Switzerland? The Best Choice for Accommodation in Europe for Skiing in the 2023 Season

Abstract

The study investigates the connections between tourists‘ hotel preferences and distance from resort expressed in meters, distance from ski lift expressed in meters, booking score, number of reviews, room type, feature of free cancellation, price expressed in Euro, type (private host/hotel), destination (ski-to-door access/travel sustainable property) from 10 highly appreciated European ski locations offered in from February 2023 by Booking, using a sustainable, electronic instrument for collecting and analyzing a large amount of data, Octoparse 8 and a multi-attribute decision model. Previous studies concerning tourist preferences and online behavior used traditional methods, such as questionnaires and surveys, being limited to a certain number of questions and respondents; thus, this study covers a research gap in the literature with regard to the use of a large amount of data, electronic instruments and multi-attribute models to rank the hotel locations, which derives from the difficulty in obtaining the necessary data to carry out an in-depth analysis. The results show that when selecting a hotel location from an exclusive ski resort, the tourists are interested in the number of reviews, the price and the distances from the resorts to the ski slopes, while the booking score is less important. This is translated into practical implications for marketers and hotel managers, presented at the end of the paper.