RESEARCH NOTES AND REPORTS This Department publishes research notes, conference reports, reports on the work of public agencies and associations, field (industry) reports, and other rel- evant topics and timely issues. Contributions to this department are submitted to its two Associate Editors: Research Notes to Juergen Gnoth (Department of Marketing, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. Email <jgnoth@ commerce.otago.ac.nz>) and Conference Reports to Russell Smith (Hospitality and Tourism, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Rep. of Sin- gapore. Email <arasmith@ntu.edu.sg>). Unsolicited conference and agency reports will not be accepted. RESEARCH NOTES Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 472–475, 2004  2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain 0160-7383/$30.00 www.elsevier.com/locate/atoures Segmenting Cruisers by Loyalty James F. Petrick Ercan Sirakaya Texas A&M University, USA Tourist loyalty has consistently been shown to be an important variable for destinations (Opperman 1998). One basis for this body of research is that it is more desirable, and less expensive, to retain tourists than to seek new ones (Thomas 2001). Loyal ones are also more likely to positively discuss past experiences than their counterparts, creating a potential for free word-of- mouth (WOM) advertising (Shoemaker and Lewis 1999). The challenge is to understand and use the information they receive regarding such dedication. One use of this data is to identify distinct tourism segments, allowing for the comparison of variables by groups to assist management in formulating market-oriented strategies (Kotler, Bowen and Makens 1996). Past research has revealed that loyalty, comprised of psychological and behavioral compo- nents (Backman and Crompton 1991), can be configured into four quadrants or segments: spurious, latent, low, and high loyalty. It has also been suggested that analyzing this potential for first-timers is important (Opperman 2000), and that cluster analysis is a less subjective manner for deriving segments than using median cutoffs (Pritchard and Howard 1997). Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to operationalize loyalty as a segmentation tool utilizing both psychological and behavioral measures as suggested by Backman and Crompton (1991), while recognizing the vast dif- ferences between first-timers and repeaters (Opperman 2000). The first objec- tive was to distinguish the two groups from one another by using a factor- 472