Abstract
Conjoint measurement, ortrade-offanalysis, has received very limited literature
attention in the hospitality industry. As a statistical marketing research tool, however,
its strong predictive power of consumer choice among multiattribute product
alternatives can be extremely useful in the development of products, among other
things. The consumer's choice of a hospitality product frequently involves trade-offs
among multiattribute product alternatives, and a majority of the product attributes,
such as location, brand name, image, ambience, and amenities, maybe non-metric
in form, thus limiting the use of other multivariate techniques requiring continuous
variables with normal distributions. Marriott Corporation used conjoint analysis in the
design of Courtyard by Marriott (Wind, Green, Shifflet & Scarbrough, 1989), and later
in the design of Fairfield Inns. Muhlbacher and Botschen (1988) demonstrated the
use of conjoint in selecting holiday tra vel packages, while Renaghan and Kay (1987)
used it to measure meeting planners' tradeoffs. In this article, we expand its
application to measuring consumerchoice of hotel weekend packages.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.