Two research reports from Cornell's Center for Hospitality Research are winners of the 2009 Industry Relevance Award. The two reports were selected by the center's website registrants and members of the center's Advisory Board. Both are targeted at improving hotels' marketing efforts.
The winners are "Setting Room Rates on Priceline: How to Optimize Expected Hotel Revenue," by Chris K. Anderson www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports/abstract-14705.html, and "Unlocking the Secrets of Customers' Choices," by Rohit Verma www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports/abstract-14342.html. As is the case with all center reports and tools, these reports are available for download at no charge www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/. For a list of past Industry Relevance Award winners, please visit http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/research/awards.html.
Anderson's report explains how to use the information provided by Priceline to set rates that will optimize sales. Although hotel operators cannot directly see the bids made by would-be guests, an analysis of Priceline's reports provides the information needed to develop the best possible offer. Anderson also provided a spreadsheet-based tool, available at http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/tools/tooldetails-14706.html, that would allow hoteliers to perform the analysis that he devised.
In his report, Verma presents an explanation of discrete-choice analysis, which allows marketers to analyze customers' preferences for products and services. Instead of simply asking customers what they would like, discrete-choice analysis compares customers' ratings of packages of product attributes. By varying the attributes in each test, marketers can determine which products and services are actually customer favorites.
The award winners were chosen from the most popular reports in the prior year, based on the number of downloads from the center's website. The five most useful of those heavily downloaded reports were determined by a poll of 2,000 frequent users of the Center for Hospitality Research website, all of whom had themselves downloaded more than ten reports or tools. Members of the center's Advisory Board then voted to select the two winners out of the top five finalists.
