An investigation of factors affecting customer selection of online hotel booking channels

When there are more and more online hotel bookers, it is important for industry players to know why travelers prefer one online booking channel among others. To have a better understanding of the channel selecting criteria, a purchase intention model was proposed and verified by a quantitative questionnaire survey with 437 valid samples. This study reveals how product related factors and channel related factors will affect online hotel bookers and compares the perceptions of online hotel bookers toward two types of channels (hotel websites and online travel agent websites) to help industry players on better positioning of their own websites. An updated version of influential factors specifically for the large China market is provided and the result shows that online travel agent website are performing better in most of the aspects while hotel websites are only competitive in website quality. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.