INVESTIGATING ELECTRONIC MARKETING AND HOTEL PERFORMANCE IN GHANA THE CUSTOMERS’ PERSPECTIVE

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the study is to investigate E-marketing and hotel performance with emphasis on three E-marketing tools namely; website, e-mail and social media. Previous studies that have looked at electronic marketing and hotel focused on adoption of the internet and electronic use in hotels. Others focused on the financial performance of electronic marketing: that is, return on investment, profit and loss and sales margin, to the neglect of other relevant issues such as the effect E- marketing tools such as website, e-mail and social media have on the non-financial performance of hotels. This study therefore seeks to address this gap in research from the Ghanaian contest. To address this gap the study employed a quantitative approach specifically a survey and an adapted framework to carry out the research. Data was collected from 200 customers of Ghanaian hotels. Data was analyzed using factor analysis and multiple regressions. The findings from the study indicated that Website and Social media were the most significant of the three tools analyzed. In addition, E-mails were found to be insignificant, that is, it was rarely used among Ghanaian hotel operators in communicating with customers. The study recommends that, hotels should update and interact with customers on their online sites regularly since customers are becoming more technology savvy. Future studies should consider budget hotels, guest houses and hostel because this study was based on star rated hotels in Ghana.