Sälj det nu eller aldrig : En studie om hotellbranschens kraftiga priskurvor

Sammanfattning: The hotel industry is characterized by perishability, which means that its services cannot be stored and saved to a later sales opportunity. In that world, a room that is not booked is lost forever. Another thing that also characterizes the industry is that it is seasonally controlled, thus the demand varies between different periods of time and occasions. As hotels tend to have high fixed costs, companies often choose to price their services higher when the opportunity that consumers pay a higher price appears. This can lead to a situation when the consumers feel fooled by the fact that the hotel itself does not create the new conditions that makes the demand rise. As a support for the interviews conducted, a research focused on the real prices has also been conducted where the prices of fifteen hotels in Stockholm were checked for three months on three occasions. To investigate the relationship between these two phenomena, seven hotel employees have been interviewed and shared their experiences of the reality and strategies within hotel industry. In order to get an overall picture, fifty consumers having profiles of potential hotel guests, have been interviewed where they answer questions about different scenarios and estimated prices for hotels of three different classes in Stockholm. The research made it possible to determine some conclusions. It appeared to be important for hotel industry to optimize prices in a way that they reflect the demand. An important tool to achieve this optimization is yield management and it confirms by the driving forces that identifies most often. The result of this reality is that the hotels experience fluctuations of prices over time, with rarely occurring stable pricing curves. Price awareness of customers tend to be raised when their experience of similar purchases is high. It has also been found that high prices do not necessarily have to lower the consumer value and that hotel guests may be willing to pay a higher price due to certain external factors. The relation between pricing and customer value was found to be complex and as there are some factors preventing the customer value to get lowered by price increase, it might be beneficial for hotels to take these factors into account.