Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of digital marketing practices on performance of star hotels/resorts. The population of the study comprised of all star hotels/resorts in Hawassa city graded and licensed by the Tourism Regulatory Authority. Only two, three, and four star hotels based in Hawassa city which use digital platforms to market their business were studied. This made a total of 13 hotels/resorts. Descriptive, correlation and regression analysis were used and results presented in tables and figures. The study concluded that, the correlation between practices of digital marketing and hotel performance at 99 percent confidence level (P<0.01) are positive and significant. The study also concluded that, digital marketing strategies positively affects performance of star hotels/resorts. Attracting customer strategy, engaging customer strategy, retaining customer strategy, learning customer strategy and digital marketing platform were concluded to be strategies and platforms adopted by the hotels/resorts and improved hotel performance. The study also concluded that relating back customer strategy negatively affect the performances of star hotels. And it is may be due to erroneous digital marketing strategies which is not compatible with level of digitalization since the stage of computerization and digital usages in our country are underutilized. Thus the researcher recommends that further research should take in to considerations the formulation and implementation process of these digital marketing strategies i.e. relating back customer strategy in order to cheek the same results prevail.
