Investigating Factors Affecting Sales In Marriott Hotel India Tourism Essay

To investigate and understand various factors affecting the sales and occupancy levels in the hotel industry with a perspective to the Marriott Hotel, Hyderabad, India

Marriott Hyderabad, India is one of the many hotels within the world’s prestigious hotel consortium. Marriott Group plc, the luxury five star hotel Hyderabad Marriott Hotel & Convention Centre offers a cool haven of relaxation with 282 rooms in the middle of one of India’s newest…yet oldest emerging cities. Overlooking the famous Lake, the Hyderabad Marriott Hotel & Convention Centre. Apart from that it also offers 15 meeting rooms too. Hyderabad Marriott Hotel’s sales and marketing department consisting of a small team led by vibrant director of marketing, who is continuously looking for new inputs and solutions to reflect true sales forecast as well as monitor and update sales and marketing materials. Keeping this in mind the author planned to undertake this research activity of to investigate and understand various factors affecting the sales and occupancy levels in the hotel and in this research it is purely from the Marriott Hotel, Hyderabad perspective.

Section 3: Research Aim

To research on various trends in the Hyderabad hotel supply as well as to measure monthly wise room occupancy levels in the Marriott Hotel, Hyderabad.

To research on various factors that influences the decision making among the guest while selecting a hotel to stay.

To investigate and understand various factors affecting the sales and occupancy levels in the hotel with a perspective to the Marriott Hotel, Hyderabad.

To formulate marketing strategies to improve the market share of Marriott Hotel, Hyderabad

To submit valuable and practical recommendations to the sales and marketing dept of the Marriott Hotel, Hyderabad.

Section 4: Literature review

For this dissertation topic and also for the initial research activity various literatures have been reviewed and are also used to developed research questions for measuring factors affecting the sales and occupancy levels in the hotel. The literature review spanned the body of journals, abstracts, relevant book sections, and references from articles from various works of other authors who have done some work on marketing in hotels and tourism sector. Various books and articles were again looked upon for the guidance regarding the tourism industry. Below are the few sources to which the study will be based upon.

Meidan(1984) in his article “The Marketing of Tourism” presents the applications of marketing management in the tourism industry. The article discusses the various factors affecting the tourism market and its major sectors: (i) travel agencies and tour operators; (ii) hotel and catering; and (iii) transport. Any meaningful analysis of tourism marketing, should be based on: (a) market segmentation; (b) tourism marketing mix; and (c) marketing strategies. As the market for tourism services and products is dynamic and accompanied by rapid changes in the environment due to increased competition, technological changes and inflation.

Hotels tend to rely on two types of business. One is transient and the other is group (Kimes, 1999). The group sales comes with the help of booking taken from various travel management companies like Thomas Cook, SITA where as transient guest are the guest who book for their rooms independently or they come directly without any reservation and takes a room. Most of the hotels lower their room prices and give the half of their room inventories to the travel management companies and tour operators as they provide them with consistent business all throughout the year. Bell (2002) states that gone are the days when business travelers used to make their decisions about which hotel to use. Now it is replaced by the, in-house travel planners are making that decision for them.

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There is an interesting viewpoint to the factors that influence hotels overall performance outcome. Ottenbacher, M., Shaw, V., & Lockwood, A. (2005). An Investigation of the Factors Affecting Innovation Performance in Chain and Independent Hotels. Journal of Quality Assurance in Hospitality & Tourism, 6(3/4), 113-128 states that the factors which impact on the performance of hotels depend on the organisational relationship of hotels-chain affiliation or independent operation. As Marriott Hyderabad is an international chain, it has got worldwide distribution network as well as online reservation system. The study’s results suggest that market attractiveness, process management, market responsiveness and empowerment predict the success within chain affiliated hotels. The author also states that independent hotels can also reap success if they are empowered enough as well as having market attractiveness which is also linked to effective marketing communication, employee commitment, behaviour based evaluation, training of employees and marketing synergy.

A study conducted by Higley, J. (2006). Charting a course: GM survey offers inside glimpse of hotel industry. Hotel & Motel Management, 221(19), 36-40 reflects the stability that the industry is experiencing globally. Most hotels responded that they expect increase in average daily rate by 5 percent in 2007. The article also presents charts and graphs in various factors affecting the industry including salaries of employees, location of hotels, upgrading of technology, hotel safety and hotel operation. It is not a surprise that the study found out that the housekeeping, front desk, sales and accounting departments also played critical role in ensuring guest satisfaction.

Hotel industry comes under service based industry and Gronroos (2000) states the main Characteristics of a service based industry are that it is Intangible, Heterogeneous, Production, distribution & consumption are simultaneous process, Core value produced in buyer – seller interactions, Customers participate in the production process, Cannot be kept in stock, No transfer of ownership. This the issue here is that the guest rooms, conference and meeting facilities are all perishable commodity and if they are unsold for a particular day, then the revenue which is lost for that particular day is lost forever. That is the main reason why the sales and marketing department of hotels are always under considerable pressure to achieve their targets with all means.

According to Montana university (2004) the main factors that can affect the hotel sales are;

Peak Season-the season with the highest demand for whatever is provided: and for Marriott Hyderabad, they tend to classify the peak season from October to march. Off Season-the season with lowest demand and for Marriott Hyderabad, they tend to classify the off season from April to September. The other factors are Economic Recession- when the economy of a country or place slows and does poorly, Economic Expansion- when the economy of a country of place grows and does well, Globalization-is the process in which economies of different nations become interconnected. Apart from the above Weather, Political Conditions like war going on in a country or terrorism threat, unstable governments, policy changes, economic conditions like people with little money are not going to spend it on luxury items, Highly mixed cultures (globalization): really diverse also play an important role in a countries tourism industry (Montana university, 2009). Zheng, G (2004) in his book “Management science application in tourism and hospitality” states that poor service quality can also affect the occupancy level of a hotel.

Whitla et al., (2007) states that that global strategy is most influenced by market factors, other drivers having much less influence. Cost drivers are constrained by limited economies of scale and standardization of opportunities. Globalization is most marked in the thrust for a broad geographic presence in key overseas markets, the pursuit of global branding, positioning and uniform service standards. At the same time, customers expect “responsive” policies in areas such as facilities and services provided. 

Hospitality ebusiness strategies (2008) states that due to the nature of online travel, consumers’ buying habits and the way search engines index and present content on the Web all influences the product market. Thus there are many online revenue opportunities at the property-level that derive from local audiences and markets. These opportunities fall outside the scope and “bandwidth” of the major hotel brands’ Internet marketing efforts, Local events that generate overnight stays like county fairs, festivals, sports events, concerts and performances, Local group and social event planning. The hotel should also make their marketing presence felt through internet search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN as well as online yellow pages and directories, links and sponsorships on directories and portals, email marketing and sponsorship opportunities as well as local feeder market. After reviewing these literatures the author feels that there is a wide scope for this research based project especially in the tourism sector. To take home a point there are not many research done on the tourism sector and thus it will be a challenging as well as very intriguing task by itself which generates considerable interest among the organisations as well as in the theoretical practitioners.