Optimal Pricing Strategy of a Small or Medium-Sized Hotel in Cooperation With a Web Site

Abstract

E-commerce is becoming an increasingly important marketing channel, because it offers ease, convenience, and customization of products and services to customers. However, small and medium-sized hotels in China seldom create and run their own Web sites due to the low volume of visits and high cost. In order to improve sales and marketing, hotels cooperate with third-party Web sites to establish an electronic channel. Thus, the hotel improves its revenue from an increased occupancy rate, and the Web site generates revenue from the difference between the wholesale room rate provided by the hotel and the discounted rate for customers. Through developing a Stackelberg game model for the cooperation, this article investigates the optimal pricing strategies of hotels and Web sites; analyzes the effects of some parameters, such as standard room rate, on hotel and Web site revenues; and designs a revenue sharing strategy to achieve full channel coordination. This article demonstrates the existence of the equilibrium condition of cooperation between a Web site and several hotels. Managerial implications are suggested for cooperation between a small or medium-sized hotel and a Web site.

电子商务使得顾客的购物更加简单、方便且可实现定制，它成为越来越重要的销售渠道。然而，由于访问量小，中小型宾馆独立建立、运行自己的网站非常困难。因此，她们通过与第三方网站合作的方式提供在线服务。通过斯坦伯格博弈模型，本文研究了宾馆和网站的盈利模式，确定了宾馆和网站的最有定价策略，并分析了宾馆客房标准定价等参数对定价策略以及双方收益的影响。本文设计了收益共享策略以实现宾馆和网站的完全协调，证明了一家网站与多家宾馆合作的均衡存在性。最后，本文给出了关于中国中小型宾馆和第三方网站合作的管理启示。

Keywords:

• Pricing strategy
• cooperation
• e-commerce
• multichannel
• small or medium-sized hotel

Keywords:

• 定价策略
• 合作
• 电子商务
• 多渠道
• 中小型宾馆

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their encouraging comments and suggestions. The quality of this article was improved substantially as a result of these suggestions. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant Nos. 70871105 and 70821001.