ASSESSING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF MARKETING STRATEGIES IN TOURIST HOTELS: AN ILLUSTRATION USING A MULTI-METHOD APPROACH IN TAIWAN

Measuring and benchmarking tourist hotels, especially their marketing effectiveness, has faced difficulties in the past because of the difficulties of measuring operations productivity and optimizing their marketing investments. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), an operations research method used in performance measurement, and truncated regression are proposed and illustrated in measuring and assessing efficiencies in tourist hotels. We illustrated this multi-method approach with a sample of 68 Taiwanese hotels, assessing their efficiencies in three operations areas - occupancy, catering, and overall efficiencies. We then identified the impact of three marketing strategies - advertising, pricing, and branding - on the efficiency scores using truncated regression. The main finding shows that the influences of high advertising expenses and international-chain brand are significant in enhancing hotel performance, but business type as a branding strategy is evaluated as a negative impact on performance.