The Early Booking Effect and Other Determinants of Hotel Room Prices in Europe

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of hotel room prices in several European cities based on the data from Booking.com website. The main question raised in the study is whether early booking is advantageous indeed, and if so, how early should it be? First a script was developed to download more than 600 thousand hotel offers for reservations from 25 March 2013 to 17 March 2014. Then an attempt to discover more details concerning the early booking effect was made via basic statistics, graphical data representation and hedonic pricing analysis. It was revealed that making reservations in advance can be really gainful, although more data and research are needed to measure the exact numbers, as they depend on at least seasonality and city.