Dear Colleagues,

Over the last years, radical changes in the global economy have profoundly affected business strategies and transformed the relationships between customers and firms. The improvements of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the spread of social media applications along with a widespread connectivity and the use of mobile devices, play a central role in the new economic context.

Internet is an effective, efficient and ubiquitous information platform, able to allow both firms and customers to diminish costs for information seeking. On the Web, they have more product and brand choices, being able to compare alternatives more easily. This affects all the steps of the consumers behavior process: how they search for information, make decisions and purchase. A key element is the opportunity to share user-generated content (UGC), interacting with companies and with other peers. The act of sharing online UGC generates a new form of word-of-mouth, electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), that influence perceptions, expectations and consumer behavior as demonstrated by marketing research.

The previous trends produced important implications for the hospitality industry. Online content affects searching, travel planning and purchase decisions. In such a context, online reputation plays a key role in driving travellers’ decisions. Reputation, the accumulated impression that external subjects or parties form of the firm and its brands or products, results from their interactions and communications. Online reviews, ratings and rankings contribute to determine the hotel popularity. This, in turn, causes a direct effect on product sales, prices and perceived risk.

Price has acquired a special and more important role, becoming more and more value-based. New technologies offer new and effective managerial instruments for pricing policies. Online sellers have the chance to track and analyze customer behavior, obtaining valuable information about their preferences and about customers’ price sensibility and their willingness-to-pay. Moreover, technology has made dynamic pricing widely possible, commercially feasible and more profitable. Tourism firms have developed revenue management strategies and tactics to improve their profitability.

This Special Issue welcomes a wide variety of academic disciplines encompassing different methodological approaches that will allow for an expanded view of online hospitality management, concerning especially the effects on online reputation and pricing.

Prof. Roberta Minazzi
Prof. Aurelio G. Mauri
Guest Editors

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• Hospitality
• Hospitality management
• online reputation
• eWOM
• user-generated content
• price