Price Determines Customer Loyalty in Ride-Hailing Services.

ABSTRACT: Not long after Uber left the business in Indonesia in 2018, increasing numbers of ride-hailingusers in Indonesia have been dominated by Gojek and Grab, with more than 100 million users downloaded eachof their applications. We don‘t know how the recent Covid-19 pandemic — when governments urged people towork from home and applying social distancing — will affect ride-hailing businesses, but this research aims tofind out which dominant factors influence customer loyalty in ride-hailing service in Surabaya, Indonesia. Datahave been collected using questionnaires from 400 participants in Surabaya by simple random sampling whichthen processed using SPSS 25.00. This research applies models of service quality, service benefit, price,corporate image, system quality, consumer (or customer) satisfaction, and consumer loyalty, which areimportant for the companies to be competitive. Results show that, compared to other four factors, price becomesthe most dominant factor that influences customer loyalty. It is hoped that results of this study will give furtherinsight into the ride-hailing services particularly in filling the gap of the relationship between these variables andcustomer loyalty, as much as they can be useful for business communities to ponder about the importance ofcustomer loyalty in determining better business performance. To enrich the findings, further study can bedeveloped using the above variables to investigate longer users in various other cities.

KEYWORDS: customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, price, public transportation, ride-hailing