Abstract

Several hotels have launched the on-line reservation services with free of charge on their Web sites. The service on the Internet through the Web was based on the concept that the customers seemed to be able to contact directly to a hotel and thus able to obtain updated information, including its availability. The purpose of this project was to evaluate and analyze the on-line services that hotel provided for its customers on the Internet through the World Wide Web home page site in terms of accomplishment. The questionnaires were mailed to 200 hotels, which currently had active Web sites on the Internet as well as on-line reservation services. These hotels included both individual and chain hotels. Also, telephone interviews were made to nineteen corporate hotels. As the result, there were only six responses from mailed survey, and fourteen responses from telephone interview. The former rate of response was 3%, while the latter was 74%. These data were then used to evaluate and analyze whether a World Wide Web home page site successful in producing room sales in hotels. The responses from six individual hotels and fourteen corporate hotels were analyzed separately due to a huge difference in their hotel property's size. The results and analysis show that, firstly, the sizes of hotel property of individual hotels are very small in comparison with those of corporate hotels. Secondly, most corporate hotels' major market segments were business. While, for individual hotels, the amount of hotel which their major market segments were business, were about the same amount as that of leisure-type hotels. In addition, the summary of analyzed data, which consist of number of rooms sold via Internet per year, maintenance cost per year of hotel's Web page, original development cost of hotel's Web page, and maintenance cost per room per year. And each issue is then discussed further in details. Also, a trend of publishing and maintaining Web sites on the Internet for both corporate and individual hotels are illustrated as well as a host computer server which hotel's Web page are kept. Then comparisons of average percentage of rooms sold via Internet and other methods are presented for both type of hotel and hotel's major market segment criteria. Moreover, the question of whether to keep, to revise, or to discontinue using the Web page was replied. The answer was all hoteliers including both corporate and individual hotels want to keep their Web sites on the Internet. They consider them one of the advertising tools, which would be helpful in producing room sales in aspect of customer service. Finally, the recommendations of using the Web site in hotel's business were proposed.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Hotels--Reservation systems; Web sites; World Wide Web

Publication Date

1998

Document Type

Thesis

Department, Program, or Center

School of Food, Hotel and Tourism Management (CAST)

Advisor

Stockham, Edward

Advisor/Committee Member

Marecki, Richard

Comments

Note: imported from RIT’s Digital Media Library running on DSpace to RIT Scholar Works. Physical copy available through RIT's The Wallace Library at: TX911.3.R47 B49 1998

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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