Hotel Branding: The Psychology of Guest Choice
How guests weigh reviews, brand, price and photographs when they choose a hotel, what makes a stay memorable, and what a brand should get right.
Answer to the question
What should a hotel branding agency get right?
A hotel branding agency should give guests a familiar, well-imaged name, photographs that use light, colour and people on purpose, a stay staged around one theme, and a promise built on the memorable domains the hotel can deliver. Research on booking cues, hotel images and tourism memories supports each point.
Key takeaways
- Ji Wen and colleagues (2021) varied price, review valence and brand familiarity in booking experiments and ranked the cues by diagnosticity: online reviews first, brand familiarity second, price third.
- Che-Hui Lien and colleagues (2015) found that brand image, perceived price and perceived value each influenced online hotel purchase intentions among leisure travellers.
- Pedro Cuesta-Valiño and colleagues (2023) linked four image properties of hotel photographs to positive perception and bookings: light and time of shooting, colour scheme, human presence and shooting angle.
- Jong-Hyeong Kim and colleagues (2012) built a 24-item scale for memorable tourism experiences with seven domains, from hedonism and refreshment to local culture and novelty.
- B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore describe a theme, positive cues, memorabilia and the five senses as the tools for staging an experience.
Reviews first, a familiar name second, price third: that was the order in which guests weighed the cues on a hotel booking page in two experiments, and it is a fair starting brief for any hotel branding agency. The photographs, the name and the stay itself all add to what a guest reads before booking and what the guest writes afterwards.
How guests weigh reviews, brand and price
Ji Wen and colleagues ran two experiments in which hotel booking decisions varied three cues at once: price, high or low; review valence, positive or negative; and brand familiarity, familiar or unknown. The cues interacted, so a guest's reading of one depended on the other two. The authors ranked the cues by how much they told the guest, with online reviews first, brand familiarity second and price third. The second experiment also tested perceived quality as the step between the cues and the intention to book.
A survey of leisure travellers booking online, led by Che-Hui Lien, found that brand image, perceived price and perceived value each influenced purchase intentions directly. Trust did not show a significant effect, and no gender difference appeared.
Reviews act as social proof, the habit of using other people's behaviour as evidence when a choice cannot be inspected. A guest cannot try the room first, so earlier guests stand in for the trial, and Why We Trust Online Ratings Anyway covers how those ratings are read.
The low weight of price in the experiment is consistent with the rule of thumb that a dearer product is a better one, which works as a fallback when richer evidence is on the page. A familiar name can be read the same way, as a way of shortening the guess about a room that has not been seen.
Because the three cues interacted, a hotel branding agency cannot treat the name, the price and the review record as three separate jobs. The guest reads them as one picture, and a hotel is judged on how well they agree. The result puts the name and the image of the brand beside the reviews, and the price below both. For a new hotel with no review record yet, a clear name, consistent images and an honest description have more to do until guests add their own words, which is our reading and not a finding.
What does a hotel photograph tell a guest?
Pedro Cuesta-Valiño and colleagues used a neural network image classifier on hotel photographs, then logistic regression and fuzzy cognitive mapping, to find which image properties go with positive guest perception and with bookings. They identified four: the light and time of shooting, the colour scheme, human presence and the shooting angle. The authors describe the work as an early application of computer vision to the question.
The four properties are all decisions a hotel branding agency makes once and then repeats across a website, a brochure and a social feed. Light and colour belong to the brand palette, the angle to the visual rules, and the presence of people to a view of who the hotel is for. Because the study links image traits to perception and bookings, the traits work as a checklist for consistent photography and not as a formula for what one changed photograph will do.
A practical use is a short written photography standard that sets the hours of the day for shooting, the palette each room is shot against, when guests or staff appear and the angles used for each room type. A hotel branding agency can hand that standard to any photographer, which keeps the images of one hotel recognisably the same across years and across the sites that carry them. How to Choose the Top Branding Agency in Dubai sets out the questions for choosing the team that writes it.
Memory is what a stay leaves behind
Jong-Hyeong Kim and colleagues built a 24-item scale for memorable tourism experiences. It has seven domains: hedonism, refreshment, local culture, meaningfulness, knowledge, involvement and novelty. Their data supported the structure of the scale, its internal consistency and its validity.
Since the scale covers tourism in general, a hotel supplies some of the domains directly, refreshment above all, and can open the way to others, such as local culture, through what it serves, shows and recommends.
B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore treat a staged experience as a distinct economic offering in The Experience Economy, and a night in a hotel is one of the clearest everyday cases. They describe the staging tools that make this deliberate: a theme, impressions harmonised by positive cues, negative cues removed, memorabilia and an appeal to the five senses. The same guest who chose the hotel from a booking page later remembers the stay, and Why You Remember the End of a Holiday covers how the memory of a trip is put together.
As an illustration, not a case: a hotel built around a coastal theme might carry it in the colour of the linen, the scent of the corridor, the wording of the menu and a small keepsake at departure. Each cue repeats the theme, and none of them contradicts it. That is the work of a hotel branding agency at the scale of a stay, as distinct from the scale of a logo.
What a hotel branding agency should get right
A brief for a hotel branding agency can be tested against the research in four questions.
1. Does the name, image and voice give a first-time guest a familiar reference point, since brand image and brand familiarity both entered the booking studies?
2. Are light, colour, people and angle in the photographs chosen on purpose and repeated in every channel?
3. Is the stay staged around one theme, with cues that agree in every room and at every touchpoint, and something a guest can take home?
4. Which of the seven memorable domains does the brand promise, and can the hotel deliver them?
The written photography standard and the staging theme are the two documents a hotel can check each stay against, and a promise that describes the stay plainly is the easiest one to keep.
Common questions
What should a hotel branding agency get right?
A hotel branding agency should give guests a familiar, well-imaged name, photographs that use light, colour and people on purpose, a stay staged around one theme, and a promise built on the memorable domains the hotel can deliver. A hotel branding agency that works from the research on booking cues, hotel images and tourism memories can show how each point is met.
How do guests choose a hotel online?
In the experiments by Wen and colleagues, online reviews carried the most weight, brand familiarity came second and price third. Lien and colleagues found that brand image, perceived price and perceived value each influenced booking intentions among leisure travellers. A hotel branding agency can use both results to decide where the first effort goes.
Do hotel photographs affect bookings?
Cuesta-Valiño and colleagues found that light and time of shooting, colour scheme, human presence and shooting angle were linked to positive perception and bookings. The study links traits to outcomes and does not measure what one changed photograph would do.
What makes a hotel stay memorable?
The scale for memorable tourism experiences by Kim and colleagues has seven domains: hedonism, refreshment, local culture, meaningfulness, knowledge, involvement and novelty. A hotel can supply some directly and open the way to others.
Sources
Pine, B. J., II, & Gilmore, J. H. The Experience Economy. Seed book; vault hub Books/The Experience Economy.
Wen, J., Lin, Z., Liu, X., Xiao, S. H., & Li, Y. (2021). “The interaction effects of online reviews, brand, and price on consumer hotel booking decision making.” Journal of Travel Research, 60(4). doi:10.1177/0047287520912330 https://doi.org/10.1177/0047287520912330
Lien, C.-H., Wen, M.-J., Huang, L.-C., & Wu, K.-L. (2015). “Online hotel booking: The effects of brand image, price, trust and value on purchase intentions.” Asia Pacific Management Review, 20(4). doi:10.1016/j.apmrv.2015.03.005 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apmrv.2015.03.005
Cuesta-Valiño, P., Kazakov, S., Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, P., & Lima Rua, O. (2023). “The effects of the aesthetics and composition of hotels' digital photo images on online booking decisions.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10(1), 59. doi:10.1057/s41599-023-01529-w https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01529-w
Kim, J.-H., Ritchie, J. R. B., & McCormick, B. (2012). “Development of a scale to measure memorable tourism experiences.” Journal of Travel Research, 51(1). doi:10.1177/0047287510385467 https://doi.org/10.1177/0047287510385467