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The purpose of this study is to identify the emerging challenges that are faced by branded budget hotels in India. The paper aims to do this by exploring the expectations as well as challenges faced by the customers and hospitality managers of branded budgets hotels in India.

Utilizing a multi-method approach, data were collected through literature review, eight in-depth interviews and 422 customer reviews. Thematic analysis using the hybrid approach brings out the challenges faced by hospitality managers of branded budget hotels in India.

Hospitality managers face the following challenges – dipping gross operating profits, higher global distribution systems productivity for international hotel brands, location constraints, high royalty structures for management contracts, regulatory issues, business poaching and unorganized growth, bureaucracy among vendors and contactors and lack of trained manpower. Customer expectations include poor check-in/check-out services, inefficient service management, inconsiderate personnel, poor management of feedback and instances of theft.

This work adds to the body of knowledge using real customer data and thematic analysis. The authors have not come across any scholarly work, especially in the Indian context, which looks at two stakeholders of the branded budget hotel industry. Hence, recommendations from this work are valuable for hospitality managers as well as researchers.

This study explores the nature of critical success factors (CSFs) in UK budget hotel operations through a questionnaire survey designed to ascertain the relevance and importance of a range of factors referred to as critical in the extant academic and trade literature. From a usable sample of 239 questionnaires the results show that budget hotel unit managers from the leading brands largely agree with the criticality of the factors stated in the literature, this being verified via the independent t‐test and reliability analysis results that show most of the CSFs to be highly statistically significant (p<0.001) and the set of CSF items to be consistent (α=0.9360). The data analysis, via principal components analysis, also facilitates the creation of a parsimonious model that identifies two dimensions and five CSFs as being the “most critical”.

In 2020, the world encountered travel restrictions because of pandemic, and the hospitality sector across the globe was one of the most affected industries. The purpose of this study is to further explore real-time experiences of guests who stayed in budget hotels and how pandemic has changed the expectations of its customer segment.

The current study uses netnography to examine customer experience of guests who stayed at budget hotels during the COVID-19 pandemic. A thematic analysis was conducted using NVivo 12 plus on 1,391 customer reviews collected from various travel portals.

The results suggested personalization and hygiene were the most significant themes that influence customer experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors’ analysis revealed that the use of self-service technologies like contactless services during check-in, checkouts and use of Quick Response codes in restaurants and other services would help reduce the perceived risk of guests and enhance the overall customer experience.

The branded budget hotel sector has pumped in lot of money envisaging growth just before the COVID crises emerged. Therefore, the fast recovery is of paramount importance for the sector. Additionally, majority of the pandemic-related studies in hospitality sector have focused on luxury hotels and failed to address the real-time experiences of customers with respect to budget hotels of a developing country. The outcome of this study will be relevant for the budget hotels and policymakers because they face the crucial task of reviving and sustaining enterprises and the industry at large.

The present case study discusses the multi-branded strategy of hotels by the Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL) in 2012. The brand architecture of the group in 2012 consisted of four brands, namely Taj, Vivanta, Gateway and Ginger. However such brand architecture posed quite a few challenges for the group such as positioning, sustain the different brands and avoiding brand dilution since both The Gateway and Vivanta had a tag “by Taj” which could erode the premium associations of the parent brand.

The case is based on secondary research and has been developed using published information collected from online and offline sources. Wherever required, written permission has been obtained from the copyright holders (Exhibits VII-IX). Direct quotes have been properly cited from original sources.

This case could be a part of the Marketing Management course in an undergraduate Program in Business Management. The specific topics which could be facilitated through this case are Segmenting, Targeting and Positioning. The case could also be a part of a Brand Management course in the same program for specialized subjects where it could illustrate the concept of Brand Architecture. In case of an Executive Education Program, this case can be used to facilitate issues in Marketing as well as Brand Management.

This study aims to identify key factors influencing Chinese domestic travelers’ behaviors in hotel selection from a pool of budget hotel attribute-based factors and customer personal characteristics and determine the extent to which these factors impact on domestic Chinese travelers’ hotel selection preferences.

This study uses a discrete choice experimental design and a multinomial logit model to examine the key influential factors contributing to Chinese domestic travelers’ choice behavior to budget hotels. Both hotel attribute-based and personal trait factors were tested.

Results indicate that location, price and business functions were factors influencing guest choice behavior. For budget hotels, being located in the traditional central business districts and having a restaurant would leverage guest preference to stay. Among consumers’ personal characteristics, income, occupation, purpose of travel, personal attitude and past experience were found to be determinants of guest choice behavior.

This study contributes to the understanding of Chinese domestic travelers’ choice behaviors toward budget hotels and offers insights for industry practitioners to better design budget hotel products and service.

This research is the first that integrates hotel attributes with travelers’ characteristics and quantitatively evaluate the determinants affecting hotel choice behavior in China. The insights are of value academically to our understanding of cognitive mechanism underlying choice behavior.

Strategic Marketing, Marketing Management, Services Marketing.

MBA and Executive MBA.

The case talks about the inception and growth of OYO Rooms, a company that originally started as ORAVEL Stays Ltd. in 2012, as a platform for booking budget and premium accommodations, but graduated to become OYO Rooms, an online aggregator of hotels, with a unique business model of “managing the partial inventory of rooms” in hotels and offering a proposition of affordable, consistent, quality experience to business, leisure and pilgrim travellers. The company received rounds of funding from Greenoaks Capital, Lightspeed Ventures, Sequoia Capital and DSG Consumer Partners. Moreover, unlike its competitors, OYO adapted itself to the fast-changing consumer preference and grew at an enviable pace and by 2016, was present across 190 cities through a network of 6,500 hotels. However, OYO Rooms had to face a multitude of challenges both from the consumer and hotel owners’ ends, primarily service quality concerns from the customers and majorly concerns out of payment irregularities or non-abidance to written contracts from the hoteliers’ end. The dissatisfaction levels increased to an extent that experts started raising questions on the viability of the business. OYO was growing at an aggressive rate but breakeven point was yet to be achieved. Moreover, growing dissatisfaction and switching amongst its customers as well as hoteliers threatened the very existence of the model. The case allows the students to critically analyse the strategies of OYO for deliberation on whether the business model was sustainable in the long run. It also encourages the students to deliberate on the possible growth strategies for OYO as also on the service recovery strategies for OYO.

The case has been positioned around the following modules: industry analysis; value of a two-sided business model to both parties; sustainability of a unique business model, against the challenges that it faces; applying the VRIO framework (resource-based view); complaint handling and service recovery strategies; applying the Ansoff’s grid for possible growth options.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 11: Strategy.

This paper aims to explore the accommodation experience of customers in the budget hotel sector – a less explored but rapidly expanding sector in the hospitality industry. This study investigates the effects of such experience on customer behavior.

The study adopts a quantitative approach and draws on a comprehensive data set (N = 414) by using a quota sampling approach. The context of the study is the Chinese market, where budget hotels and the number of mass tourists (inbound and outbound) have increased tremendously.

This study identifies a behavioral pattern that differs from trends reported in prior studies. The finding shows that the relationship between customer experience and behavioral intentions is mediated by customer satisfaction, which similarly mediates the relationship between perceived value and behavioral intentions.

The results provide significant implications for hoteliers in the budget hotel industry by calling for a differentiated marketing approach for this segment of customers. Furthermore, the study provides insights into the accommodation behavior of Chinese mass tourists. These findings can serve as reference for international budget hotel practitioners, especially those involved in hotels that target the increasing number of travelers from China.

The budget hotel sector is the first accommodation choice for many Chinese mass tourists. This study is the first to conduct a systematic exploration of the behavioral patterns of customers toward budget hotels in this context. Moreover, this study adopts a holistic approach by adopting an experiential view in measuring the overall experience of customers in budget hotels.

This case studies the growth of OYO Hotels (OYO) to illustrate the operational processes necessary to succeed in the service sector. The case allows for a discussion of employee- and customer-management systems, tech-driven solutions, and profit drivers. The material unfolds OYO's growth and its solution for making economy hotels discoverable and bookable online.

The case raises a series of questions around OYO's business model, its ability to translate across global markets, and growth potential. It has been successfully taught in a second-year MBA class on the management of service operations.

This study aims to investigate if experiences can create satisfaction, loyalty and place attachment in the context of the budget hotel industry given growing proportion of Gen Y and Gen Z of budget travellers.

This study uses structural equation modelling-partial least squares approach to validate the path model. A total of 168 samples in Indonesia were collected using online consumer survey.

The findings show positive and significant effects of experience on memories, perceived value, satisfaction, loyalty and place attachment among budget hotel travellers.

Some studies have investigated the importance of experiences in budget hotels marketing. This study contributes to this discussion by presenting that multiple dimensions of experience (sensing, feeling, thinking, acting and connecting) are significant drivers of satisfaction, loyalty and place attachment among Gen Y and Gen Z majority budget travellers.

From the findings, the authors suggest budget hotels to provide physical service environment that can enhance the visitor experience while visiting the hotel related to services relating (e.g. cozy room), acting (e.g. instagrammable spots), thinking (e.g. game centre) and sensing experience (e.g. music that soothes the soul) and social interaction (guest-to-staff interaction) that can enhance feeling service (e.g. welcoming staff).

Given the growing proportion of Gen Y and Gen Z among budget travellers and growing occupation of budget hotels, it become more essential to understand how customers perceive the services of budget hotels. This study shows that today customers perceive not only cost but also experiences as important factors that determine their satisfaction, loyalty and attachment towards budget hotels.

Budget hotels are becoming an emerging industry for convenience and affordability, where consumer sentiments are of paramount importance. Tourism has become increasingly dependent on social media and online platforms to gather travel-related information, purchase travel products, food, lodging, etc., and share views and experiences. The user-generated data helps companies make informed decisions through predictive and behavioural analytics.

Design/Methodology/Approach: This study uses text mining, deep learning, and machine learning techniques for data collection and sentiment analysis based on 117,151 online reviews of the customers posted on the TripAdvisor website from May 2004 to May 2019 from 197 hotels of five prominent budget hotel groups spread across India using Feedforward Neural Network along with Keras package and Softmax activation function.

Findings: The word-of-mouth turns into electronic word-of-mouth through social networking sites, with easy access to information that enables customers to pick a budget hotel. We identified 20 widely used words that most customers use in their reviews, which can help managers optimise operational efficiency by boosting consumer acceptability, satisfaction, positive experiences, and overcoming negative consumer perceptions.

Practical Implications: The analysis of the review patterns is based on real-time data, which is helpful to understand the customer’s requirements, particularly for budget hotels.

Originality/Value: We analysed TripAdvisor reviews posted over the last 16 years, excluding the Corona period due to industry crises. The findings reverberate in consonance with the performance improvement theory, which states feed-forward a neural network enhances organisational, process, and individual-level performance in the hospitality industry based on customer reviews.