Improving competitiveness through city marketing in Spanish hotels

Abstract

The degree to which hotels can be competitive depends upon some very important factors, such as city promotion initiatives and city knowledge networks. The purpose of this study is to analyse and present how a city marketing procedure could become an effective tool for knowledge development and the competitiveness of Spanish hospitality hotels. Our findings support the view that in order to implement a marketing city programme oriented towards hotels, municipal managers need to provide and support knowledge creation networks. Furthermore, a hotel's size is significantly associated with levels of city promotion initiatives. Therefore, to consolidate marketing city results among small hotels, municipal managers need to reinforce the environment in which hotel managers operate and provide them with the means to survive in the context of a competitive knowledge-based economy.

Keywords:

• marketing cities
• city promotion
• knowledge creation practices
• hotels
• hospitality

Notes

For stylistic parsimony we make use of the term ‘target markets’. However, the term target markets refer to any entity (human, organisation, enterprise, university, technology park, research centre, tourist, etc) that manages knowledge (Metaxas, 2002).

The SABI database (Sistema de Análisis de Balances Ibéricos) contains financial information for 520,000 companies (480,000 from Spain and 40,000 from Portugal). This includes public and private, Spanish and Portuguese companies, with up to 10 years of data, and is updated daily.