Investigating influence of social media on hospitality and its challenges to the hotel industry

Introduction

Hoteliers and investors have been progressively made aware of how the social and environment activities impacts the hotel procedures and improvements during the recent decade (Ottenbacher, Harrington, & Parsa, 2009). Components that have added to this awareness incorporate the wants of hotel proprietors and administrators to decrease expenses of activities, change required for practical improvement, expanded guidelines that focus on improvements and tasks and the way of perceptions of investors and stakeholders are changing towards the environment (Ottenbacher, Harrington, & Parsa, 2009). Due to the dynamic nature, the hospitality industry has face many challenges in the recent years. Few of these challenges are lack of equity, global rising of markets, lack of employees and talent, technology and social media and sustainability. 

However, the researcher will be focusing on one contemporary issue throughout this study which is how social media challenges the hotel industry. Along the expansion in utilization of social media platforms, the competitors in the hospitality industry must be perceptive to maintain a strategic scheme to refrain from circumstances that will deliver negative exposure (Zarrella, 2010). Due to the growth of many hotel chains throughout the world, the hotel industry is established in the center of globalization (McQuilken,2010). Since the environment is changing constantly, the hotel industry must rise with approaches to adapt to these changes (Gaurav,2012). 

The utilization of social media has empowered the people to communicate and share their knowledge and experience and therefore clients are capable to write feedbacks of their experience on these platforms, which has a critical effect on the hospitality industry as well as other industries (Pelsmackera, Tilburgb, & Holthofb, 2018). The Trip Advisor which is a popular online booking platform has reported that 93% of the people discover that reviews are important when choosing a hotel to accommodate in while 53% of the people have mentioned that they would not book any hotel without a guest feedback, recommendation about it (Ryan, & Jones,2009). Therefore, reviews play a major role to both customer and hotels (Pelsmackera, Tilburgb, & Holthofb, 2018).

The purpose of this study is to determine why social media challenges the hotel industry and how it impacts on the hotel industry negatively and positively. 

This study will first examine the literature review and then identify the methodology that will be used in the upcoming research and illustrate the project scope and finally the time plan of completing the research will be described. Further, the research will focus on how social media affects the hotel industry, how could social media marketing help to improve the industry. 

There are few limitations of carrying out this research. Access to resources is limited due to shortage of informative journals and books since social media is something new to the market and its updating constantly. Another limitation is that due to the constrained time frame it is quite difficult to assemble the information since qualitative data is time consuming.