SEARCH COST REDUCTION INCREASES VARIATION IN HOTELS OCCUPANCY RATE: A THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS

Marianna Succurro () and Federico Boffa

No 201020, Working Papers from Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza "Giovanni Anania" - DESF

Abstract: This study explores how direct online booking affects the variation in hotel bed-places occupancy rate between peak and off-peak periods, thereby contributing to three strands of literature, respectively the determinants of seasonality, the tourist information acquisition process and the impact of the internet on tourism. The empirical analysis, covering 18 countries over the 1997-2007 period, investigates the impact of an increase in the use of the internet by consumers on the seasonal variation in the occupancy rate. We find that internet actually increases the variation in occupancy. We contribute to reduce the lack of a theoretical framework in this field by developing a formal model to illustrate why and how the reduction in search cost entailed by the use of the internet can indeed lead to a higher seasonality.

Keywords: Internet; Search Costs; Net Occupancy Rate of bed-places (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D40 D83 L11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2010-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict and nep-tur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecostat.unical.it/RePEc/WorkingPapers/WP20_2010.pdf First version, 2010-11 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:clb:wpaper:201020

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza "Giovanni Anania" - DESF Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza "Giovanni Anania", Ponte Pietro Bucci, Cubo 0/C, I-87036 Arcavacata di Rende, CS, Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giovanni Dodero ().