Report On The Influence of Social Media on Hospitality and Its Challenges to the Hotel Industry

1.     Introduction

Hoteliers and investors have been progressively made aware of how the social and environment activities impacts the hotel procedures and improvements during the recent decade (Ottenbacher, Harrington, & Parsa, 2009). Components that have added to this awareness incorporate the wants of hotel proprietors and administrators to decrease expenses of activities, change required for practical improvement, expanded guidelines that focus on improvements and tasks and the way of perceptions of investors and stakeholders are changing towards the environment (Ottenbacher, Harrington, & Parsa, 2009). Due to the dynamic nature, the hospitality industry has face many challenges in the recent years. Few of these challenges are lack of equity, global rising of markets, lack of employees and talent, technology and social media and sustainability.

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However, the researcher will be focusing on one contemporary issue throughout this study which is how social media challenges the hotel industry. Along the expansion in utilization of social media platforms, the competitors in the hospitality industry must be perceptive to maintain a strategic scheme to refrain from circumstances that will deliver negative exposure (Zarrella, 2010). Due to the growth of many hotel chains throughout the world, the hotel industry is established in the center of globalization (McQuilken,2010). Since the environment is changing constantly, the hotel industry must rise with approaches to adapt to these changes (Gaurav,2012).

The utilization of social media has empowered the people to communicate and share their knowledge and experience and therefore clients are capable to write feedbacks of their experience on these platforms, which has a critical effect on the hospitality industry as well as other industries (Pelsmackera, Tilburgb, & Holthofb, 2018). The Trip Advisor which is a popular online booking platform has reported that 93% of the people discover that reviews are important when choosing a hotel to accommodate in while 53% of the people have mentioned that they would not book any hotel without a guest feedback, recommendation about it (Ryan, & Jones,2009). Therefore, reviews play a major role to both customer and hotels (Pelsmackera, Tilburgb, & Holthofb, 2018).

The purpose of this study is to determine why social media challenges the hotel industry and how it impacts on the hotel industry negatively and positively.

This study will first examine the literature review and then identify the methodology that will be used in the upcoming research and illustrate the project scope and finally the time plan of completing the research will be described. Further, the research will focus on how social media affects the hotel industry, how could social media marketing help to improve the industry.

There are few limitations of carrying out this research. Access to resources is limited due to shortage of informative journals and books since social media is something new to the market and its updating constantly. Another limitation is that due to the constrained time frame it is quite difficult to assemble the information since qualitative data is time consuming.

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2.     Literature Review

Social media takes part as a significant aspect in hospitality and tourism, converting the direction of customer investigations, discoveries and co create facts and changing the way they make decisions online (Pelsmackera, Tilburgb, & Holthofb, 2018). However, the use and impact of social media on clients’ decision making procedure is uncertain up to date (Ross, 2011). Social media is an interactive and virtual marketing tool which includes pictures, words, videos and assists the development of likes with the motive of sharing views, thoughts, experiences and choices about products, services and brands (Evans, 2012). Nowadays, social media has already become a substitute to traditional broadcast such as television, radio, magazines and newspapers and it is achieving more popularity among the society (Zarella,2010).

• Importance of Social Media

Social media represents as important platforms for exchanging information and interaction among organizations and customers as well as between broad mediators (Ryan, & Jones,2009). Social Media demonstrates an essential conversion in how sharing information works (Ryan, & Jones,2009). It empowers customers to communicate with content and with one another at whatever point and anyway they need. (O’Connor, 2011). Due to this, potential clients can decide to advise themselves from previous guests regarding a similar lodging they are keen on and not particularly from institutional sources as: associations and broad communications (Ryan, & Jones,2009). Consumers are provided the opportunity to access to a large and fast expanding combination of great quality, updated and essentially unbiased information created not by business interests however by different clients through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, Instagram and LinkedIn (Gaurav,2012).

An initial goal of a hotel in the internet is creating its online appearance while increasing bookings through search engines such as Google, Chrome, Yahoo and Bing. Therefore, visibility is fundamental date (Ross, 2011). Basically the more engagement to the hotel’s content has greater visibility on the search engines (Lodging,2012). Moreover, through efficient social media campaigns, developing the brand through online, using direct links to control traffic hotel operations, investigating and engaging peoples’ online community constantly will guide to accomplish a higher brand awareness and increase room and beverage bookings (Lodging,2012). As per McQuilken (2010), social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter runs hotel bookings faster more than other online platforms by advertising high quality images and videos which attracts a broad target audience. Social Media provides opportunity to employees to be creative and enthusiastic (Ross,2011). Furthermore, it gives the opportunity to gain competitive advantage to hotel brands while drawing in their clients (Knapp,2012).  Another advantage of social media is that it cost effective since rather than spending millions on advertisements on broadcast media, uploading content on the platform which can reach out to a higher scope of target audience is much efficient (Neti,2011).

2.2 Challenges to Hotel Industry from Social Media

According to Knapp (2012), organizations have to invest time and observe actively challenging feedbacks from followers or guests from social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and also advertise the products and services creatively and efficiently in these channels to gain competitive advantage. Since social media falls under technology and marketing, it is quite a challenge to specialize in both categories. Marketing and technology both changes from time to time rapidly (McQuilken,2010). Therefore, the employees who are managing the social media platforms in an organizations have to adapt to new marketing and technological trends. Similarly, Ryan and Jones (2009), describes that the primary challenge faced by the hotel industry from social media is that observing movements in the platforms which is consuming time and requires a social media manager or employee who is committed to connect potential clients by maintaining a smooth conversation. Furthermore, the person who operates the platforms could confront a challenge such as the way of communication might turn out wrong (Neti,2011). For example, if the target audience is for the modern generation, the content on the social media feed should be casual style rather than broadcasting style(Gaurav,2012). However, this depends on the scenario since using too much of informal ways to promote the brand will damage the reputation of the organization (Gaurav,2012). The employees must be able to manage and be updated and creative to create a unique brand for the hote l(Gaurav,2012).

Another difficulty faced by hotels are to discover various approaches to draw in the customers and to lead them towards turning into a guest or offer their experience for the hotel inside their virtual system (Lim,2010).

Operations in the hospitality industry could confront many legal problems with regards to marketing and advertising products and services in social media such as marketing user produced information, intellectual property and principles and standards (Pritchard & Motamedi, 2012)

Even though, social media can be utilized as a significant instrument to drive income and improve brand awareness, it is said that due to many rising of social media channels client generated blogging sites/ online platforms such as Trip Advisor, hotels are confronting challenges in order to control their income and compelled to change their techniques with regards to guest feedbacks (Hotel Business,2012). Therefore, it is a crucial challenge since there are many competitors in the market of hospitality industry.

3.     Methodology

The approach that will be used to emphasize the data collected will be qualitative in order to determine the influence of social media and its challenges to the hotel industry. Qualitative data is gathered through means of observation, administering focus groups or through interviews. These type of data is non statistical and considered as unstructured data (Creswell,2003). Since organizations and hotels would like maintain private and confidentiality regarding their challenges, this research will include only secondary data. Secondary data is data which already exists and the data will be collected through the internet, journal articles, newspapers, e-books and blogs to support the finding of the research (Creswell,2003). Furthermore, the research tool which will be used to analyze the data will be content analysis. Content analysis is a research instrument used to discover and analyze the existence of certain text, concepts or theme (Creswell,2003). s. Sources of information could be from interviews, open-finished inquiries, field examine notes, discussions, or open ended questions (Creswell,2003).

4.     Project Scope

An internationally esteemed hotel chain will be used as the target hotel for this study since a reputed brand have a strong presence in the social media platform which has many followers. Through their social media platforms data can be collected and many reviews and comments can be observed and analyzed. The scope of the research will be in New Zealand since it is accessible.

5.      Timeline Reporting

The following table demonstrates the timeline of the research which will be completed within a time frame of eight weeks:

Table 1: Time Frame

6. References

Creswell, J. W. (2003). Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Methods Approaches (2^nd ed.). University of Nebraska, Lincoln: SAGE Publications.

Evans, D. (2012) Social media marketing an hour a day. (2^nd ed.). London: John Wiley and Sons.

Gaurav, S. (2012). Analyzing the Effects of Social Media on the Hospitality Industry. University of Nevada. Las Vegas.

Hotel Business. (2012). Hotels look to social media outlets to converse with customers. Tech Trends, 12.

McQuilken, T. (2010) Tapping into social media can result in more than just bookings for hotels. Hotel Business, 19(15).

Neti, S. (2011). Social Media and its Role in Marketing. International Journal of Enterprise Computing and B International Journal of Enterprise Computing and Business Systems, 1(2).

Pelsmackera, P. D., Tilburgb, S. V., & Holthofb, C. (2018). Digital marketing strategies, online reviews and hotel performance. International Journal of Hospitality Management,72, 47-55.

Pritchard, B & Motamedi, S. (2012) Legal implications of using social media to advertise hotels in Canada. Travel Law Quaterly, 4(1),15.

O’Connor, P. (2011). Social Media Adoption by International Hotel Companies: A benchmark and exploration of best practices. France.

Ottenbacher, M., Harrington, R., & Parsa, H.G. (2009) Journal of Hospitality &

Tourism Research,33(3), pp.263-283. Doi :10.1177/1096348009338675

Ryan, D & Jones, C. (2009). Understanding Social Media Marketing. London: Kogan Page.

Ross, B (2011). Making the most of Social media. Caterer & Hotelkeeper, 201(467), 3.

Zarrella, D. (2010) The Social Media Marketing Book. Canada: O’Reilly Media, Inc.