Social Media Marketing In The Hotel Industry

1667 Words4 Pages

INTRODUCTION
Social media has been touted as having an increasingly important role in many aspects of the hospitality industry, including guest satisfaction and process improvement. However, one of the more intriguing aspects of social media is their potential to move markets by driving consumers’ purchasing patterns and influencing lodging performance (Anderson, 2012). The hotel industry is one of the most detail-oriented industries in the world. So naturally they apply this merit to social. The literatures show that, in general, users like photos twice as often as text updates. And they share videos 12 times more than photo and text posts combined. As a result, hotel brands use high-quality visual content to attract consumers’ attention. Users prefer to see appealing food photos, comfy, white linen beds, and giant, clean swimming pools (www.5loom.com). Social media marketing is one of the fastest growing forms of marketing. Especially within the information intensive tourism and travel sector, this results in a shift of traditional marketing strategies towards online, fast paced and interactive marketing techniques (Laudon and Traver, 2010). This study aims to assure the truth of the following hypotheses:

Social media marketing positively affects the guest satisfaction.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
The objectives of this research are to evaluate the role of social media marketing within hotel marketing strategies in the selected hotel sample, to evaluate how the internet has changed the hotel marketing and to develop recommendations for the effective use of social media marketing in hotel establishments.
LITERATURE REVIEW
The Operation and Marketing Connection
Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creatin...

... middle of paper ...

...ed as it is one of main major cities in hospitality market in Egypt. One hotel from the whole chain is selected to represent the chain itself, due to the similarity of applied policies in every hotel in the chain.
Sample Distribution:
The questionnaires were distributed to hotel guests in the selected sample who were willing to participate in the research. Participation was voluntary. Therefore, the data were collected using a convenience sampling approach. A total of 900 questionnaires were administered and 234 were returned. After eliminating 14 questionnaires because of incompleteness, 220 useful questionnaires were obtained, yielding a 24.5 per cent response rate. Considering the issue of the sample size when conducting more complex statistical analysis, the sample of 220 valid questionnaires deemed satisfactory. Data were gathered from January to February 2014.

Open Document