Keywords

1 Introduction and Background

Social media (SM) has become an important communication channel for the tourism and hospitality industry and a source of managing brand awareness and equity [1, 2]. Hotel brands in particular use SM to personally engage with customers in two-way communication, advertise, improve service, research and disseminate their information [3] as a way to influence customers’ purchasing decisions [4]. Extant studies show that luxury perceived by luxury hotel customers can be increased by hedonic rather than utilitarian or functional messages [5] and the customers are more interested in interior elements (e.g. rooms) of the hotel than the exterior (e.g. building, view, etc.) [6].

During COVID-19, hotel brands were forced to use SM wisely to communicate effectively with customers about unexpected crises [7]. Recently, several studies have examined crisis communication amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in the tourism and hospitality industry (e.g. [8, 9]). Most of these studies focused on text posts initiated by hotel brands to identify topics and effective communication strategies. Although hotel brands mostly post photos and videos across SM [10] and such visual data can provide valuable insights into the tourism experience, current tourism research is still predominantly textocentric [11]. The limited number of photocentric studies mostly focused on destination images (e.g. [12]), use qualitative approaches and analyse photographs using content analysis, semiotic analysis or other visual methods [13]. Wang et al. [14] identified critical issues related to photo analysis methods in tourism and suggested that future studies should use machine learning and employ artificial intelligence (AI) to classify large amounts of visual data by minimising human inspection. Recently tourism studies started using machine learning and AI to analyse online photo data, but most of these studies conducted metadata analysis or textual data embedded in photos (e.g. title, description, hashtags) [15]; or focused on Instagram photos produced by tourists [16,17,18]. Yet, hotels are still predominantly using Facebook to engage with customers; to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to apply AI tool and examine the content of photos posted by hotel brands during the pandemic.

To help to fill the methodological and content shortages in hotel photo analysis [19], this study follows the above-stated recommendations by Wang et al. [14] and seeks to apply AI in order to explore the photo-based communication of Italian 5-star hotels during the times of COVID-19 pandemic. Giglio et al. [6] state that luxury hotel brands should focus on interior elements to convey the class, refinement and overall sophistication of their interiors for the most efficient marketing of luxury. Further, Amatoulli et al. [20], suggest that luxury hotels are reluctant to include sustainability in their marketing communications; with communication about adapted services and health-related protocols certainly falling within the social sustainability and responsibility agenda. Thus, in this study, we seek to find out how COVID-19 affects the visual communication of Italian luxury hotels on Facebook (FB). Contrary to recent COVID-19 studies highlighting the changing nature of the communication and marketing strategies in tourism [21], communication consistency is the main factor found in hotel marketing to have a strong positive impact on all brand equity dimensions, especially on brand trust, brand image and perceived quality [21]. Thus, it is prudent to observe, whether luxury hotel brands reacted drastically, or focused on consistency in their visual communications during the pandemic when trying to convey the excellence, exclusivity and safety of their offering.

2 Methodology

Given that there are 601 five-star hotels in Italy and several steps of data collection were done manually, it was necessary to narrow down the sample. TripAdvisor has a standard sorting algorithm that ranks holiday accommodation listings based on travellers’ overall rating of the property, the number of times the listing was viewed, etc. For this purpose, the hotel brands that appear on the first 10 pages of Italy’s Tripadvisor listing (114 out of 601 brands or 19% in total) were considered and their official FB profiles were searched, reducing the sample to 64 distinctive hotel brands (56% in total). Further criteria used included the frequency of their communication (min. 3 times a month) and language of their communication (English), further reducing the final sample to 17 Italian 5-star hotel brands, i.e. 27% of the total sample.

The photo collection was conducted using Facepager and covers the period before and during the pandemic COVID-19 (1st January 2019 – 18th November 2021). The sample size differs in all three years observed, with a total of 811 photos collected in 2019, 674 in 2020, and 954 in 2021. The researchers deployed image content analysis software, Google Vision AI, which extracted AI ascribed labels from the photos. This pre-trained software labels the characteristics of a photo within millions of predefined categories. For pragmatic reasons, the number of collected results was limited to the first 10 labels assigned per photo.

To enable further exploration of visual communication over the course of COVID-19, a content analysis was performed with the use of NVivo software, focusing on the frequency of occurrences of the collected phrases. A total of 1001 individual labels were identified as used to ascribe the photos. The findings that follow are limited to the presentation of the 30 most frequently occurring labels for each year.

3 Findings and Discussion

The analysed data shows that the selected Italian luxury hotel brands in all three samples (i.e., 2019, 2020, 2021) generally focus on the following themes: elements of the natural environment (i.e. plants, sky, wood, water), interior design (i.e. furniture, lighting, art), the exterior (i.e. building, property, architecture) and upscale cuisine (i.e. food, cuisine, drinkware, ingredients).

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Study results, top 30 AI-generated labels of Italian luxury hotel photos

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A deeper analysis shows that hotel brands visually communicate most about interior across all samples (2019 = 42%, 2020 = 36% and 2021 = 40% of the 30 selected labels). With the outbreak of the pandemic, hotel brands placed more emphasis on the elements of natural themes (2019 = 22%, 2020 = 29% and 2021 = 27% of the 30 selected labels). Upscale cuisine was the second most important theme in 2019 (22%), while the same theme was communicated third most often in the years after (2020 = 22% and 19% of the 30 selected labels). The exterior theme was communicated the least in all samples (approx. 14% of the selected labels). Noticeably, labels related to health and safety measures and COVID-19 did not occur. The diversity of labels varied from year to year. In 2019, the average number of labels was 123.4 (SD = 57.43), in 2020 96.2 (SD = 46.95) and in 2021 94 (SD = 47.85).

The results thus suggest that hotel brands changed their visual communication during the pandemic, but this change seems to be very subtle enforcing the claim Šerić and Mikulić’s [21] about the importance of communication consistency for luxury hotel brands. The most notable change concerns the type of visual content used. The focus shifted from the interior design suggested by Giglio et al. [6] to more nature-based content, keeping in mind interior public spaces were considered a greater risk for the spread of the virus. This explanation could be further enhanced by a belief that this type of content would resonate well with a clientele that was restricted to their homes for most of the 2020 spring due to the lockdowns. In the pandemic context, the open-air spaces and natural themes in the luxury hotel brands’ FB posts could better reflect the hedonic aspect of luxury hotels alluded to by Deb and Lomo David [5]. This emphasis on hedonic brand communication also explains the complete absence of health and hygiene-related visual themes so common during this pandemic. Yet, further, more in-depth research is needed to confirm this assumption and the reasoning behind it.

Finally, the variety of labels of images shown requires further investigation. Therefore, the authors will in the future, among others, investigate whether there is a positive correlation between FB likes and the increase in specific attributed content.

4 Conclusion

The study used an AI-based methodological approach to observe the changes in luxury hotel brand communication selecting Italy, as one of the first and most pandemic-hit countries. The results indicate the changes in visual content communication that are even subtler than anticipated; visual communication shifts towards attributing the natural themes within the hedonic framing of luxury, that hotel managers and academics might have earlier not been aware of. Therefore, this initial research suggests luxury and hedonism remain the most important elements of luxury hotel brand communication despite times of crisis. To explore this correlation the researchers will focus on the full dataset collected and will compare different hotel categories regarding their application of visual communication. Any future research will aim to utilise mixed methodologies, with a focus on multiple SM outlets and diverse marketing perspectives of various stakeholders to further expand on and overcome any limitations of this scoping study.