You’re the Only One, or Simply the Best. Hotels differentiation, competition, agglomeration, and pricing

Keeping the competition close: The impact of competitor distance in the lodging industry

“…The study's distance measure also engages with other spatial factors, including the presence of homogeneous and heterogeneous competition, the density of the competition, and the agglomeration effect. Supported by previous literature, we theorize the U‐shaped distribution as stemming from both the competition and agglomeration effects (Chung & Kalnins, 2001; Sánchez‐Pérez et al, 2020; Weidenfeld et al, 2014; Yang, 2016). We extend these studies, as, in contrast to direct competition from competitor proximity due to physical location, product space, and organizational characteristics, our U‐shaped distribution could also arise from varying avenues of competition (including peer‐to‐peer accommodation platforms such as Airbnb), as well as the heterogeneous environment, resources, and situations faced by hotels.…”

An Index for Measuring Horizontal Differentiation in Hospitality

“…Finally, the main limitation of the three previous approaches is that they do not measure the level of differentiation with respect to the competition, so they do not take into account the value that the consumer receives compared to the value offered by rival products, so that the aggregate measurement of the differentiation in services of a hotel with respect to the competition through a service indicator has been considered to a lesser extent by previous studies (Silva, 2015;Sánchez-Pérez et al, 2020;Urtasun & Gutiérrez, 2017); the indicators proposed in the approach of Urtasun & Gutiérrez (2017) are complex and the interpretation of their value can be not very intuitive when evaluating the degree of differentiation of a company for hotel managers and the consumer, while the indicator proposed by Silva (2015) may increase its value as it incorporates a greater number of services, which can generate confusion when evaluating the degree of differentiation of a hotel. In this way, in this chapter, we will adopt an aggregate measurement approach through an indicator of easy interpretation of its value for both the consumer and the company that allows us to know the differentiation in services, with respect to the hotels of the competition, and to truly know the uniqueness of each hotel.…”

The Use of Geolocation for Competition Analysis of Destinations: Application to the Hotel Supply in Barcelona

“…• Hotel Differentiation. To measure the degree of services differentiation for each hotel i respect to the hotel located in the same commercial zone Z i , we consider the following index (Chisholm et al, 2010;Sánchez-Pérez et al, 2020):…”