Guang-Xin Gao et al. study the hotels’ strategic decisions on choosing online travel platforms in the blockchain era. The research has recently been published in Annals of Tourism Research (rated 4 in the ABS ranking, FMS A level, A+ level in College of Economics and Management, NUAA), which is one of the top three academic journals in the field of tourism management, primarily publishing high-level theoretical research on tourism management that is rooted in practical tourism issues. It holds authority in tourism management and possesses extremely high academic influence and reputation.

The abstract of the paper is copied below.

Online travel agency has been used by most hotels to attract customers. However, hefty commissions and unverified reviews reduce hotels' cooperation intentions. Armed with unique advantages, blockchain-based platforms with higher blockchain-adoption costs can alternatively offer peer-to-peer booking service. This paper investigates the hotels' choice strategies on online travel platforms, blockchain-adoption conditions, and effects of blockchain-based platform. The results show that marginal blockchain cost, commission rate and customers' perceived distrust value of online reviews have great influence on the hotels' decisions. Although blockchain-based platforms can create win-win situations for hotel(s) and customers, they are not widely available as it is considered imperfect and costly. Alarmingly, there exists an invalidation effect of online travel platforms in a competitive market, resulting in non-equilibrium.

Fig. 1.Business sequence in online booking system with blockchain-based platform.

Fig. 2. Booking hotel via Locktrip.com.

If you are interested in the research, please read the paper

Guang-Xin Gao, Jian-Wu Bi*. Online travel agency or blockchain-based platform? Hotels’ strategic decisions on choosing online travel platforms. Annals of Tourism Research, 2024, 109, 103846.

A full version of this article could be viewed at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2024.103846.