The hotel industry operates in a highly complex and competitive environment, therefore continuous monitoring of performance indicators is necessary, at the same time market performance improvements are required. One of the business performance indicators is hotel occupancy, which reflects the demand for hotel services. Hotels strive to maximize occupancy, which is influenced by many factors, according to some previous studies also by online reviews. This topic has been explored in recent years and the conclusions have varied. We have studied/researched the impact of online reviews on occupancy on the example of four-star hotels in Ljubljana. We took into account two variables: an average online review and the number of reviews. We obtained online reviews from three different online sources for a period of one year. We determined the positive impact of the number of online reviews on the hotel occupancy, while the average online review was not proved to be an impact factor. In the thesis we have also been interested in the amount of attention the hotels in Ljubljana pay to online reviews, as the online hotel reviews are a popular source of information among consumers when deciding about the online booking of a hotel accommodation. We have looked into the following three strategies of online reviews management on selected websites: replying to online reviews, in-time response, and hotel website’s online reviews integration. It turned out that hotel reviews and comments have already been recognized as an important communication channel; however, we propose certain improvements.
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