Tourism marketers and hotel managers should take account of the distances people travel and offer them different packages, according to Dr Sangwon Park of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and his co-researchers. In a recently published study, the researchers used information collected from TripAdvisor to evaluate how travel distance affects tourists’ satisfaction with the level of hotel service at the destination. They found what they called an “inverted U-shaped” relationship, which suggests that there is an optimum point at which the distance travelled maximises the perception of service quality, after which it begins to decline.
