Hotels presence on the Internet : A comparing study of Karlstads chain owned hotels and privately owned hotels exposure on the Internet.

In today’s society Internet is evolving the tourism industry and it’s the pioneers that use this marketing channel to further their brands that’s that reap the benefits of early adoption. In this essay we research how well two kinds of ownership structures, private ownership and chain ownership, in the hotel market match up against each other in Internet presence and the steps they have taken to encourage guests too book via their websites. We determined that the hotel market in Karlstad was sufficient to study the different kinds of ownership structures as it’s small enough to see the competition between private ownership and chain ownership clearly instead of as normal in more densely populated cities where chain owned hotels dominates the marked due to sheer size. The scientific research consists of two types of methods. At first we do a qualitative comparative website analysis of the selected hotels websites and then we further research the differences found in the analysis by doing a quantitative interview study asking the guests at the selected hotels about their attitudes towards Internet bookings. The conclusions drawn from our scientific research is that there are differences in Internet presence between the different types ownership structures and that the chain owned hotels outperformed the privately owned hotels by a large margin. Hotel guests prefer to book via the hotel website and the branding of the hotel plays a huge role in their decision to book a hotel stay