quality determinants play a significant role in managing and establishing customer hotel relationship in star hotels in Bhubaneswar.
