What can hotels learn content wise from online travel agency websites?

ABSTRACT

This research focuses on the specific information present on a hotel website and an online travel agency (OTA) hotel page, and to identify what information relates to which customer value. A checklist, based on the combination of OTA consumption values and the six information dimensions, has been used in this research study in which two hotels are included. The hotels differ in size, location and brand. The results show that OTA content has a perfect score half of the time, where hotel websites only reach this in 10% of the ten researched clusters. Hotel website content outperforms OTA content only in company information and visibility clusters. The results are the basis for further research to determine the importance of each dimension’s presence on the website from the customer’s perspective to nudge a customer to book the next stay via the hotel website.

KEYWORDS:

• customer behaviour
• customer values
• hotel website
• OTA consumption values
• six information dimensions