Analysis Of Hotel Case Study Essay Research

Analysis Of Hotel Case Study Essay, Research Paper

Analysis of Hotel-Online Internet News Service

I. Introduction

The need to balance a company’s strategy and structure with changes in the external environment is obvious in any industry. However, in fast changing industries such as the Hospitality Industry, this need is even more

important. Hospitality operators have to keep track of changes in the mentality of customers, changes in the attitude of government agencies and legislators towards the industry, changes in economic and technological

issues, and strategic changes of competitors and other firms connected to the industry. This responsibility has been previously discussed by West: “The strategic manager [must] scan sectors of the environment which are

appropriate to the intended strategies of the firm, identify trends and changes within each sector, ascertain which require immediate response, interpret the potential effects of environmental occurrences on firm performance, and initiate appropriate firm response.”

Unfortunately, the fast-paced nature of this industry prevents most operators from spending adequate amounts of time monitoring the external environment; day to day operations always take precedent. For this reason, Internet news services such as Hotel Online may be the perfect tool for environmental scanning efforts in the hospitality industry. Hotel Online is a convenient service providing daily information on hospitality related news and events. It counts with nearly 3000 registered users from different hospitality related companies and institutions, although the total number of users is certainly larger (see Table 1). Registration to the service’s mailing list is optional, and the web page can be accessed freely by any person with a web browser

Table 1: Hotel Online Subscription Statistics (based on a random sample of 500 users)

Type of Subscriber Count % of Sample

Hospitality Companies 189 37.80%

Domestic Use 4 00.80%

Related Companies 167 33.40%

Educational Institutions 139 27.80%

Regulatory Agencies, Government 1 00.20

Totals 500 100.00%

The content of this paper represents a discussions of trends in the hospitality industry as determined by an analysis of the internet postings in Hotel Online. The project had a double purpose: to obtain environmental information of the hospitality industry and to determine the usefulness of the internet service provided by Hotel Online.

II. Research Methodology

The outcome of this project is the result of a content analysis of Hotel Online. The research involved analyzing the daily news postings in the server over a period of 30 days, between November 1 and December 1st, 2000. The analysis consisted of reading the title, first paragraph and the first sentence of other paragraphs of each article posted. Then, each article was qualified and placed in one of the following categories:

a. General environment categories:

1. Socio-cultural environment

2. Political environment

3. Economic environment

4. Technological environment

a. Specific environment categories:

1. Finance

2. Marketing

3. Research and Development

4. Operations

5. Administration

6. Human Resources

This classification scheme was taken form the work of Chon and Olsen (1987). As it is further described in Appendix I, these categories were divided into sub categories to increase the specificity of the research. In addition, each article was assigned a specific weight according to its length, in order to make a more accurate assessment of each article’s importance. However, it is difficult to find an appropriate measure of article space in a web page. Most articles in Hotel Online have very similar lengths and number of paragraphs. The most convenient measure found by the author was the number of “Page Downs” that it took to reach the end of the article (using a 14″ monitor with a display of 600 by 800 pixels). The weights were assigned as follows:

Table 2: Weight Assignment

Number of Page Downs Weight

1 to 2 1

3 2

4 3

5 plus 4

The total number of postings analyzed was 747 articles. This number is so substantial due to the daily nature of this online service. After these articles were analyzed, categorized and weighted, statistics were obtained to determine the major themes dominating the internet space of Hotel Online (see Appendix II for detailed statistics obtained in the research process).

III. Findings and Discussion

The first major finding of the research process was the fact that the majority of the news posted in Hotel Online relates to the U.S. national industry environment. The actual distribution of national vs. international topics is described in Table 3.

Table 3: Distribution of National vs. International Environment

Environment % of Hotel Online Space

National 88.75%

International 11.25%

Another major finding of the study was the predominance of topics related to the specific environment over the general environment (see Table 4). These two characteristics of Hotel Online slightly limit its usefulness as a complete environmental scanning tool.

Table 4: Dist

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