Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic was a major phenomenon with strong health, political, economic, and social consequences. But the health crisis was also coupled with an equally powerful communication crisis. This double crisis has of course had an impact on the world of tourism. Since mobility has been partially authorized again in Europe, hoteliers are looking to win back their customers, especially on these same social media. What is the place of the pandemic in online communication? How can the subject of the crisis be raised without scaring customers? Are the modes of communication different depending on the category of the hotel? Based on 10 hotels of different categories taken at random in Paris, London, Berlin, and Rome, the study seeks to analyze the informational policies implemented online by individual hoteliers. The results show that the variables “country” or “category” are not significant; there are strong differences from one hotel to another, which highlight a greater or lesser capacity or interest in using these communication tools to promote the establishment.
TopBackground
State of the Art
This paper combines two main themes identified by Yang, Zhang, and Rickly (2021) in their study of tourism research and COVID-19: theme 2 “responses, strategies, and resilience” and theme 5 “technology adoption”. Three successive theoretical frameworks will be considered through a up-to-date literature review. The first one will question the importance of communication and especially digital communication for tourism. Indeed, a hotel that does not have a website or a facebook page does not exist. The guesthouses in remote Laddakh have understood this. The second framework will point out the consequences of the health crisis for tourism. It will consider the place of crisis communication, in general, and more specifically in tourism, in particular, with a question that often comes up in studies: what are the expected longer term consequences of this global crisis for global tourism practices? This point is essential, not as much in order to predict how managers will react after the crisis, but rather to understand what they did during the crisis. The last part will focus on the few studies conducted on the subject of the digital strategy of hotels during the crisis.
Digital Communication and Tourism
Since 2012, more than half of all tourism-related spending in Europe was done on the Internet and the trend is growing (Thirumaran, Mohammadi, Pourabedin, Azzali, Sim 2021). The communication of hotels typically began with a web 1.0 business card type of website providing information with many advantages: almost unlimited space, updating possibilities, diversity of forms, personalization, reasonable cost, etc. In a second time (web 1.5), the websites allowed a beginning of interaction by giving the customers the possibility to book a room. Hoteliers just had to make sure that all their reservation sources were well coordinated to avoid overbooking. But the web 2.0 has changed the rules: Information circulates not only from top to bottom, but also from bottom to top and especially horizontally. Social media are the expression of these new forms of information flow. To what extent do hoteliers take this evolution into account? Do they have a forum on their website where they interact with their customers? Do they respond to criticism on facebook or Instagram? If these questions are well debated in the professional field, they are rarely the subject of scientific articles. A website is to a hotel what a shop window is to a store: it must seduce and incite people to enter. It must therefore be perfect, whether it is managed internally or by an external company.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Tourism Communication: Unlike marketing, which looks at the best way to make investments profitable, tourism communication studies all the elements that come into play before, during and after the stay for all the actors linked to the territory concerned.
Social media: Social media is a great tool to develop the e-reputation of hotels; however, hoteliers must invest in professional skills to manage it.
Communication Crisis: The main rule of teaching crisis communication is the importance of preparation. No one anticipated the COVID-19 crisis. We need to learn from it for the future and train hotel managers to communicate in future health crises that experts believe will continue to spread.
Hotel Professionals: As in other areas of business, many hotel managers still have a very top-down view of information. It is not enough to adopt social media to have a social vision of information.
Tourism and COVID-19: the COVID-19 health crisis was of course a problem for the entire hotel industry, but it also revealed the weakness of the digital communication of some hotels.
Health Crisis and Hotels: The health crisis has revealed great differences in the ability of hotel managers to manage their digital communication.