Effect of covid-19 on behavioral engagement with luxury hotels : an observation on facebook

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze how tourists react to messages with experiential content issued by luxury hotels on social networks, focusing on how the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic has affected their online engagement behavior. During the pandemic, social networks have offered hotels an important communication tool, becoming an ideal promotional platform for maintaining interaction with their customers. However, despite the fact that the hotel industry has spent considerable time and resources optimizing the use of social media channels (Boes et al., 2016), there is still little empirical evidence available on how the process is carried out and, overall, for what purposes (Harrigan et al., 2017). Thus, the mode of social media use, its effectiveness and hotels’ relationship with social media users represent possible research topics for the hotel industry (Leung et al., 2017).