Redesigning an Effective Pathway to Consumer Loyalty for Sustainable Competitive Advantage

The qualitative case study aimed to study the impact of leadership behaviors on delivering hospitality frontline employee services to customers to sustain consumer loyalty and gain a sustainable competitive advantage in the South Florida hospitality and tourism industry. The flexible design allowed the researcher to develop specific research questions while focusing on the problem statement, which addressed the potential inability of U.S. business leaders in service-related industries to gain customer loyalty, resulting in the possible loss of competitive advantage for the organizations. The researcher selected a highly successful South Florida luxury hotel resort, and twenty-nine professionally diversified participants were interviewed in person during this study. Each participant was asked eight semi-structured interview questions about their experiences at the resort or previous hospitality experiences. The qualitative concepts of bracketing and triangulation used in data collection enabled the researcher to develop an increase of objectivity about the participants. Through this case study, the researcher discovered that hospitality leadership must ensure employees are engaged with their jobs; such actions should help reduce employee turnover and develop a strong culture of employer-employee commitment (Figure 1). Furthermore, this qualitative research discovered the five new critical themes of 1) ensuring proper training, 2) teamwork, 3) leadership engagement with staff, 4) delivering high-quality services, and 5) developing and maintaining a caring organizational culture. Furthermore, this case study proved to fill the gaps in research knowledge on redesigning a practical pathway to customer loyalty for sustainable competitive advantage