Social Media as a Channel of Communication with Customers in the Hospitality Industry

Social media have become a representative part of people’s lives. Nowadays, companies rely on the information on the web to study customer behavior and offer products that fit the needs of their customers. This situation is also valid for hospitality providers, who structure their holiday packages and offers based on reviews and feedback. The main research question is how social media can be used as a channel of communication between hospitality providers and customers, in synergy with other channels. To answer this question, the study will focus on how customer-relationship management is already handled by hospitality providers, as well as what the existent channels of communication between providers and customers are, and how social media is already used as a channel. The main observation will be on how people interested in choosing a holiday destination make use of social media technologies. This practical problem has a broader interest and is framed as a project to research how hospitality providers can support customers in their whole transaction process of deciding on a holiday destination, by making use of social media combined with other channels. The practical research for this thesis is conducted for a hospitality provider, VierVakantie, which is a camping startup concerned with increasing its number of customers, as well as maintaining a constant group of clients. The methods used to conduct this study are literature research on existing customer-provider channels, with the main focus on social media and electronic word-of-mouth, as well as a structured survey on how families from five European countries use social media when deciding on a holiday destination, from searching for a location, to booking and reviewing it. The results from the survey stand as the basis for several strategies that will be suggested to hospitality providers – camping agencies from the Netherlands, in particular - to establish a solid customer database. Moreover, a great deal of questions from the survey focus on whether people are interested in the type of holiday VierVakantie is offering, thus the answers will help in designing a solution for this camping startup to enhance communication with customers. This solution is represented by a social media platform that allows customers to book a vacation, post reviews, photos and videos from their trips, as well as interact with other travelers and, perhaps, establish a travel community, where people not only discuss online, but also travel together. A social media platform is the desired alternative, since it will be connected to the most common social media websites, and will extract all the information in one place. The social media platform is, however, at the design stage, so, as future work, it should be implemented and tested. The natural step is to implement a prototype to test the basic functionalities and analyze how users interact on it. This social media platform is believed to help customers to find all the information they need about their holiday in one place, in a timely manner, as well as to ensure that VierVakantie, as a hospitality provider, has access to most of the online information about their customers and services, hence it is the most holistic channel of communication.ICT Management and DesignManagementTechnology, Policy and Managemen