The Determinants of Domestic and International Visitors’ Online Hotel Booking

Abstract

We investigate the possible differences between domestic and international visitors in terms of their online hotel booking behaviors. For our data set, we choose the most popular tourist destination in the world: Paris. We examine the influences of quality metrics (customer review volume and valance and star rating) and price on the proportion of online bookings originated domestically. We identify various specifications used in previous researches and test the models against our data set. We find that price and review volume are significant and negatively associated with the proportion of domestic online sales in all model specifications. The estimates of marginal effects across the various model specifications are mostly similar. While a ten percent increase in review volume decreases the proportion of domestic sales by about 0.2 percentage points, a ten percent increase in average room price decreases the proportion of domestic sales by about 1.9 percentage points. Neither star rating nor customer rating is statistically significant.