A New Hospitality Marketing Perspective on the Emergence of “Lifestyle Hotels”

Abstract

Hotels in Japan have long been grouped under two categories: city hotels and business hotels. While the former are relatively expensive, have a large number of guest rooms, and include a variety of French and Chinese and Japanese restaurants and bars as well as meeting rooms and huge banquet halls, the latter are relatively low-priced facilities that only have guest rooms or basic rooms destined to meals. However, the category of lifestyle hotels, which is different from both, has been growing rapidly in Japan in the last few years. Instead of the above two categories, price categories such as luxury, upscale, mid-price, economy, budget are being adopted, but the emergence of lifestyle hotels has also caused the deepening of market segmentation. In this paper, I examine the current situation in this field and consider it from the viewpoint of marketing.