Online Hotel Booking Systems in Romania

Abstract

If in the past the websites were used by hotels only for promoting their products and services, nowadays are used to attract customers and to offer them the opportunity to book rooms online directly without using other intermediaries. The main objective of this article is to identify the level of online booking systems uptake by hotels in Romania. In order to support this objective we developed a qualitative study based on several research methods which include: websites analysis, documents review like promotional materials, personal observations and official statistics analysis. The paper starts with a presentation of the Romanian hotel industry focusing on the main characteristics of different types of hotel units. The Romanian hotel industry grew steadily in the last ten years, offering now a wide range of accommodations characterized by diversity, accessibility and affordability. Further, we focus on literature review, and because the existing hospitality literature has limited number of papers that investigated the perceptions of hotel website users on the importance of specific features of hotel websites, we create a framework with attributes for analysing the hotel websites. Next, we will present the result of a research we carried out in Romania on the implementation of booking engines on hotel's websites. Based on the results of this research we will overview the online booking engines used by hotels in Romania and we will highlight the main characteristics and features of these systems.