Impact of Digital Tools on the Hotel Industry in the USA

Abstract

Although disruptive innovation is a shortcut to increase revenue by technology, it has been applied little in the hotel industry. The purpose of this study is to examine how disruptive innovation has been applied in hotels via adopting a digital tool of linguistic inquiry word count (LIWC) to explore guests' unconscious needs to increase hotel revenue. The study has been based on the Maslow's hierarchy and the McClelland's motivation to examine the relationships between hotel criteria and guests' unconscious needs to increase hotel revenue. The study sample includes 10918 comments from online travel agency websites of hotels in the southeast destinations of the United States from January 2015 to October 2016. Findings from canonical correlation analyses indicate that hotel value and cleanliness would attract guests with a high-power motive whereas hotel service and quality would attract guests with a high affiliation motive. Finally, hotel room and location would attract guests with a high achievement motive. Implications have been discussed.