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The effect of hotel’s dual-branding on willingness-to-pay and booking intention: a luxury/upper-upscale combination

  • Research Article
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Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management Aims and scope

Abstract

Dual-branding is drawing interest in the industry because it offers cost and operational efficiencies. However, when two branded hotels are located on the same property, consumer evaluation toward one brand might be affected by the other brand. This study examines the brand anchoring effect on customers’ willingness-to-pay and booking intention and whether the disclosure of such information affects consumer evaluations. By analyzing responses from 309 US consumers collected from a web-based survey service, we find no anchoring effect at the booking stage regardless of the level of disclosure but information disclosure significantly affects consumers’ perceived fairness when consumers learn the dual-branding status. The results suggest that while dual-branding and disclosure of such information do not affect consumer evaluation at the booking stage, insufficient disclosure of the dual-branding status would negatively affect perceived fairness, which could negatively affect the company in the long term.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Minsun Kim & Wesley S. Roehl

  2. Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Chun-Hung Tang

Authors
  1. Minsun Kim
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  2. Chun-Hung Tang
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  3. Wesley S. Roehl
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Correspondence to Minsun Kim.

APPENDIX: RESEARCH STIMULI

APPENDIX: RESEARCH STIMULI

To investigate brand anchoring and disclosure effects at the booking stage, the scenarios instructed participants to imagine a hotel booking experience using the instruction as follows:

Instruction

Imagine that you are planning a winter holiday trip to Orlando, Florida. You decided to stay at a luxury (or upper-upscale) hotel. You searched for a standard room on an Online Travel Agent (OTA) website. The OTA produced a list of hotels that satisfied all of your criteria including price, location, amenities, scale, and other preferences. From the list, you were particularly attracted to a “Waldorf Astoria (or Hilton)” hotel. You clicked the hyperlink to learn more about this hotel. Below is the webpage you saw after clicking the hyperlink (The webpage shows either no disclosure, photo only, written only, or full disclosure).

After reading respective instructions with stimuli that are modified based on each scenario, the participants were asked to indicate their willingness-to-pay and booking intention. Subsequently, the participants were instructed to imagine a post-check-in experience, where the complete dual-brand information were revealed to the subjects using the instruction in below.

Instruction

Suppose that you booked this “Waldorf Astoria (or Hilton)” hotel for your vacation. Now, you’ve just arrived and checked-in the hotel. You learned that this Waldorf Astoria (or Hilton) shares some facilities with a “Hilton (or Waldorf Astoria)” hotel.

After then, the participants were asked to indicate perceived fairness, word-of-mouth intention, and revisit intention, in order to examine how the different pre-booking disclosure presentations influence these post-check-in evaluations.

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Kim, M., Tang, CH. & Roehl, W.S. The effect of hotel’s dual-branding on willingness-to-pay and booking intention: a luxury/upper-upscale combination. J Revenue Pricing Manag 17, 256–275 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41272-017-0107-z

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