Patrick Kullmann 
Managing Distribution Channels in 4 to 5 Star Hotels in Austria 
An Analysis of the Room Reservation Process

Diploma Thesis from the year 2003 in the subject Tourism – Hotel Industry / Catering, grade: 1, 5, Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne, language: English, abstract: This study summarises relevant literature on traditional and online distribution channels and gives an insight in the management of hotel’s room reservation processing as well as potential consequences of intrinsic service failures. Since it was assumed that differences in distribution channel treatment do exist in hotels, investigation was focused on telephone and e-mail reservation channels as the ones with the strongest utilization rates. Therefore, hypothesises were formulated to undertake research on both channels in comparison to room reservation transformation rates, frequency of focal points of service failures and the potential influence of category, size and location as specific hotel characteristics.

In order to carry out the investigation, an online questionnaire was established in co-operation with university and industry room reservation professionals. The actual study focused on the Austrian three to five star hotel segments since these categories were expected to provide all relevant investigated communication channels. The aim was to find comparable results to Swiss figures. Therefore, a sample of 800 hotels was contacted. 89 hotels or 11.4 per cent replied in total.

The statistical analysis pointed out that the telephone channel tends to be still slightly more efficient than the e-mail. A correlation with hotel characteristics showed that location did influence channel’s efficiency rates among the investigated hotels. These results indicated that hotels in big cities had higher room transformation rates on average than properties in resort destinations or any other location. Category as well as number of guest rooms did not provide significant dependence on this transformation ratio. In contrast to efficiency, all hotel characteristics illustrated significant influence on frequency of focal points of service failures. The frequency of focal points of service errors, however, differed in relevance among telephone and e-mail reservation channels. Even if the findings pointed out that focal points of service failures seemed to be mainly emphasized by ‘indefinite guest confirmations’ and ‘refusals due to unavailable room preferences’ on both channels, channel specific errors such as Spam illustrated very common problems in the usage of e-mail reservations.

Finally, this paper compared the findings with results of earlier studies and gave hoteliers a recommendation on short- and long-term channel management.