Promoting Guest Satisfaction: Digital Platforms as a Means to Encourage Economic Development in Hospitality

ABSTRACT

Digital platforms can provide mechanisms to reduce barriers to entry for individuals in Internet-enabled commerce. These platforms provide a broad range of technical and administrative capabilities to support marketing and transaction processing; however, users may fail to take full advantage of these capabilities. This study examines how property hosts apply the affordances of a hospitality digital platform within developing economies. We consider skill by which a host uses the online platform as a resource, and evaluate the extent to which a host’s use of the platform corresponds with guest review scores. Our findings demonstrate that, after accounting for location and property characteristics, hosts who skillfully utilize hedonic marketing affordances achieve higher guest review scores than those who do not.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital platforms
• hospitality
• sharing economy
• Peer-to-peer rental
• Airbnb
• marketing affordances
• resource based view

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).