| Author: | Lam, Chun-man Carmen |
| Title: | Assessing the technological readiness of hotel sales and marketing in upper-upscale and luxury branded hotels : selected cases from hotels in China and South East Asia |
| Advisors: | Law, Rob (SHTM) Zhang, Ziqiong (SHTM) Kucukusta, Deniz (SHTM) |
| Degree: | DHTM |
| Year: | 2018 |
| Subject: | Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations Branding (Marketing) Hotels -- Marketing Hotel management |
| Department: | School of Hotel and Tourism Management |
| Pages: | xii, 182 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Information and communication technology (ICT) is playing an increasingly important role in hotel sales and marketing in the current digital era. Customers are technologically-savvy and are searching, booking and engaging with travel service providers using multiple devices at any time of the day, through multiple channels including traditional and digital channels. Traditional booking channels for hotels such as property and centralized voice reservation channels have been losing share to electronic channels including third party intermediaries such as online travel agents (OTAs). Customers book through OTAs because they offer flexibility, pricing transparency and superior customer booking experiences through good use of technology but delivery through OTAs comes at a high cost to hotels. To manage this, hotels need to tackle key touchpoints in the hotel customer journey, differentiate from the competition and regain their share of direct customer bookings by deploying better distribution and customer relationship management strategies to be customer-centric, and that requires a data culture and better implementation of ICT in today's environment. It is recognized that in brand-affiliated hotels, distribution and ICT strategies are set at the corporate level while the hotels need to focus on execution of those strategies. Good execution on the hotel unit level requires the right skill sets, mindsets and technological environment. This research and analysis was done in the first half of 2017 to address a research gap which was the level of competence and the implementation environment for ICT at hotel level. It analyzed the barriers and facilitators for ICT deployment and the contributing factors to past implementation success and failure on property and found that past successes with ICT were not good indicators of future performance because at the branded hotel level, key ingredients needed to develop a data-driven customer-centric culture were missing. Hotels lacked the analytical skills, experimental mindset, and collaborative culture required for successful digital transformation. Based on the findings, a number of recommendations have been made on what could be done by hotel management companies to address these issues to facilitate future implementations. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 991022180958003411.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 1.29 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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