Real-Time Personalization and Geolocation in Tourism: Toward an Integrated Conceptual Model of Customer Experience and Loyalty in Morocco

Abstract

Contemporary tourism is increasingly shaped by the convergence of real-time personalization and geolocation technologies, which enable service providers to deliver individually tailored, spatially contextualized experiences at unprecedented levels of precision and relevance. Yet despite their growing deployment, the mechanisms through which these technologies influence customer experience and loyalty remain insufficiently theorized — particularly in emerging market contexts and with respect to their joint, synergistic effects. This article addresses these gaps by proposing an integrated conceptual model linking real-time personalization and geolocation to customer loyalty in tourism, mediated by customer satisfaction, provider trust, and user experience quality. Ten theoretically grounded hypotheses are formally derived from person–environment fit theory, commitment–trust theory, and the experience economy framework, and are situated within the specific socio-cultural and institutional context of Morocco's tourism sector. The model introduces the concept of synergistic personalization–geolocation value and identifies the trust paradox of digital personalization as the central theoretical tension requiring resolution. Theoretical contributions, managerial implications for Moroccan tourism operators and destination management organizations, and directions for future empirical investigation are discussed.