Analysing the role of urban hotel location in guests’ satisfaction

ABSTRACT

Location of hotels in the urban space is an important factor for hoteliers and urban planners alike. Various methods can be used to assess the importance of hotel location in tourist demand. This work applies an operational method in the urban area of Thessaloniki, Greece, which combines spatial analysis and guests’ satisfaction with hotel location. To explore the spatial patterns, i.e. areas where hotels are expected to have higher or lower assessments of their location, spatial auto-correlation analysis has been used. Then, a regression analysis was carried out to assess the contribution of various spatial factors to the evaluation of hotels’ locations. Finally, a map was created to predict tourists’ satisfaction from any potential location of new hotels’ establishment.

KEYWORDS:

• Hotel location
• urban tourism
• spatial analysis
• hotel guests’ preferences

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. https://opendata.thessaloniki.gr/el

2. LISA cluster maps provide a graphic representation of hotel locations with a significant local Moran statistic classified by type of correlation as follows (Anselin et al., 2006): “high-high”, “low-low”, “high-low” and “low-high”. The first two (high-high and low-low) are so-called “clusters”, which means that “a hotel with high location rating has neighboring hotels with high location ratings” and that “a hotel with low rating is surrounded by other low-rating hotels”. The other two are “spatial outliers” where “high-low” means a high-rating hotel is near low-rating ones, while “low-high” indicates the vice-versa.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dionysis Latinopoulos

Dr. Dionysis Latinopoulos is an associate professor of Rural Sustainable Development and Natural Resources Management at the Department of Spatial Planning and Development, School of Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh). Diploma in Agriculture/Agricultural Economics (AUTh), MSc in Environmental and Resource Economics (Department of Economics, University College London), PhD (Department of Civil Engineering, AUTh) and Post-doc (Department of Economics, University of Macedonia). His teaching includes courses in environmental and natural resource economics, environmental spatial planning, sustainable development economics and environmental planning and management of tourism. His research interests include non-market valuation of environmental resources, environmental planning and decision-making, planning and management of tourism. He has published articles in international peer-reviewed journals on these topics.