Social Media and the Hospitality and Tourism Industry

The rapid advancement in technology and the internet’s prevalence in today’s world, consumers are becoming more and more knowledgeable about hospitality and tourism products and services because the amount of information and its accessibility.  Social media websites have become a popular tool among consumers in sharing personal experiences, comments, and opinions via the Internet.  The content of these social media websites are consumer-generated with the intent of educating others about products, brands, services and issues (Blackshaw).  According to Litvin, Goldsmith and Pan social media has transformed the way information is released and received via the internet; it has modified the concept of word-of-mouth creating what is known as electronic word-of-mouth.  Word-of-mouth is a concept of spreading information which greatly influences other consumers.  This is important because of the nature of hospitality products and services: severability, intangibility, perishability, high risks and competitive industry.  The industry is influenced based on the experiences of the consumers.  If consumers are finding more, new and improved ways of sharing experiences and information through social media then hospitality management must be aware and understand social media.

Social media affects both consumers and hospitality management.  For example, consumers now have fast access to update information, whether it is information about a hotel or restaurant or comments and reviews about the best tasting burger in town, consumer will be able to find the latest thoughts about anything.  Consumers looking for direction regarding experiences, i.e. restaurant experiences, hotel experiences, can search the Internet and generally be confident and trust other consumer’s opinions.  On the same hand, the concept above gives opportunities for hospitality management to improve service recovery by addressing negative comments or reviews on social media sites such as Tripadvisor, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube.... Hospitality management has the ability to quickly respond to consumers, and service recovery with social media can lessen the influence or impact of negative comments and reviews.  Hospitality management can also use social media as a means to analyze current performance and consumer satisfaction, and make improvements or corrections accordingly within the company.  Hospitality management has the opportunity to use social media as a marketing tool, a communication to consumers of what the company has to offer, creating a more attractive image to consumers.

Hotels always speak to their guests about their stay experiences, but sometimes its too impolite for the guests to express what they were truly thinking.  If hotels engage more with their revivers, the number of negative comments may decreases.  Scott Baublitz, the Director of Sales at San Francisco Union Square, read the most recent reviews posted especially with the low ratings and decided what they needed to do to satisfy guests and raise their hotel profiles on Tripadvisor rankings.  As you can read on Tripadvisor, he wrote back apologizing to some of the recent negative reviews and addressed how they will follow up on the issue and finally thanked the guest for staying at Hilton.  

According to Role of Social Media in Online Trael Information Search the complexity of the Internet and social media has created some issues with the hospitality industry.  Since the content of social media is largely consumer-based, it can make it difficult to filter through all the information that is available for consumers.  Searching for information through the Internet has been greatly influenced by large search engines that limit search results to only include the most “popular” social media sites.  The top players in the social media scene are very well represented in large search engines like Google, while the much smaller social media sites are under-represented.  Consumers are not always presented a good representation of the opinions, thoughts and expressions of consumers because only the popular social media sites are represented well in the internet.  As mentioned above, hospitality management has looked at social media as an opportunity to improve their business strategy.  However, ethical concerns arise when employees are asked to pose as consumers on social media sites to post and share positive experiences and comments to improve or create a better company image.  On the same note, the same concept is applied toward handling competitors; employees are asked to post and share negative experiences and comments to damage their competitors’ image or reputation.  Companies use these tactics because the Internet and social media sites are not clearly regulated and restricted, thus companies find ways to abuse them without anyone truly knowing and without any real consequences.