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This paper attempts to identify the emerging themes that can shed light on the sales and marketing issues and challenges being faced by global hospitality organizations.

The paper utilizes a multi‐method approach for data collection. A thorough literature review, a focus group and personal interviews were conducted to explore the themes and construct a tentative thematic web. Publicly accessible secondary data in the form of customer reviews were drawn from world's leading web site – Tripadvisor.com. A total of 702 reviews of the customers of luxury hotels from the world's top two tourist destinations – France and USA – were analyzed, using thematic analysis. Customers' perspective is juxtaposed with industry's perspective to offer insights on the sales and marketing issues and challenges being faced by hospitality organizations globally.

Marketing challenges, namely personalization/customization of services, service management, creating a strong parent brand, under‐utilization of the social media and diverting tourists from heritage properties, are identified as some of the key emerging sales and marketing issues and challenges faced by the global hospitality industry.

Analytically identified themes in this research paper provide valuable insights on issues and challenges related to sales and marketing for the policy makers and practitioners from the hospitality industry. Findings are based on the analyses of real customer data from the world's leading tourist destinations. This makes the paper very valuable for both practitioners in the hospitality industry around the globe as well as for academic researchers working in this area.

This work is unique in nature because the authors did find any scholarly work addressing such an important issue. Use of real customer data and thematic analysis – a widely used qualitative analytic method for a scholarly study – in the hospitality field, enhances its value and contributes to the field by opening up avenues for further scholarly explorations and investigations.

While prior research on websites has largely focused on service quality perception by customers, little research has gone into the investigation of the specific sales function of the website. A survey of 111 German, Swiss and Austrian four and five star hotels was designed to test the responsiveness of hotels to reservation inquiries made through the options offered by the companies’ corporate websites (e.g. e-mail, online booking forms, request for proposal forms etc.) and to evaluate the hotels online sales performance in terms of the technical and process quality while dealing with a typical reservation request. The current study found that many hotels missed the opportunity to increase sales by failing to respond adequately to electronic reservation inquiries.

Nowadays, various hotels and third party websites allow guests to express their stay experience in the form of textual content and ratings termed as user-generated content (UGC). This study aims to explore the influence of UGC along with the financial aspect on the sales of the hotel. This will help them in making efficient business decisions and revenue generation by realizing the requirements of the guests. The proposed model provides an insight into the theoretical and practical significance of the concerned explanatory variables to the hoteliers.

This paper considers the number of rooms, six aspect ratings (room, cleanliness, location, service, value and sleep quality), review length and readability as the independent variables. Revenue per available room is taken as the dependent variable. Log-linear regression analysis is performed on a data set of 78 hotels situated in Delhi National Capital Region to validate the relationships. Moreover, the differential impact of hotel type on these exploratory variables is studied.

Research findings show that along with the financial aspect, the UGC components also play a key role in generating sales for the hotels. It was further observed that the two hotel categories, i.e. luxury and budget have different natures and also the characteristics of luxury hotels overshadow those of budget.

This study uses the textual content of the reviews along with the numerical ratings. This is a unique combination for studying sales of hotels according to the knowledge of authors, where earlier studies focused only on the financial aspects.

The paper discusses how market orientation impacts marketing performance in the hotel industry of Ghana. The research was a qualitative research that covered a sample of nineteen19 hotels in Ghana by using a two-stage nonprobability sampling comprising convenience sampling and purposive sampling. Personal interviews were conducted to collect primary and qualitative data from hotel managers of the sampled hotels. Template analysis was used to analyze the data in order to understand how market orientation impacts selected marketing performance indicators. The study has provided insight into how market orientation impacts marketing performance indicators, precisely sales growth, customer complaints, customer satisfaction, and customer retention. The limitations of the study are that it is a cross-sectional study and it involved only officials of the hotels as participants. Also, the study does not explain how customers perceive market orientation practices and how market orientation affects customer buying behavior. Research implications are that longitudinal research design and involvement of customers as participants should be considered in future-related qualitative studies. The contribution of this study to knowledge is that it has given some explanations to how market orientation impacts sales growth, customer complaints, customer satisfaction, and customer retention in the hotel business.

This paper aims to focus on the reason why hoteliers choose to be present in online travel agent (OTA) and social media web sites for sales purposes. It also investigates the technological and human factors related to these two practices.

The research is based on a survey sent to a wide range of hotels in a Swiss touristic region. The empirical analysis involves the specification of two ordered logit models exploring the importance (in terms of online sales) of both social media and the online travel agent, Booking.com.

Findings highlight the constant tension between visibility and online sales in the web arena, as well as a clear distinction in social media and OTA web site adoption between hospitality structures using online management tools and employing personnel with specific skills.

The research highlights the need for the hospitality industry to maintain an effective presence on social media and OTAs in order to move towards the creation of a new form of social booking technologies to increase their visibility and sales.

This research contributes to understanding the major role played by OTAs and social media in the hospitality industry while underlining the possibility of a major interplay between the two.

Aims to develop an implementation framework. Further to a critical review of previous research, ten implementation variables were identified and a conceptual framework constructed. The implementation process of a strategic decision was investigated in two international hotel groups via in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews, observations and documentation analysis. The initial conceptual framework was found to be useful as it grouped key variables together and illustrated their roles when implementing strategic decisions. Three new variables, however, emerged from the findings; namely, multiple project implementation, organisational learning and working with external companies. A revised framework was then proposed and further explanations provided. Concludes by emphasising the importance of contextual variables in implementation and dispels the strategic management notion of “fit”.

This paper aims to define and demonstrate the importance of crowdsourcing for the improvement of diverse functions of hotels, the advantages and disadvantages of this technique and, specifically, the relevance of crowdvoting for enhancing hotel sales, and diverse hotel performance dimensions.

A total of 45,103 opinions from Booking.com, a sample of 184 questionnaires addressed to hotel managers and partial least squares (PLS)-path modeling were combined to contrast the hypotheses.

The results empirically show the direct and positive impact of the opinions of the crowd on the amount of hotel sales that do not depend on physical intermediaries, and the impact that this has on the performance dimensions of hotels.

The paper shows the relevance of following strategies addressed at increasing the customers’ recommendations in the main social media or virtual travel agencies, as a mechanism to reduce tourism and hospitality organizations’ traditional weaknesses and increase their long-term performance.

The novelty of crowdsourcing, means that few works (although with an explosive increase and with high impact) have focused on this aspect in the literature, especially in the tourism and hospitality literature. The results of our research open new areas of research and contrast the relevance of crowdsourcing and specifically crowdvoting for the success of hotels. In addition, the methodology employed, by mixing the data from a social media, with a questionnaire addressed to managers, can open new ideas for future works.

In 1988, 998 letters of reservation inquiries were sent to hotels with 250 rooms or more requesting information about hosting a business reception for 20 couples. The study was designed to test the responsiveness of hotels to reservation inquiries made by letter and whether the hotels would miss the opportunity to maximize their revenues by failing to respond effectively to these reservation inquiries. Recently, 100 letters of similar content were again sent to a random sample of hotels with 250 rooms or more located in the USA, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The letters of reservation inquiries were sent to test the responsiveness of hotels again and to assess whether the quality of the responses made by the hotels has changed since 1988. The current study found that the responsiveness of hotels to reservation inquiries made by letter has changed little since 1988. Like 1988, many hotels missed the opportunity to maximize their revenues by failing to respond to reservation inquiries made by letter.

This study examines whether a higher interest alignment between online travel agencies (OTAs; hosting platform) and hotels (business owners) will intensify review manipulation activities.

With a panel data set collected from a Chinese online travel agency and a travel search engine, the authors develop a matching-based difference-indifference approach to examine the presence of partnership-intensified review manipulation.

The authors find that the ratings of agency's partner hotels (with a higher interest alignment) are abnormally higher than those of matched non-partner hotels (with a lower interest alignment), after they are benchmarked with their ratings on the search engine (without a partnership business model). Further, the analysis results indicate that this partnership-intensified manipulation deteriorates the hotel's sales performance because of damaged customer trust and satisfaction.

Previous studies implicitly assume that review manipulator is independent from the hosting platform. This is the first study examining the role of the hosting platform in review manipulations.

The purpose of this paper is to know which hotels mostly rely on Booking.com, investigating the level of presence on Booking.com around the world by country, hotel size, hotel category and managerial form. Neither the company nor the hotels provide this information, so the authors use the number of reviews as an indicator of estimated sales.

Data from 33,996 hotels worldwide are downloaded from Booking.com using a Web browser automatically controlled, developed in Python, that simulated a user navigation (clicks and selections). The comparison between independent hotels and hotels belonging to a chain is performed by a Student’s t distribution test and the comparison of hotel categories and hotel size is analyzed by a one-way ANOVA test.

The results show that three factors clearly influence the usage level of Booking.com: independent vs chain hotels, small vs large hotels and low vs high category hotels worldwide. The authors also observe that hotels from Europe are the ones that rely more on Booking.com.

The originality of this research is to identify the factors that make hotels to have a greater (lesser) dependence on Booking.com within each destination and geographical area. Moreover, the use of big data from hotels worldwide allows the authors to know the level of use of Booking.com in dozens of countries, especially those with the highest tourist activity. This work expands the capabilities of big data in the hospitality industry research, and with a simple ratio, this study counteracts the lack of public data on hotel sales through Booking.com. This new approach could be extended to the analysis of other online travel agencies (OTAs), which use similar review systems.