Award Date

Spring 2012

Degree Type

Professional Paper

Degree Name

Master of Hospitality Administration

Department

Hotel Administration

First Committee Member

Pearl Brewer, Chair

Number of Pages

58

Abstract

In the past several years there has been an exponential increase in smartphone applications made available by businesses looking for new ways to reach customers. Many of the big hotel business have not failed to deliver such applications for their customers to use that helps expedite and simplify the process of reserving a hotel room. Most applications have many more uses than simply reserving the hotel room, such as locating the hotel, overviews of the hotel, pictures of the hotel and property, and tracking rewards programs. The more popular these smartphone applications the more people there are that will use them. The questions raised in this report is whether or not such applications reduce costs or expenses related to generating the reservations through using technical tools instead of agents or employees to handle bookings. A thorough analysis of the cost of sales (when available) and operating expenses trends concurrent to the release of smartphone applications for six hotel companies is included in this report, as well as what the trends might mean and recommendations based on the research.

Keywords

Application software; Cost effectiveness; Hospitality industry; Hotels—Reservation systems; Smartphones

Disciplines

Hospitality Administration and Management | Technology and Innovation

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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