Cornell hotel and restaurant administration quarterly

Being one of the “mega trends” that has significantly impacted the tourism system, the role and use of social media in travelers' decision making and in tourism operations and management have been widely discussed in tourism and hospitality research. This study reviews and analyzes all extant social media-related research articles published in academic journals during 2007 to 2011, mainly in tourism and hospitality fields. Based on a content analysis on the analyzed articles from both the consumers' and the suppliers' perspectives, this article found that consumer-centric studies generally focused on the use and impact of social media in the research phase of the travelers' travel planning process. Supplier-related studies have concentrated closely on promotion, management, and research functions, but few discussed product distribution. Research findings thoroughly demonstrate the strategic importance of social media for tourism competitiveness. This study also contributes to the academia and ind...

Social media in tourism and hospitality : a literature review

In view of the increasing popularity of online reviews and their significant impact on individual buying behavior as well as on the supply side, this study reviewed and analyzed articles related to online reviews in tourism and hospitality published in academic journals between 2004 and 2013. Based on a keyword-driven search and a content analysis, 50 articles were identified as relevant and classified into five topics. The findings revealed that (a) more than half of the analyzed articles focus on hotels and apply empirical methods based on secondary data, (b) more attention has been paid to the relationship between online reviews and online buying as well as satisfaction and online management, and (c) opinion mining of online reviews, motivation to post reviews, and the role of reviews are evenly distributed. This paper also discussed significant topical and methodological trends, contributes to an overall understanding of existing research and its limitation.

Hospitality and Tourism Online Reviews: Recent Trends and Future Directions

As a method of determining what types of social media messages work best for hospitality firms, this study examined what types of messages gained the most clicks of “Like” and comments on Facebook....

Spreading Social Media Messages on Facebook: An Analysis of Restaurant Business-to-Consumer Communications

Purpose




Online consumer reviews have become increasingly important for consumer decision-making. One of the most prominent examples is the hotel industry where consumer reviews on websites, such as Bookings.com, TripAdvisor and Venere.com, play a critical role in consumers’ choice of a hotel. There have been a number of recent studies analyzing various aspects of online reviews. The purpose of this paper is to investigate their effects in terms of hotel occupancy rates.




Design/methodology/approach




This paper measures through regression analysis the impact of three dimensions of consumer reviews (i.e. review score, review variance and review volume) on the occupancy rates of 346 hotels located in Rome, isolating a number of other factors that might also affect demand.




Findings




Review score is the dimension with the highest impact. The results suggest that after controlling for other variables, a one-point increase in the review score is associated to an increase in the occupancy rate by 7.5 percentage points. Regardless the review score, the number of reviews has a positive effect, but with decreasing returns, implying that the higher the number of reviews, the lower the beneficial effect in terms of occupancy rates is.




Practical implications




The findings quantify the strong association of online reviews to occupancy rates suggesting the use of appropriate reputational management systems to increase hotel occupancy and therefore performance.




Originality/value




A major contribution of this paper is its comprehensiveness in analyzing the relation between online consumer reviews and occupancy across a heterogeneous sample of hotels.

/pdf/the-influence-of-e-word-of-mouth-on-hotel-occupancy-rate-4nrm4rg5if.pdf

The influence of e-word-of-mouth on hotel occupancy rate

Hotel companies are struggling to keep up with the rapid consumer adoption of social media. Although many companies have begun to develop social media programs, the industry has yet to fully explore the potential of this emerging data and communication resource. The revenue management department, as it evolves from tactical inventory management to a more expansive role across the organization, is poised to be an early adopter of the opportunities afforded by social media. We propose a framework for evaluating social media-related revenue management opportunities, discuss the issues associated with leveraging these opportunities and propose a roadmap for future research in this area.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Frpm.2011.12.pdf

Kristin V Rohlfs

Papers

Social media meets hotel revenue management: Opportunities, issues and unanswered questions