Abstract
Low price or convenience? What is more important for online and offline bookings? For the sustainable development of the hospitality industry, it is necessary to know the opinions of customers about their online/offline hotel booking experiences. This study aimed to predict the customers’ online/offline booking behavior toward a resort hotel in Taiwan by adapting the marketing mix elements. We first designed and executed a detailed questionnaire involving approximately 300 respondents from a five-star hotel in Taiwan, used hypothesis testing to extract important factors from the data, and finally used logistic regression of these factors to predict the customer choices effectively. The study results show that the majority of the customers believe that booking hotel services online provides for a broader choice, offers more discounts and more privacy than available while booking offline, and is cheaper, faster, and more reliable and convenient. The outcomes of logistic regression confirm that “broad choice,” but not “low price” has the most significant impact on the customers booking a resort accommodation online or offline. Furthermore, the results of the analysis of variance (ANOVA) show that the younger customers (under the age of 45) and those with university degrees are significantly more likely to make the reservations online for a resort. The findings and the recommendations can provide valuable inputs to the resort industry practitioners in Taiwan for improving the online booking services.
Highlights
Nowadays, innovative development and a wide array of access to information have changed the way people travel [1]
With the growth of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the Internet, tourism products can be directly purchased on the Internet, through Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) or provider-owned websites [4]
To identify whether a customer would use an online or an offline channel to book a resort accommodation, we considered the importance given to the seven factors by the customers as predictor variables
Summary
Innovative development and a wide array of access to information have changed the way people travel [1]. Scholars have indicated that the tourism industry was one of the first to be affected by the Internet [2]. With the growth of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the Internet, tourism products can be directly purchased on the Internet, through Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) or provider-owned websites [4]. The technology most influential in changing the behavior of tourists has been ICT [5], which has transformed the tourism industry globally [6]. According to Statista 2019, in 2016 the global online travel sales worldwide amounted to 564.87 billion U.S dollars. It was projected to be 755.94 billion U.S dollars in 2019 [7]
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