Mediating customer gratitude and satisfaction in the relationship between value co-creation and positive behavioral intentions of hotel’s customers in Egypt: The moderating role of price fairness perception.

The Egyptian government invests heavily in promoting its tourism areas and improving its hotel services, transportation and the level of safety in order to regain its leadership in the hospitality industry in the region and providing a contemporary and atypical image of Egypt in light of Egypt's 2030 vision for sustainable development. In addition to the prominent role of that sector in developing the Egyptian GDP and support the Egyptian economy. Thus, the current paper investigates how value co-creation, customer satisfaction and customer gratitude stimulate the rates of positive behavioral intentions of hotels customers in Egypt. Data were collected from 436 hotels’ customers based on the internet-based questionnaire. Partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS–SEM) was employed to test the hypotheses. The findings confirmed that value co-creation dimensions (co-production and value in use) significantly impacted customer gratitude and satisfaction. Co-production dimension significantly impacted positive behavioral intentions, while the value in use significantly impacted positive behavioral intentions except the customer’s willingness to pay premium prices. In addition, customer gratitude positively influenced positive behavioral intentions. Moreover, the results showed that both customer gratitude and satisfaction mediated the relationship between value co-creation dimensions and positive behavioral intentions. Also, the results confirmed that price fairness perception moderated the relationship between co-production dimension and both customer gratitude and satisfaction, as well as it moderated the relationship between value in use dimension and customer gratitude only. Finally, some theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are discussed.