Living Without OTAs—Goodbye Columbus: Putting the Jenie Back in the Bottle

A recent Cornell Hospitality Quarterly article highlighted a unique natural experiment where an entire city had all its hotel delisted from all online travel agents for more than 4 years. The article provides great background to the delisting and highlights the impacts on hotel revenue and accommodation taxes for the county. The article estimates that even though the hotels relisted at all online travel agents (OTAs), there was a substantial gain to both hotels and accommodation tax collectors during the OTA delisting period. The impact estimates are based solely on the loss of demand realized in neighboring Phenix City, AL, once Columbus is relisted at OTAs. In the following, we highlight some concerns with these estimates and indicate that the losses may in fact be quite substantive and perhaps more indicative of why Columbus hotels relisted at the OTAs

Hotel Performance Impact of Socially Engaging with Consumers

User reviews have become a critical aspect of the travel research process, as evidenced, for instance, by TripAdvisor having over 350 million unique monthly visitors.1 One benefit of these posted reviews is that hotels can address issues raised by consumers in an effort to improve consumer satisfaction along with review scores. Given the importance of consumer reviews, one goal for hotels is to find ways to improve their social media performance (with a goal of boosting financial outcomes). In this report we examine the effects of reviews posted on TripAdvisor to look at non-operational and relatively inexpensive ways in which hoteliers can improve their performance, both on the review sites themselves and in terms of actual hotel revenue and sales performance

Living without OTAs–A Summary of the Performance Impacts Resulting from the OTA Delisting of Columbus, Georgia

A four-year period during which hotels in Columbus, Georgia, were delisted by online travel agencies—and subsequently relisted—created a natural experiment that allows comparison of hotel performance before, during, and after the delisting period. This report summarizes two already published analyses of the hotels’ performance and then extends one of those analytical approaches to develop a more comprehensive picture of revenue outcomes. An initial study compared changes in room-nights sold by Columbus’s hotels with those in neighboring Phenix City, Alabama, which undoubtedly absorbed a substantial amount of Columbus’s lost OTA business. This study found that the loss of room-nights in Columbus was relatively small during the delisting, and it concluded that occupancy in the city’s hotel market roared back once its hotels were relisted. The later analyses present more nuanced picture using indices rather than absolute figures, as well as including the relative effects on revenue per available room (and thus both average daily rate and occupancy). This approach finds that while occupancy did, indeed, flourish, that came at a cost of diminished ADR during the delisting. Moreover, RevPAR did not entirely recover when the hotels were relisted

The Dynamic Impact of Post-service Managerial Interaction on Satisfaction, eWOM, and Loyalty

132 pagesThe importance of properly managing the post-service customer experience has been widely suggested in the service marketing literature. A popular post-service managerial practice in the hospitality industry is conducting a customer satisfaction survey (CSS) and responding to the customers who complete the survey. In this dissertation, I investigate the effect of conducting a CSS and responding to the customers who participate in the survey. First, I examine how customers would decide to post online reviews if the hotel does not examine the CSS. Then, using a panel data model, this dissertation empirically investigates how the post-survey managerial interaction can impact the customers' future satisfaction and online word-of-mouth behavior (i.e., eWOM). Finally, a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is used to understand how customers' loyalty to the hotel that is measured by the booking channel selection (i.e., OTA vs. direct booking) can be improved as a function of the post-survey managerial interaction

Customer Engagement: The Key to Long-term Loyalty and Impact

In today’s physically separated world of hospitality, engagement and interaction between hoteliers and guests are taking new forms but are still as critical as ever. In a series of studies using data from a well-known hotel chain and a customer feedback software company, we illustrate the long-term impacts of guest engagement. The results of these studies are the first to measure the impact of guest/hotel engagement upon guest satisfaction, loyalty and booking channel selection

Indexing Hotel Brand Reputation

Using monthly online reputation data from 2016 through to the first quarter of 2018, we index major hotel brands in the United States. This analysis of online reputation for branded properties yields three major conclusions: (1) the variation in reputation across brands is four times larger than the variation across chain scales; (2) online reputation is mainly a function of brand and sub brand rather than segment or hotel location; and (3) variability in reputation across hotels within a brand is greater than the variability in reputation in hotels across brands. These three points indicate the changing impact of brand upon hotel choice, considering that the variance in reputation within a brand and online reputation scores—as presented at OTAs or meta-reputation sites like TripAdvisor or Google—may outweigh the traditional quality signals provided by brands.Anderson_2018_Reputation_Test.pdf: 1956 downloads, before Aug. 1, 2020

The Billboard Effect: Still Alive and Well

Changes in the online travel market are causing hotels to rethink their relationships with online travel agencies (OTAs) and to take a closer look at the impact on bookings from listing their properties with OTAs. One outcome of being listed on an OTA is additional bookings on the brand’s own website, a phenomenon that co-author Chris Anderson labeled the billboard effect. In a 2009 study, Anderson presented an experiment in which a group of hotels was listed and then removed from Expedia.com in alternate weeks. This test found that, compared to being hidden, being listed on the site increased reservations 9 percent to 26 percent (above transactions that occurred at Expedia).1 That was followed by a 2011 study examining consumers’ online pre-purchase research that found about 75 percent of consumers who made reservations with a major hotel brand had visited an OTA in advance of booking directly with the brand.2 In this report we show that the ability of a second-party channel to influence an eventual reservation may be lower now, but the billboard effect still occurs, since many consumers visit an OTA prior to booking

Hotel Performance Impact of Socially Engaging with Consumers

User reviews have become a critical aspect of the travel research process, as evidenced, for instance, by TripAdvisor having over 350 million unique monthly visitors.1 One benefit of these posted reviews is that hotels can address issues raised by consumers in an effort to improve consumer satisfaction along with review scores. Given the importance of consumer reviews, one goal for hotels is to find ways to improve their social media performance (with a goal of boosting financial outcomes). In this report we examine the effects of reviews posted on TripAdvisor to look at non-operational and relatively inexpensive ways in which hoteliers can improve their performance, both on the review sites themselves and in terms of actual hotel revenue and sales performance.Anderson_2016_Hotel_performance_impact.pdf: 9043 downloads, before Aug. 1, 2020

Living without OTAs–A Summary of the Performance Impacts Resulting from the OTA Delisting of Columbus, Georgia

A four-year period during which hotels in Columbus, Georgia, were delisted by online travel agencies—and subsequently relisted—created a natural experiment that allows comparison of hotel performance before, during, and after the delisting period. This report summarizes two already published analyses of the hotels’ performance and then extends one of those analytical approaches to develop a more comprehensive picture of revenue outcomes. An initial study compared changes in room-nights sold by Columbus’s hotels with those in neighboring Phenix City, Alabama, which undoubtedly absorbed a substantial amount of Columbus’s lost OTA business. This study found that the loss of room-nights in Columbus was relatively small during the delisting, and it concluded that occupancy in the city’s hotel market roared back once its hotels were relisted. The later analyses present more nuanced picture using indices rather than absolute figures, as well as including the relative effects on revenue per available room (and thus both average daily rate and occupancy). This approach finds that while occupancy did, indeed, flourish, that came at a cost of diminished ADR during the delisting. Moreover, RevPAR did not entirely recover when the hotels were relisted.Anderson_2018_CHR_LIving_without_OTAs.pdf: 882 downloads, before Aug. 1, 2020

Renoprotective Effect of KLF2 on Glomerular Endothelial Dysfunction in Hypertensive Nephropathy

Kruppel-like factor 2 (KLF2) regulates endothelial cell metabolism; endothelial dysfunction is associated with hypertension and is a predictor of atherosclerosis development and cardiovascular events. Here, we investigated the role of KLF2 in hypertensive nephropathy by regulating KLF2 expression in human primary glomerular endothelial cells (hPGECs) and evaluating this expression in the kidney tissues of a 5/6 nephrectomy mouse model as well as patients with hypertension. Hypertension-mimicking devices and KLF2 siRNA were used to downregulate KLF2 expression, while the expression of KLF2 was upregulated by administering simvastatin. After 4 mmHg of pressure was applied on hPGECs for 48 h, KLF2 mRNA expression decreased, while alpha-smooth muscle actin (αSMA) mRNA expression increased. Apoptosis and fibrosis rates were increased under pressure, and these phenomena were aggravated following KLF2 knockdown, but were alleviated after simvastatin treatment; additionally, these changes were observed in angiotensin II, angiotensin type-1 receptor (AT1R) mRNA, and interleukin-18 (IL-18), but not in angiotensin type-2 receptor mRNA. Reduced expression of KLF2 in glomerular endothelial cells due to hypertension was found in both 5/6 nephrectomy mice and patients with hypertensive nephropathy. Thus, our study demonstrates that the pressure-induced apoptosis and fibrosis of glomerular endothelial cells result from angiotensin II, AT1R activation, and KLF2 inhibition, and are associated with IL-18