How digitalization and package deals can be measured and compared for hotels in the tourism sector : A comparative study of hotels in the counties of Halland and Kalmar

Sammanfattning: Tourism plays a crucial role in driving economic growth and regional development for countries worldwide as well as spurring economic growth in counties within regions. This thesis delves into the unexplored potential of two Swedish counties, Halland and Kalmar, as tourist destinations. Focusing on their degree of digitalization and digitization, we conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis to understand the current state of tourism and identify opportunities for sustainable growth within digitalization. All hotels in both of the counties were studied and compared to see how present they were online on third party booking sites.  The thesis has used secondary data from official tourism statistics sites simultaneously as well as combining them with gathered data from all of the different hotels own websites as well as third party sites used for booking. By examining the two key factors of presence online and package deals we evaluate potential room for improvement for the respective county.  Our findings show that there are several similarities between Halland and Kalmar when it comes to the degree of digitalization and how the regions offer package deals on a broad spectrum. There seems however to be room for improvement for both counties when analyzed to what the literature states. Hotels in Halland have a larger presence online than the hotels in Kalmar, when looking at how many guest nights per hotel the county has, Hallad comes out on top by a large margin. We argue that because of the larger online presence of hotels in Halland they achieve to attract more tourists than Kalmar, despite having fewer hotels in total.  To increase growth in the hospitality industry this thesis proposes a few actionable recommendations for both counties. Implementing more package deals and diversifying the contents of these package deals and focusing more on the digital marketing platforms that are readily available for every business in the hospitality business.  This thesis contributes to a deeper insight into how business owners should act to increase their odds of success as well as how policymakers might help business in their region to develop further. This thesis also gives stakeholders a way of measuring the online presence of hotels and by extension then a way of comparing presence online.