Individual characteristics influence on online hotel booking

The industry of online hotel rooms booking has developed so fast in China that there are at lest 3,000 company dealing with this business. However, the competition is too fierce that the profit of this industry keeps going down. How to distinguish the customer for a certain company is a very important task to fulfill. This paper aims at finding some common characteristics of individual consumers that booking hotel rooms online in China. Based on a online survey web page and the data collected from it, A model with 7 variables was produced by stepwise logistic model selection for distinguishing bookers. At an alpha level of 0.05, the significant variables were education, income, preference of using internet, dependence on the internet, attitude toward online booking, past booking experience's influence, and perceived efficiency of online booking. From a marketing perspective, some of the variables can be used to identify target markets of potential bookers, which others can help to improve internet marketing strategy and serve.