The Smart Hotel Branding During the Pandemic Times

Project Background

Hospitality services branding has notably changed during the recent decade. Managers of hotels face a situation where they have to innovate and introduce strategies designed to both keep the existing clientele and attract new customers to stay competitive and offer a unique value proposition. The smart hotel branding, which promotes hospitality services based on the enabled information and communication technologies (ICT) in hotel rooms, is certainly one such innovation (Buhalis and Leung, 2018). Smart hotel branding was particularly considered as a market advantage in the UAE, which followed the smart city initiatives promoted by the government of Dubai (Piro et al., 2014; Neirotti et al., 2014; Shadab, 2018). However, technological proliferation requires making a research intervention to understand its suitability towards customer needs and requirements, especially during the pandemic times.

Literature Review

One of the essential tasks of every company engaged in the hospitality industry is the provision of excellent customer experiences. Positive experiences are seen as essential components of the hospitality industry performance (Khan et al., 2017). Experience, on the other hand, is seen as a variable which has a strong impact on hotels’ brand image (Moon and Sprott, 2016; Dalman and Puranam, 2017). As fairly admitted by Gretzel et al. (2015), nowadays, people do not only simply want to buy goods and services, but they also wish to enjoy the experience of consuming a product. Additionally, the experience becomes a crucial factor in the modern market because the strategies of low pricing or unique propositions do not entail a desired competitive advantage since all companies offer similar products (Buhalis et al., 2019). The major role in communication and interaction was enabled by the emergence of social media platforms granted consumers the ability to filter the information they receive and to decide how to interact with it (Chen, 2019). Websites such as Facebook accompanied by the rise of ICT triggered a change in consumers’ role in relation to hotels.

Research offers a verity of viable methods of utilizing ICT to generate experiences as a product of the efforts of both providers and clients. The most important step here concerns the necessity to design and implement a platform which would facilitate the interaction between hotels and their clientele and help reach better cooperation (Akca and Özer, 2014). Moreover, some researchers suggest that hotels can engage customers and improve their marketing with the assistance of official blog posts, podcasts, and social media accounts (Yavuz, Cavusoglu and Corbaci, 2018). In addition, personalization is an element which is integral for strategies which focus on individual clients and assist hotel operators with providing customers with services based on their needs and requirements (Chen, 2019).

The history of reservations, clients’ comments, and data on promotion are the most important data points (Snow, Hakonsson and Obel, 2016). Some hotels also use data unrelated to their primary operations, for example, information concerning major events and political developments in the world (Glebova, Yasnitskaya and Maklakova, 2014). It is important to note that posts on social media platforms constitute a reliable predictor of what consumers expect from a hotel (Zaidan, Taillon and Lee, 2016). Thus, hotels have to utilize interoperability as part of their system because it can help automate and streamline the process of collecting important data to provide better services to customers.

Research Question and Objectives

Considering the evaluated perspectives for the role of smart hotels in customization and personalization of customer experiences, the proposed research question is to learn how digital services utilized in hotels could improve satisfaction levels. The objectives to be explored are formulated as follows:

1. To discover which ICT solutions are utilized by the hospitality services providers in the UAE and to assess their effectiveness in improving the experiences of customers and their satisfaction.
2. To determine how smart hotels located in Dubai affect the view of tourists one the hospitality industry in the UAE.
3. To establish the most reliable strategy for Dubai’s smart hotels, which would increase customer satisfaction with the help of new technologies.

Research Methods

To accomplish the study, a quantitative research approach based on the survey distribution among hotel operators will be utilized. The survey will address major hospitality service providers in the Dubai area, asking individuals from the service control teams to respond to a questionnaire. To contact them, the author will first email the HR departments of said providers, explaining the study and requesting access to relevant employees. It will be distributed using direct emailing based on the initial screening of smart hotel services provided in the hotel. The survey will ask participants to evaluate the notion of smart hotel branding in their respective facilities on the five-point Likert scale, arguing their level of agreement or disagreement with the particular statement. The data will be further analyzed using statistical techniques and interpreted against the past findings mentioned in the literature review section.

Results and Discussion

The author has been able to contact 45 service control team workers, 43 of whom returned completed surveys. Their average experience was 5.3 years, which means most of them started working as hotels started increasingly adopting smart branding techniques. The participants rated the average degree of their hotels’ smart branding usage at 3.4, likely indicating some usage but with inadequate results. A likely contributor is the 2.3 online presence score, with some of the participants using the comment section to highlight how their hotels have next to none beyond a non-interactive website. With that said, the degree of personalization received a 4.1 score, indicating that, despite their lack of online measures, the hotels are using highly advanced technologies to ensure their guests are comfortable. The 3.8 visitor satisfaction score also indicates an overall positive response, though there is considerable room for improvement.

Overall, it appears that, while UAE hotels are adopting some new technologies to improve their branding and the customer experience, they are overly focused on the physical component. In working to provide the highest comfort for guests, they are ignoring the opportunities provided by the increasing adoption and usage of the online sphere (Akca and Özer, 2014). As a result, they are unable to fully capitalize on the marketing and data gathering advantages that it provides despite the service team members recognizing the potential they have (Zaidan, Taillon and Lee, 2016). To improve their performance and ability to satisfy customers, UAE hotels need to embrace smart technologies more fully.

References

Akca, Y. and Özer, G. (2014) ‘Diffusion of innovation theory and an implementation on Enterprise’, International Journal of Business and Management, 9(4), pp. 92-114.

Buhalis, D. et al. (2019) ‘Technological disruptions in services: lessons from tourism and hospitality’, Journal of Service Management, 30(4), pp. 484-506.

Buhalis, D. and Leung, R. (2018) ‘Smart hospitality – interconnectivity and interoperability towards and ecosystem’, International Journal of Hospitality Management, 71, pp. 41-50.

Chen, L.-F. (2019) ‘Hotel chain affiliation as an environmental performance strategy for luxury hotels’, International Journal of Hospitality Management, 77, pp. 1-6.

Dalman, M.D. and Puranam, K. (2017) ‘Consumer evaluation of ingredient branding strategy’, Management Research Review, 40(7), pp. 768-782.

Glebova, I.S., Yasnitskaya, Y.S. and Maklakova, N.V. (2014) ‘Assessment of cities in Russia according to the concept of “smart city” in the context of the application of information and communication technologies’, Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 5(18), pp. 55-60.

Gretzel, U. et al. (2015) ‘Smart tourism: foundations and developments’, Electronic Markets, 25(3), pp. 179-188.

Khan, M.S. et al. (2017) ‘Smart city and smart tourism: a case of Dubai’, Sustainability, 9(12). Web.

Moon, H. and Sprott, D.E. (2016) ‘Ingredient branding for a luxury brand: the role of brand and product fit’, Journal of Business Research, 69(12), pp. 5768-5774.

Neirotti, P. et al. (2014) ‘Current trends in smart city initiatives: some stylized facts’, Cities, 38, pp. 25-36.

Piro, G. et al. (2014) ‘Information centric services in smart cities’, Journal of Systems and Software, 88, pp. 169-188.

Shadab, S. (2018) ‘Tourism and economic growth in the United Arab Emirates: a Granger causality approach’, IOSR Journal of Business and Management, 20(4), pp. 1-6.

Snow, C., Hakonsson, D.D. and Obel, B. (2016) ‘A smart city is a collaborative community: lessons from smart Aarhus’, California Management Review, 59, pp. 92-108.

Yavuz, M.C., Cavusoglu, M. and Corbaci, A. (2018) ‘Reinventing tourism cities: examining technologies, applications and city branding in leading smart cities’, International Interdisciplinary Business-Economics Advancement Journal, 3(1), pp. 57-70.

Zaidan, E., Taillon, J. and Lee, S. (2016) ‘Societal implication of UAE tourism development’, Anatolia: An International Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Research, 27(4), pp. 543-545.

Appendix: Smart Branding Survey

1. How much experience do you have in service control?
2. Rate the overall degree of smart branding at your hotel.
3. Rate your hotel’s online presence via social media, websites, blogs, and other media.
4. Rate the degree of personalization your hotel offers its visitors.
5. Rate the satisfaction improvements your hotel has achieved since adopting smart branding.
6. Leave any comments or additional thoughts here.