engleski

Marketing Activities on the Hotel Websites in Primorje-Gorski Kotar County

Purpose – The rapid development of information and communication technologies and the development of Internet as the most important global communication network in the last decade largely affected the marketing activities of hotels, in particular the promotion and distribution. Internet and Web 2.0 technologies provide hospitality professionals completely new competitive opportunities. Accordingly, once designed hotel website does not represent the finished job and its editing and changing must be a constant work in interaction with the dynamics of the observed changes in demand market. To achieve this, it is necessary to have a clear view of all the page elements and their attributes. The purpose and goal of this paper is to perform a detailed analysis of categorized hotel websites in Primorje-Gorski Kotar County with regard to the quality of the content itself. Methodology – The list of categorized hotels in Primorje-Gorski Kotar county published on the website of the Ministry of Tourism, Republic of Croatia, 2014 was used for the purpose of online empirical research of hotel websites. Data for the analysis were collected from the websites of researched hotels and information that are indicating the level of quality of selected website were obtained by the methods of analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction. For the Test of the hypothesis relative to the probability value of the population proportion, the chi-squared test, and an analysis of variance (ANOVA) will be used for purpose of this study. Findings – The use of the Internet and the WWW in the tourism and hospitality facilitates communication between the hotel company and potential guest without a third party and significantly affects the image of the hotel and hotel sales. Potential guest has the opportunity of easy viewing and comparison of existing hotel offers and rates, highlighting its quality and benefits that will encourage guests to choose the hotel for their stay. It is important to highlight the facilitated possibility of booking, online availability check and online payments. The results show that there is a statistically significant correlation between the characteristics of the hotel (category) and the existence of the hotel website. Research shows that the hotel website's most content contains information related to communicating with guests and marketing activities prior to sales, and the least content related to online sales and marketing activities after confirmed booking. Contribution – There is a need to conduct this research due to having observed the lack of similar studies in the Croatian hotel industry in the past few years. On the basis of numerous models that measure level of quality of the hotel website with more or less success, the authors identify a number of entities, with associated attributes and variables, and shape their conceptual model of rating the quality of the hotel website. Results of the study will provide guidelines for future actions of hotel management in achieving better planning, implementation and control of marketing activities through the Internet.

Internet ; hotel websites ; marketing activities ; Primorje-Gorski Kotar county

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