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The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the relevance of business intelligence (BI) in businesses in general and tourism firms in particular. BI has been hailed as an innovation that can propel businesses that adopt the system to high productivity and efficiency. This paper confirms that view but further adds that BI also enhances a business’s competitiveness.

This paper reviews literature on the use of BI in tourism. Although current literature is largely fragmented, focusing on BI, the tourism industry and the notion of competitiveness separately, this paper makes an attempt to bring the three sub-themes in the same study and highlights their interconnectedness. The study adopts two environmental analysis models to better analyze this matter. First is the environmental analysis model as based on Downes’s modification of Porter’s five forces framework. The second model used is the resource-based view approach to business environmental analysis.

This paper affirms that the tourism industry is one of those industries that continue to benefit from the advantages that come with the adoption of a BI system. Literature shows that the tourism industry was one of those that first adopted BI in order to benefit from the benefits that come with its adoption. Such advantages include flexible and user friendly tourists’ data capture, storage, retrieval, processing and analytical capabilities.

This was a largely literature review-based study. There is, therefore, room for strengthening its findings by conducting field work and mixed methods research for more robust results.

This study will surely benefit the tourism industry and business in general from its highly favorable conclusions to the benefits that come with the adoption of a BI system. It can also be used as a reference in to the tourism field, especially aggregating important concepts and literature that can help future practical studies.

Society will also benefit from this study in terms of the new knowledge that has been generated. Members of society will then be in a position to demand products and services that are a result of innovation and informed decision making.

Although this paper is largely based on literature, the conclusions reached are those of the authors. A close assessment of the literature in BI and the tourism industry was done, resulting in the conclusions reached by the authors.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of key hotel attributes on the room rates of selected hotels in the Greater Gaborone Region, Botswana.

Using hedonic pricing analysis, the effect of eight attributes collected from 80 standard double rooms on Booking.com in the area was analysed using quantile regression.

The estimated results from quantile regression suggested the importance of the 10th quantile as the best predictor of hotel room price distribution. Overall, the presence of a fitness centre and the availability of meeting and conference facilities were positively significant for the lowest- and premium-priced hotels, respectively.

The study advanced the literature in hedonic pricing models by confirming the applicability of hotel room rate attribute research in unexplored environments.

Hotel managers should be aware of the influence of key attributes, such as meeting and conference space availability and locational factors, on the pricing decisions of room rates in the Greater Gaborone Region. The study also presented opportunities for business-to-business marketing between hotel and tour operators in the region.

The study is one of the few that uses quantile regression in the hedonic pricing analysis of hotel room rates.