Eva Martin Fuentes

Publicaciones

Hotels that most rely on Booking.com – online travel agencies (OTAs) and hotel distribution channels

Editorial/Revista: Tourism Review

Fecha de publicación: 19-11-2018

Publicación completa: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/TR-12-2017-0201/full/html

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to know which hotels mostly rely on Booking.com, investigating the level of presence on Booking.com around the world by country, hotel size, hotel category and managerial form. Neither the company nor the hotels provide this information, so the authors use the number of reviews as an indicator of estimated sales.

Design/methodology/approach

Data from 33,996 hotels worldwide are downloaded from Booking.com using a Web browser automatically controlled, developed in Python, that simulated a user navigation (clicks and selections). The comparison between independent hotels and hotels belonging to a chain is performed by a Student’s t distribution test and the comparison of hotel categories and hotel size is analyzed by a one-way ANOVA test.

Findings

The results show that three factors clearly influence the usage level of Booking.com: independent vs chain hotels, small vs large hotels and low vs high category hotels worldwide. The authors also observe that hotels from Europe are the ones that rely more on Booking.com.

Originality/value

The originality of this research is to identify the factors that make hotels to have a greater (lesser) dependence on Booking.com within each destination and geographical area. Moreover, the use of big data from hotels worldwide allows the authors to know the level of use of Booking.com in dozens of countries, especially those with the highest tourist activity. This work expands the capabilities of big data in the hospitality industry research, and with a simple ratio, this study counteracts the lack of public data on hotel sales through Booking.com. This new approach could be extended to the analysis of other online travel agencies (OTAs), which use similar review systems.

Modelling a grading scheme for peer-to-peer accommodation: Stars for Airbnb

Editorial/Revista: International Journal of Hospitality Management

Fecha de publicación: 01-01-2018

Publicación completa: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278431917304401

This study aims, firstly, to determine whether hotel categories worldwide can be inferred from features that are not taken into account by the institutions in charge of assigning such categories and, if so, to create a model to classify the properties offered by P2P accommodation platforms, similar to grading scheme categories for hotels, thus preventing opportunistic behaviours of information asymmetry and information overload. The characteristics of 33,000 hotels around the world and 18,000,000 reviews from Booking.com were collected automatically and, using the Support Vector Machine classification technique, we trained a model to assign a category to a given hotel. The results suggest that a hotel classification can usually be inferred by different criteria (number of reviews, price, score, and users’ wish lists) that have nothing to do with the official criteria. Moreover, room prices are the most important feature for predicting the hotel category, followed by cleanliness and location.

Does hotel size matter to get more reviews per room?

Editorial/Revista: Journal of Information Technology & Tourism

Fecha de publicación: 16-11-2019

Publicación completa: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40558-018-0126-7

The number of reviews on websites like TripAdvisor may improve hotel ratings and hotel rankings, which favors the perception of hotel quality. Previous studies have focused on the total number of reviews for each hotel, suggesting that increasing the number of reviews could affect hotel ratings. We use a simple index, which is obtained by dividing the number of reviews on TripAdvisor for a given hotel by its number of rooms. This allows identifying the profile of the hotels that are most efficient at generating reviews on this website, which are surprisingly the smallest ones. This index also shows the real level of use of TripAdvisor in each country, without taking into account its population or number of hotels, which are elements that distort the measurement of the popularity of this website.

 

Diverse and emotional: Facebook content strategies by Spanish hotels

Editorial/Revista: Journal of Information Technology & Tourism

Fecha de publicación: 23-01-2020

Publicación completa: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40558-019-00164-z

Social media communication has become a fundamental tool for hospitality companies, especially for marketing and customer engagement purposes. Facebook is the social network most used by hotels, both to interact and to establish relationships with their customers, and to provide them with relevant content and information, which may contribute to a positive travel experience and overall satisfaction. In general, content hotels post on Facebook either emphasizes hotels’ services (hotel-level or internal information) or aspects related to where the hotels are located (destination-level or external information) while conveying emotional attributes. Thus, this study aims to unveil the content strategy of these two types of content levels for hotels in the two most-visited cities in Spain, as well as to explore the emotional aspect of hotel Facebook posts. To do so, 4725 Facebook messages posted by 189 hotels in Barcelona and 1175 posted by 47 hotels in Madrid were analyzed using compositional data analysis, which accounts for the relative importance (shares) of different types of contents. Results show that hotels in Barcelona post more content related to hotel services and hotels in Madrid post more content related to the destination.

 

From Blockbuster to Neighbourhood Buster: The Effect of Films on Barcelona

Editorial/Revista: Sustainability

Fecha de publicación: 15-03-2020

Publicación completa: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/6/2290/htm

In recent years, cities such as Venice, Dubrovnik, Paris and Barcelona have experienced an exponential increase in visitor numbers leading to episodes of tourismphobia by anti-tourism movements, or even the decline of the destination. Among other solutions, some destinations see film-induced tourism as a possible way of diversifying tourism supply and demand. Through the analysis of the locations of six thematic film routes in Barcelona compared to the same locations on the largest online travel review platform, TripAdvisor, it is concluded that, far from spreading out tourist flows, fiction-induced tourism in Barcelona has concentrated tourism at the main attractions of the city. Only a few exceptions of films with minor audiences lead tourists off the beaten track. Overall, this paper provides a set of recommendations, strategies and challenges for destination managers to help alleviate overtourism and to offer more sustainable tourism away from spots that attract mass tourism.

Satisfaction measures with monetary and non-monetary components: Hotel’s overall scores

Editorial/Revista: International Journal of Hospitality Management

Fecha de publicación: 01-05-2020

Publicación completa: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278431920300499

Hotel scores are critical indicators of satisfaction. However, the diversity of methodologies for calculating these indicators leads to notable differences. To explore such discrepancies, this study investigated the differences when monetary and non-monetary components are included in the measures of satisfaction. The empirical test conducted on over 26,000 hotels revealed that exclusively using non-monetary components in satisfaction measures (e.g., arithmetic mean of non-monetary attributes) leads to higher values than using monetary measures of satisfaction (e.g., value for money). The deviations between attribute performance and its expected value explained the difference between both satisfaction measures. In addition, the attributes to which people seem to be monetarily sensitive are “comfort,” “staff,” and “services.” This study provides a tool for decision-makers to identify the best method for communicating the hotel’s satisfaction measures via its position in the market and attributes that require reinforcement.

The halo effect: A longitudinal approach

Editorial/Revista: Annals of Tourism Research

Fecha de publicación: 04-05-2020

Publicación completa: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160738320300827?dgcid=coauthor

The halo effect is a cognitive bias whereby people form an opinion about a characteristic of an attribute of a product based on their predisposition (positive or negative) toward another attribute. No formal testing of this effect is available in the hospitality and tourism literature. Thus, this study fills this gap by analyzing a sample of 21,338 hotels. Results indicate that: i) the halo effect is supported (the “other” attributes explain nearly 50% of the focal attribute “location”); ii) asymmetric effects exist because negative variations have a stronger influence than positive variations (the halo effect actually becomes a crown of thorns); and iii) varying effects exist over the range of the dependent variable.