Marketing Small Hotels on the World Wide Web.

Abstract

Small hotels face an uphill battle, as the larger hotel companies become more dominant in die marketplace. The Internet and World Wide Web may offer the small hotelier a lifeline for business survival. Through a study of a group of small hotels in Scotland, this article applied a set of critical success factors to evaluate the effectiveness of their Web sites. Most of the small hotels were not effectively using the Web and were certainly not realizing all of the advantages of the Internet/WWW. Their sites tended to be "electronic brochures" rather than "dynamic and interactive relationship marketing tools." A series of recommendations is provided for improving the effectiveness of small hotel Web sites.