Predicting Hotel Choice Decisions and Segmenting Hotel Consumers: A Comparative Assessment of a Recent Consumer Based Approach

Given the intensified competition to attract today's increasingly discerning hotel guests, it is vital for hotel managers to understand the set or bundle of hotel attributes which are demanded by the potential traveler. Unfortunately, marketing research in hotels is still mainly confined to the analysis of guest-related data collected during registration or from guest comment cards. These data, however, have little merit as predictors of customer behaviour and cannot answer the “what if” questions. In recent and past research in hospitality and tourism, researchers have demonstrated the use of product attributes in predicting consumer preferences and segmenting markets (Bell and Morey 1997; Kim 1996). In undertaking this approach to behavioral study, many researchers in the field have been attracted to use conjoint attribute part-worths, (the judgmentally quantified attribute valuesderived from conjoint modeling. This study attempts to utilize the compositional self-explication model as a reference model to assess the comparative superiority of the conjoint model in predicting client preferences among travelers to Hong Kong. It also seeks to reveal subgroup preference variations by using two segmentation approaches. The overall finding indicated that the most important hotel attribute sought by all respondents is Room Rate, followed by Star Rating, Location, Brand and Room Type. In terms of market segments, the results revealed similar preference profiles among leisure, short-haul and infrequent travelers as one group and business, long-haul and frequent travelers as another.