Relationship marketing has received much attention and widespread publicity over the past ten years and has moved to the forefront of research and practice. It provides companies with a management tool to establish economically profitable relationships, networks and interactions with different, but equally important stakeholder markets. The marketing concept as reflected in the four P's of the marketing mix was prominent in marketing practice and thinking until the mid-1980s, when reference to customer relationships and relationship building began to appear in the literature and became the focus of much research. The marketing concept, although still relevant, was expanded to include the dimension of relationships. The shift fiom transactional to relationship-based marketing has many implications for product and service based business. Marketing can no longer be viewed as a separate function to which an organisation can assign responsibility for the customer while the rest of the organisation gets on with their tasks. Rather, the relationship-based view of marketing places the responsibility for marketing (as defined broadly) on everyone in the organisation. In other words, it is the responsibility of every employee within the organisation to satisfy the needs of customers. A relationship marketing orientation can therefore create a competitive edge for an organisation and can also have a positive impact on organisational performance. In a highly competitive, global environment organisations are focussing more attention on building sustainable, competitive advantages by developing and maintaining close, cooperative relationships with a limited set of suppliers, customers and channel members. Through these relationships, organisations create value by differentiating their offering and/or lowering their costs. The term "relationship marketing" is therefore applied to a number of different marketing activities ranging from consumer frequency marketing programs to selling activities directed towards building partnerships with key customers. The focus of this study is to investigate the mutually beneficial nature of establishing long term relationships in supplier markets, customer markets, internal markets, recruitment markets, internal markets and influence markets. The different principles which are important to improve and professionally manage the relationships in the markets listed above, are identified and discussed. These principles were tested in travel agencies in the Western Cape province to determine their current and ideal application in a travel and tourism environment. The calculation of effect sizes were based on the difference between the current and ideal application of the principles within travel agencies in the Western Cape. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Business Management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007