A Positioning Analysis of Hotel Brands

Hotel marketers attempt to create a unique position for their hotel brands—a set of attributes that set the brand apart from competitors. The only way to gauge the effectiveness of that positioning effort, indeed, to determine what a brand's position actually is, is to survey customers and develop perceptual maps showing the locations of hotel brands. A perceptual map developed using probabilistic multidimensional scaling (MDS) algorithms depicts the relative position of business-class and upscale hotels based on a three-year time series of surveys of corporate-travel managers and travel agents. These perceptual maps show the relative positions of hotel brands as customers see them. Statistical techniques allow marketers to determine whether brands' relative positions are significantly different or whether various brands are seen as essentially similar. Moreover, comparison of the perceptual maps over time shows the "movement" of the brands' positions from year to year.