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

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.

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