Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: Most literature on marketing contains an exhaustive discussion on the topic of relationship marketing and this concept is now well understood by every marketer. However, valuing customer relationships is usually viewed more vaguely as being a general, desirable and virtuous factor. Like many fields in marketing, there has been a failure to justify adopting such an approach based also on its inherent financial control measures. In this increasingly globalised marketplace (the hospitality sector), it can strike as odd that scholars and researchers have overlooked the differences in CRM handling that exist among different cultures. The aim of this dissertation is to make a contribution to closing the gap between marketing and management perspectives in terms of customer profitability, especially in the luxury hotel sector with regard to their international customer/guest base. The gap is to identify by the management and accounting which customers are profitable and to translate these insights into marketing activities. Companies can control their customer relationships and make sophisticated decisions about which customer relationships should be finished and which are worth retaining, a practice known as Customer Equity. The objectives of this work include: - Identify how investment in customer retention create a Return on Investment. - Allocating marketing spending ratios for long-term profitability. - Identify the methods that managers can use to create customer loyalty. - Explain the links between customer loyalty, customer equity and relationship marketing. - Estimate the role of quality factors within service delivery and after-sales service as above and how they affect customer retention. - Identify the effect of after-sales service as above quality on customers expectations and its impact on customer satisfaction. CRM outline is seen by some as an extended database containing useful information about customers that could be used to help extend sales, while others see it as a tool specifically designed for use on a (one-to-one) basis with each of their customers (Peppers and Rogers, 1999). To implement CRM successfully the TQM, HRM and IT management need to ensure organisational alignment (Reinartz et al., 2004). Building on this statement, Buttle (2004) spells out that: CRM needs to be established in three layers: companywide, factional and customer facing . Inhaltsverzeichnis:Table of Contents: i.able [...]