The determinants of hotel room rates: Another visit with Singapore's data

In this research note, volatility clustering modeling framework is used to examine the determinants of hotel room rates in Singapore. Using monthly data from January 1985 to June 2009, GARCH-M(1, 1) is identified as the appropriate model used to capture volatility clustering. The results suggest that total inbound tourists and economic performance have positive effects on hotel room rates. The main findings are (a) the occurrences of terrorist activities in the neighboring countries have negative impacts and (b) the volatility of hotel room rates has a positive effect, on hotel room rates.     

The Impact of Discounting Room Rates on In-House Restaurant Sales

This study investigates whether discounting hotel room rates during low seasons of demand influences in-house hotel restaurant sales in a positive way. A linear regression function was utilized to assess the relationship between discounting room rates and the hotel's in-house restaurant sales. The model summary provided results indicating that the discounting of room rates during the low season did not significantly influence in-house restaurant sales. The value of this study lies in the empirical results that may provide guidance to the revenue management practices of hotel managers.     

Do luxury room amenities affect guests’ willingness to pay?

Intangible services have fewer cues to enable consumer evaluation compared to physical goods. Cues are therefore particularly important for highly intangible services, since they provide tangible evidence of quality. This study explores whether luxury brand room amenities can be used as cues for customers to evaluate a hotel. This study attempts to identify what items and amenities guests find most/least useful and to examine whether luxury brand room amenities can enhance customers’ evaluation of a hotel and increase willingness to pay based on positivity bias. Wi-Fi was regarded as the most useful hotel amenity, while telephone was regarded as the least useful amenity. This study found customers willingness to pay is affected by providing luxury brand room amenities. When luxury amenities were placed in the room, customers’ estimation of the room rate and their willingness to pay for it both increased. Moreover, about two out of five expressed a willingness to pay extra for an upgrade to access luxury brand room amenities. The findings of this study provide important implications for hotel practitioners.     

Heritage tourism: A question of age

This research analyzes the demographic characteristics and motivations of the senior and non-senior market segments in selecting a heritage site. By studying how these two groups of individuals select heritage sites, planners will be better able to comprehend what these individuals expect from their visit. A survey consisting of a historic preservationist scale, benefits sought scale, services sought scale, historic site preference scale, and demographic information was mailed to a systematic random sample of 700 travelers requesting tourism information about Virginia. The findings show that many similarities exist between the senior and non-senior market. However, the senior market is more likely to visit a historic site that is less convenient to reach, has fewer facilities, and is more authentic and less developed; while the non-seniors are motivated more by opportunity to escape work overloads.     

A comparison of destinations’ impacts on hotel rates

The impact of destinations’ attributes on hotel rates in different locations has been insufficiently compared the existing literature. This study sought to apply the hedonic pricing method to measure and compare how room prices are affected by factors that are both external and inherent to hotel companies. After collecting nearly all the data regarding hotel features that consumers can use to make choices about accommodations on the TripAdvisor website, different models were developed for each city and season. The results suggest that hotels in Barcelona are more dependent on external conditions than hotels in Madrid are. In addition, hotels in both cities are more affected by external conditions during the high season. This paper discusses these and other results, as well as their implications.     

Town walls,walled towns and tourism: paradoxes and paradigms

The paradoxical relationship between tourists and town walls is examined in the wider context of the walled town tourism. Such towns may be paradigm cases for historic towns as attractions for heritage, urban and cultural tourism among the ‘flows and scapes’ of delocated global tourism. Widely distributed across the ‘old’ world and extant even in the ‘new’, town walls can be seen as the grim barriers between contested identities or as the emblems of the peaceful security of the town within. The paper draws on material gathered as part of a European Interreg IIIc network project – ‘ARCHWAY’. Walled towns and related monuments represent nearly 20% of the 890-strong 2009 world heritage list and half the ‘ARCHWAY’ towns have world heritage status or aspirations. To meet the economic and urban planning challenges, walled towns have developed a range of options for success in, or for surviving, tourism. Examples from across Europe and beyond are critically appraised in the light of the literature of historic and heritage town tourism. As historic towns with obvious signs of past conflict, walled towns point the way to examining urban heritage tourism with de-romanticised vision.     

Globalization or localization of consumer preferences: The case of hotel room booking

The purpose of this study is to investigate potential differences in attitudes between Chinese and Western tourists towards various hotel room reservation policies. The study is meant to help the revenue managers of international hotel companies make informed choices on whether to pursue a globalized or a localized approach in the design of hotel room rates and rate restrictions. Three ranges of room prices and four types of rate restrictions are evaluated. The rate restriction policies considered are: a) rule type, b) advance requirement, c) refundability, and d) changes allowed. The results of customer surveys show that the Chinese and Western respondents do not express significantly different preferences concerning room rates, advance requirement, rule type, or refundability. They differ significantly only concerning the changes allowed policy. This result indicates that revenue managers of international hotel companies can take a globalized approach in designing rate restrictions. The identification of these customer preferences provides hotel revenue managers with empirical data on the attitudes of culturally diverse consumers, and this information can enable the design of hotel pricing policies that attract consumers in the global market.     

Rethinking slavery heritage tourism

This paper argues that the investigation of slavery heritage within a ‘thana’- or ‘dark’ tourism framework invariably fails to appreciate the subtleties, power relationships and various contestations that are at play in both the presentation and consumption of former Transatlantic Slave Trade (TAST) sites. Instead, the authors argue that a combination of Halbwachs’ collective memory theory and Tunbridge and Ashworth's concept of dissonant heritage can provide a deeper understanding of tourism linked to such sites. A study of TAST sites in Ghana identified six key groups of stakeholders involved in the interpretation of slavery heritage, each with its own agenda, desire to remember or forget slave memories and desire to compose different narratives. By analysing collective slave memories, the study proposes a framework that demonstrates that tourism to TAST-related sites is complex and nuanced because it relates to the nature of the historic event itself, intrinsic qualities of TAST-related sites in terms of current relevance and the closeness of the event or site to each stakeholder.     

The Channel That Offers the Lowest Online Room Rates: A Case Study of Hotels in Hong Kong

Online distribution channels increasingly serve as platforms hotels can use to offer competitive room rates to attract price-sensitive customers and maximize yield. Capturing the lowest and highest daily room rates over a 360-day period from five of the most popular online travel agencies, and two batches of data showing the lowest room rates over 28 days from a last-minute bookings website, this study compares the lowest prices offered. The results indicate that no single online channel outperforms the others in any of the hotel star-rating categories, and that the last-minute reservation service provides the lowest hotel room rate across different star ratings.     

Determining guests’ willingness to pay for hotel room attributes with a discrete choice model

Hotel managers need to understand the marginal utility customers associate with a specific attribute of a hotel in order to effectively set up rate fences and to price their rooms accordingly. This study adopted a stated choice experiment and discrete choice modeling method to obtain hotel guests’ willingness to pay (WTP) for a specific set of room attributes within a single hotel property. The attributes include room views, hotel floor, club access, free mini-bar items, smartphone service, and cancellation policy. The study discovered that leisure travelers versus business travelers, and first-time visitors versus repeat visitors, perceive different WTP values for various attributes. These findings provide valuable information for hotel managers to segment their market and conduct revenue management practices in order to maximize revenue and profit. The results also demonstrate the value of discrete choice modeling in obtaining WTP for hotel room attributes.     

Fairytale authenticity: historic city tourism,Harry Potter,medievalism and the magical gaze

ABSTRACT

This article makes an original contribution to debates about authenticity by asking how tourist experiences of the medieval historic environment are linked to fairytales, providing a new way for tourists to imaginatively authenticate heritage. The architecture of some historic cities is preponderantly medieval, an era which is strongly associated with fairytales. Magical-historical double affectiveness has been compounded in the collective imagination by modern fairytales such as the fantasy Harry Potter and Game of Thrones which employ historic city locations and faux-medieval settings, establishing a fluid magi-heritage simulacrum. This is concretised by the appearance in many historic cities of evidence of magical placemaking and staged magical authenticity, such as wizarding shops. The study used a visual methodology to examine 14 historic cities including Oxford, Cambridge, Bath, York, and Canterbury, demonstrating how the magical gaze employs fairytale schemata to imaginatively authenticate places. The findings illustrated how heritage tourists serendipitously encountered the medieval-fairytalesque, unfolding the agency of monumental cathedrals and castles and discovering stories and the historicisation of mythology within the extraordinary-ordinary streetscape. The research findings imply that in an era when the fantasy genre is increasingly popular, the experiential authenticity of heritage tourists may be enhanced by the ‘heritage marvellous.’     

Claiming Christmas for the Tourist: ‘Living History’ in Dundurn Castle

Based on an examination of the Christmas Evening Tour at Dundurn Castle, an historic home and national heritage site located in Hamilton, Ontario, this article investigates the living history format and the means through which it involves tourists’ physical senses and mental states. It considers the format’s dependence on performative exhibitionary practices that strive to convey an ‘authentic experience’ for tourists so that they might ‘live history’. In addition, analysis of the decorated atmosphere and tour content demonstrates that the Christmas tour represents an ethnicised version of a historical holiday – the Victorian Christmas celebration – and essentialises Canadian history as being distinctively British based. Finally, this paper examines the implications of this programme in relation to the existence of multiculturalism as state policy, which recognises the existence of many cultures in Canada.     

Archaeological heritage tourism in China: the case of the Daming Palace from the tourists' perspective

Archaeological heritage tourism has been critical in historic cultural revival, archaeological knowledge dissemination, environment upgrading, and local community improvement. Little has been undertaken to evaluate the effectiveness and consequences of archaeological heritage projects in China from the tourist perspective. This study of the Daming Palace Heritage Site in Xi’an illustrates how archaeological and cultural resources have contributed to tourists' experiences. Through investigating an array of approaches that have been applied to advance tourists' understanding of archaeological and cultural resources, the paper proposes that more versatile methods and creative works are to be integrated to develop effective interpretative methods for both education and entertainment purposes. Local government needs to change its top-down approach to a more inclusive one, to establish strong networks among state and non-state stakeholders, and to promote their collective involvement in archaeological heritage tourism. Heritage site packaging strategies and partnerships among heritage resources citywide are advocated. More attention should be given to how to integrate various resources of local communities into heritage tourism. The current organization of government-run archaeological heritage in China calls for more opportunities for archaeologists to contribute actively with their expertise to enhance interpretive programmes and general tourist experience.     

Identification of the reactions of hotel managers to new competition

This paper arises out of research carried out recently on the impact of a new hotel on the other hotel businesses which are operating in the same market. To ascertain the possible reactions of hotel managers to new competition and the relative importance of alternative price and non-price strategies a postal survey of 250 three-and four-star graded hotels across the U.K. was undertaken. It was found that a change in published tariff rates is regarded as being relatively unimportant whilst sales promotion is given the highest priority. Disaggregation of the sample by hotel size and occupancy rates does not reveal any significant changes in the relative importance of possible strategies. While the survey indicates that both non-price and price competitive strategies are seen by managers as essentially complementary, nevertheless, price competition in the form of secret discounting of published room rates to mass market intermediaries (tour operators and travel agents) and corporations is particularly important. While price discounting is the ‘private’ face of hotel competition much more research is needed on both the ‘public’ and ‘private’ nature of competition in the hotel industry and how these inter-link.     

Gushing about black gold: oil and natural gas tourism in Texas

Coal mines, factories, and many other forms of industrial heritage have been well documented in terms of tourist motivations, economic impacts, and community attitudes, but little attention has been given to tourism associated with oil and natural gas, among the world’s most significant and controversial natural resources. Texas is arguably the US state most widely associated with the resource, economically, politically, and culturally. As the site of several historic oil booms, extensive onshore and offshore oilfields, and important contemporary oil and natural gas hubs, Texas has a strong associated heritage dating back over 100 years. This article is a discussion of the major discourses found in the interpretative material and site design at nine prominent oil and natural gas tourism sites in Texas. Major interpretive themes found across five or more of the tourism sites are analyzed in terms of similarities and differences in how they represent the heritage and influences of oil and natural gas. Discourses identified at the tourism sites include: an emphasis on boomtowns and the contemporary industry, a focus on wildcatters and influential oilmen, the science and technology of production, positive impacts of oil and natural gas, essential oil and natural gas products, and industry recruitment.     

Determinants of revenue per available room: Influential roles of average daily rate,demand, seasonality and yearly trend

Determining price per room to be charged to customers is an important decision to be taken by hotel management. Hotels frequently change their room rates based on the demand of room, occupancy rate, seasonal pattern, and strategies undertaken by other hotels on pricing. We formulated four models to analyse how various influencing variables, such as hotel price, demand, yearly trend and monthly seasonality influence hotel revenue per available room (RevPar). To analyse a case, we used monthly accommodation statistics for Sweden taken for Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth and Statistics from January 2008 to July 2017. We carried out data analysis using both multiple regression and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS) model and found that application of MARS can help establishing a nonlinear relationship of RevPar with other determining variables in a superior way. We also proposed the possibility of developing a better forecasting model using MARS.     

Tourist tax elasticity in Florida: Spatial effects of county-level room tax rate variation

We examine the spatial, county-level incidence of changes to tourist tax rates in Florida from 2003 to 2014. Florida allows county-level visitor tax increments to fund various tourism-related initiatives. As a result, there is considerable variation in visitor tax rates across counties and across time. Using a dynamic spatial autoregressive panel model, we show that direct and indirect effects of room tax rate changes on taxable hotel room expenditures are relatively small and largely exported to visitors. Because these taxes have recently been allowed for funding Major League Baseball Spring Training facilities, we also test whether these facilities impact hotel tax collections. We find no measurable effects of a small number of facility relocations on hotel spending in the new or previous home-counties. We also discuss the importance of considering contiguous spillovers and the use of cluster-robust standard errors in panel estimation of tax incidence for tourism.     

Expert front office management by computer

A great deal of interest has been fostered in the West by Japanese projects to develop ‘intelligent’ computer systems. Almost all of the so-called expert systems designed so far have been related to applications in science or engineering where problem-solving is highly structured. Although intelligent computer systems can be of value to managers, all computer-based hotel systems currently on the market are intended to function at a clerical level. Thus in a reservation system, the computer does none of the important work of managing occupancies and room rates, it merely keeps records and files. This article describes work that is being undertaken at the University of Surrey to help hotel reservation managers make accept/refuse decisions. The expert system that is being developed tries to reproduce the expertise of real reservation managers on an inexpensive, business microcomputer.     

Successfully selling accommodation packages at online auctions – The case of eBay Austria

In this era of e-commerce online auctions have emerged as a valuable distribution channel (36 and 52). Displaying low entry and exit barriers but also vast coverage rates, online auctions may effectively augment the distribution potential of hotel businesses. This paper identifies those factors that positively affect the final price level obtained in online auctions for hotel room vouchers. Based on data gathered at eBay comprising 53,406 auctions, linear structural equation modelling (SEM) was conducted to identify significant relationships between auction characteristics and the obtained final price for hotel room vouchers. By drawing on these results and through an example of the Austrian eBay platform, selling strategies for successfully listing accommodation packages at online auctions are proposed.     

Authenticating a heritage hotel: co-creating a new identity

This study attempts to broaden understandings of co-creation by examining stakeholders who authenticate the meaning of a heritage hotel. It proposes that a heritage hotel is not only defined in terms of the provenance of material and non-material aspects of a culture, but also by subjective criteria as applied by various stakeholders. Using the case study of the Hotel Estoril, the first Western-style casino hotel built in the former Portuguese colony of Macau, it shows that government, community organizations, and residents endeavor to co-create a new identity for adaptive reuse. Under the circumstances, a heritage hotel is characterized by a polyvocality of interpretations, reflective of the array of stakeholders involved.