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Investigating Internet Marketing Strategies among Hotels in Ghana
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| bet | 1/66 | | Sana | 19.03.2017 | | Hajmi | 2.14 Mb. | | #258 |
ABSTRACT
All over the world, the hotel industry is making use of the internet to market and expand their frontiers. Internet marketing offers hotels a distribution channel to showcase their facilities. Majority of hotels in Ghana have taken to the internet with the aim of gaining competitive advantage.
The aim of this research is to investigate the internet marketing strategies among hotels in Ghana. The frame of reference for the research is based on the ICDT model, Sigala (2003) postulated the extended internet marketing mix model which includes the traditional four Ps and Customer relation dimensions. Measuring internet marketing activities based on these five dimensions is argued to be an appropriate, effective and valuable tool that fully exploits the transformational capabilities of the internet (O’Connor, 1999: Sigala, Lockwood, & Jones, 2001; Liu & Arnett’s, 2000).
Findings from the research shows that only 2 dimensions i.e place and product have been developed by all the hotels surveyed in Ghana. Also whereas, price is the least transformed dimension place is the most transformed by Ghanaian hotels. Furthermore, majority of the hotels
are not fully exploiting the full potential of the internet rather they are using the internet as a means to create awareness thereby adopting a globalization strategy.
In conclusion the survey has shown that most hotels in Ghana are under utilizing the potential of the internet despite the fact that many of them have websites. It is suggested that hotels in Ghana should engage the services of internet marketing professionals to develop a comprehensive internet marketing strategy upon which their websites could be developed to enable them take full advantage of the benefits associated with internet marketing.
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