The Mediating Role of WOM (Word of Mouth) Between Antecedents and Purchase Intention among Hotel Guests in Sarawak, Malaysia

Word-of-mouth (WOM) is interpreted as inter-consumer communication regarding their personal experience of a product or service. WOM Marketing has become an important communication tool to promote brands and products. The objective of this study is to investigate the influence of WOM on purchase intention as well as to examine WOM as the mediating effect in associating the antecedents (service quality, trust, utilitarian value, and hedonic value) and purchase intention among Sarawak's hotel guests. Studies have proven that WOM to be rather persuasive compared to advertising in transferring positive or negative information and is set to be one of the most relevant and important strategies to promote hotel's products. This cross-sectional paper, using self-administered questionnaires, is one of the few papers to examine the prominent factors on word of mouth and purchase intention in the context of Sarawak hotel industry. The targeted population sample consisted of 400 respondents who stayed in the hotels in Kuching. Quantitative study, random sampling method, descriptive and inferential statistics were used in the data collection and analysis, of which SPSS version 23 and PROCESS Model 4 were utilized. The results indicated that there was a significant mediating effect between all the four antecedents and purchase intention.