The More the Merrier? Understanding How Travel Frequency Shapes Willingness to Pay

Our Services Marketing and Tourism research addresses contemporary challenges in any business that provides a service such as tourism, hospitality, car rental and restaurants. These challenges include how to price services appropriately, how to build and maintain a positive online reputation, how to understand tourist behaviour to deliver the best user experience, and how to effectively deploy AI powered Service Robots in the frontline services. We also work on national and social identity in tourism.

One of our Service Marketing and Tourism streams is pricing. Our work focuses on the determinants of consumers’ accommodation choices, the factors behind their willingness to pay and how consumers behave strategically when booking tourism accommodations.

We regularly collaborate on research projects with industry partners. We helped a holiday lettings company, Home Away, increase their market share in Spain by investigating tourists’ decisions and behaviour in the context of hotel and holiday home stays. We conducted segmentation analysis and explored consumer preferences – in terms of services and prices – to help the company target customer segments more effectively.

Using hotel data from several European capital cities, we demonstrated that the more you apply dynamic price variability - or the more you change prices in real time depending on competitor conditions - the higher average revenue. The data for this research was provided by STR Global, a hotel benchmarking service, managing data for almost 7 million hotel rooms.

Our research has been published in journals including the Journal of Service Research, Tourism Management, the Annals of Tourism Research, the Journal of Travel Research, the International Journal of Hospitality Management, and the Journal of Service Marketing. We have also presented papers at international conferences.

We keep our research up to date and recently conducted impact research into Covid-19 and accommodation types. The study considered whether travellers' choices are affected by the need for physical distance.

Partnerships and collaborations

We have a knowledge transfer partnership (KTP) with Fresh Relevance, a Southampton based global company that creates personalised digital ads. They use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning to understand user behaviour. Our research into their algorithms helps to optimise the ads their consumers see and increase sales for their clients. This project is carried out by researchers in the 1024�˹�� Business School (PBS) and the School of Computing.

Services marketing and tourism is an area of expertise in the Marketing research area. Explore the other areas below.

Publication highlights

We are exploring strategic consumer behaviour in online hotel booking and we showed how strategic decisions vary across segments with different levels of risk attitude > .

We are interested in how consumers determine the price they are willing to pay for a service and we recently found that travel frequency affects willingness to pay for the accommodation > .

Recent publications

Aiello, G., Donvito, R., Acuti, D., Grazzini, L., Mazzoli, V., Vannucci, V., & Viglia, G. (2020). Customers’ Willingness to Disclose Personal Information throughout the Customer Purchase Journey in Retailing: The Role of Perceived Warmth. Journal of Retailing.

Masiero, L., Viglia, G., & Nieto-Garcia, M. (2020). Strategic consumer behavior in online hotel booking. Annals of Tourism Research.

Dyussembayeva, S., Viglia, G., Nieto-Garcia, M., & Invernizzi, A. C. (2020). It makes me feel vulnerable! The impact of public self-disclosure on online complaint behavior. International Journal of Hospitality Management.

Nieto-García, M., Muñoz-Gallego, P. A., Viglia, G., & Gonzalez-Benito, O. (2020). Be social! The impact of self-presentation on peer-to-peer accommodation revenue. Journal of Travel Research.

De Canio, F., Nieto-Garcia, M., Martinelli, E., & Pellegrini, D. (2020). The motives behind consumers’ intention to use peer-to-peer accommodation: an fsQCA application. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.

Nieto-García, M., Muñoz-Gallego, P. A., & Gonzalez-Benito, Ó. (2020). The More the Merrier? Understanding How Travel Frequency Shapes Willingness to Pay. Cornell Hospitality Quarterly.

Gursoy, D., Ekinci, Y., Can, A. S., & Murray, J. C. (2022). Effectiveness of message framing in changing COVID-19 vaccination intentions: Moderating role of travel desire. Tourism Management, 90, 104468.

Dyussembayeva, S., Viglia, G., Nieto-Garcia, M., & Mattila, A. S. (2022). Would you like to add a gratuity? When explicit requests hamper tipping. Journal of Business Research, 139, 908-917.

Yang, Y., Nieto García, M., Viglia, G., & Nicolau, J. L. (2022). Competitors or complements: a meta-analysis of the effect of airbnb on hotel performance. Journal of Travel Research, 61(7), 1508-1527.

Discover our areas of expertise

Services marketing and tourism is an area of expertise in the Marketing research area. Explore the other areas below.

Advertising and Branding

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Marketing and society

We're looking at macro trends influencing consumer decision-making – from sustainability to health – and the relationship between marketing and society.