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Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2019 pp 344–356Cite as

Do Hotels Talk on Facebook About Themselves or About Their Destinations?

Abstract

Social media have become essential for firms in the hospitality industry to promote their brands, generate engagement and create sales. Using Facebook more than any other social media, hotels mobilise Facebook pages as platforms for communicating, interacting and networking with customers and potential guests, as well as for providing adequate content to consumers as an essential component of users’ overall satisfaction. The aim of the study was to analyse the message strategy that hotels in different hotel classes use in content related to services offered by individual firms compared to content related to the destination. A total of 4,725 Facebook posts by hotels in Barcelona were analysed, and compositional data analysis was applied to account for the relative importance of different data (i.e. proportions of different types of content). Findings show that higher-class hotels promote themselves by highlighting their facilities, whereas lower-class hotels promote themselves by promoting the destination.

Keywords

  • Compositional data analysis (CoDa)
  • E-marketing
  • Facebook
  • Social media
  • Hotel class
  • Content analysis

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Acknowledgements

Authors are pleased to acknowledge the support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (grant ID’s ECO2017-88984-R and TIN2015-71799-C2-2-P), the support of the Catalan Government for the accreditation as Consolidated Research Group TURESCO (2017 SG4 49) and the University of Lleida grant 2017-TR265. Finally, the authors wish to thank Marc Alimbau, Anna Tkach and Alice Florina Ghencea from University of Lleida, for their help with data collection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Administration, University of Lleida, Lleida, Catalonia, Spain

    Berta Ferrer-Rosell, Eva Martin-Fuentes & Estela Marine-Roig

Authors
  1. Berta Ferrer-Rosell
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  2. Eva Martin-Fuentes
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  3. Estela Marine-Roig
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Correspondence to Berta Ferrer-Rosell .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Business School, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland

    Dr. Juho Pesonen

  2. Faculty of Informatics, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Dr. Julia Neidhardt

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Ferrer-Rosell, B., Martin-Fuentes, E., Marine-Roig, E. (2019). Do Hotels Talk on Facebook About Themselves or About Their Destinations?. In: Pesonen, J., Neidhardt, J. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2019. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05940-8_27

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