Abstract:
Tourism and Travel sector is fundamental in advancing social economic growth of nations.
Hotel industry plays a major supportive role to the this sector by ensuring comfortable stay for
the visitors through meeting their gastronomical, lodging and other related auxiliary needs.
However, the industry is always faced with performance challenges due to its susceptibility to
changes in internal and external environments. It has therefore been adopting strategies to
improve on its performance and mitigate on any eventualities. One of such strategy is customer
engagement, a component of value co-creation which is a process of collaboration by parties
who are involved in direct interactions that is aimed at generating mutual value. Due to the
dearth in studies on the effectiveness of customer engagement in the hotel industry, this study
evaluated from a managerial perspective the effect of customer engagement on the performance
of registered hotels in the Nyeri County. The research specifically was concerned on the sections
of hotel that deal directly with the customer: F&B, Room Division and Sales and Marketing. The
study used a descriptive research design and had a target population of the 61 registered hotels in
the county of which only those with bed capacity of 25 and above (34 hotels) were considered as
practically, they are the ones expected to be implementing the strategy. Census method was
adopted in selecting the sample size due to the low number of registered hotels while purposive
sampling was utilized in picking the respondents from the selected hotels. Questionnaire were
used for data collection and were piloted to ensure validity and reliability during data collection.
The Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient for the instrument was 0.754 which is above 0.7 thus
ascertaining that the instrument was reliable for the data collection process. Data collected was
analyzed descriptively and inferentially with the aid of Statistical Package for Social Sciences
(SPSS). Diagnostic test was carried out before multiple regression analysis was carried out to
measure the relationship between the dependent variable and independent variables. The findings
indicate that customer engagement (β1 = 0.642 p< 0.05) had a positive relationship with
significant effect on the performance of registered hotels and explained 35.9 per cent variance of
the performance. Based on these findings, the study concluded that customer engagement have a
positive effect on the performance of registered hotels in Nyeri county. Thus, concluding that
firms that engage their customers more are more likely to outperform their counterparts