Essay On Hotel Branding

A considerable amount of awareness concerning environmental issues has been raised globally in the past few decades and people have been progressively perceptive about communicating their environmental views. For example, more consumers are buying hybrid cars, solar electricity and eco-labelled food products. This phenomenon presents that market opportunities to exist for organizations that consider the environment in their goods and services expansion and attempt to create a "green" brand, and the same can be applied to the growing hospitality industry.

In relation to that, branding in the hospitality industry is an extremely valuable asset. Essentially, the purpose of it is to create value and retain customer loyalty. Over the years, hotel companies have introduced a system of segmenting their different target markets to form a series of hotel brands (brand extension) that caters to different customer needs. (Jiang, Dev & Rao 2002) For example, international hotel groups such as Accor, Hilton, Marriott and Starwood operate hotels of multiple tiers.

This strategy to “divide and conquer” is based on the idea that, creating a brand name means

For example, the location of the hotels, services and facilities provided by the hotels, the reviews the hotels receive and the consumer’s budget. Other than that, hotel branding is also something that consumers will take into consideration for several reasons: 1) a good brand would be established and would hence be a safer option; 2) it portrays the type of people they are (in terms of belief, lifestyle, image or status). Nevertheless, for a green hotel brand, there is no doubt that the operations will incur a higher cost. Therefore, it is important to know whether the consumers are willing to pay a premium when choosing a green hotel. In order to do so, the premium of the price has to be determined