The Effect of Ethical Sales Behaviour on Customer Relationship Quality in Hotels

Hotels face a significant challenge to build and maintain strong customer relationships. Therefore, it is essential to assess customer relationship quality (CRQ) and the factors that may influence it, i.e., hotel salespersons’ ethical sales behaviour (ESB), which is a moral factor influencing customers’ attitudes and behaviours. Gaining knowledge about the impact of ESB can help hotel managers to deal effectively with different behaviours of customers towards the organisation and make a difference in increasing CRQ. Although ESB and CRQ are critical for organisations and individuals, they have received minimal study, especially in the hospitality field. This paper investigates the extent to which hotel salespersons behave ethically and assesses the level of the CRQ. Besides, it explores the effect of ESB on CRQ dimensions and the influence of CRQ on selected relational outcomes. Moreover, the study assesses the impact of customers’ moral identity (MI) as a moderating variable on the relationship between ESB and CRQ. Data were collected using questionnaires. A simple random sample of 387 tourism managers working in the travel agencies category (A) in Greater Cairo was chosen. Only 285 valid questionnaire forms were received, representing a response rate of 71.6 per cent. The main results showed that ESB had significant positive effects on all dimensions of CRQ; the customer CRQ positively influenced the selected relational outcomes. Furthermore, it was found that customer MI moderates the positive relationship between ESB and the three dimensions of CRQ. Thus, it was recommended that hotel management maintain the level of CRQ by continuing with the good practice of salespersons’ ESB. In addition, hotel management should maintain employees’ ESB by recruiting, hiring, retaining, training, and promoting ethical salespersons.