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have an opportunity cost.
My research question to help me study the economic principle is: What design choices do
hotels (or inns) make in order to attract the most people?
The article published in Thrillist titled “8 Ways to Spot a Crappy Hotel When Booking Online”
demonstrates this economic principle because it shows a few of the many ways that hotels
hide their defects and increase the number of people who book a room online.
First, it is interesting to see that something so simple as the type of lens that the photo was
taken with can reveal a lot about the quality of the hotel. The example used in “8 Ways to
Spot a Crappy Hotel When Booking Online,” is the “fish-eye lens.” This lens, if I understand it
correctly, is used to make a room look bigger, or at least make certain aspects of the room
look that way. In the above image, it is the beds that they made look bigger.
Second, on this blog post, written by Nadia Imafidon, you can see that a perfect photo can
be just as suspicious as a bad photo. She links to a web page that is a series of “photo
fakeouts” where there is a picture of the hotel online vs. a picture of the hotel taken by
someone who is standing there at the hotel. Some of those photos seem like they could be
entirely different hotels because the quality of the online photo is vastly different than the
quality of the realistic photo.
Third, this was something that I, personally, had never heard of. There is a such thing as a
“Bed Bug Registry” a website where you can see where people reported seeing bed bugs.
Being the germaphobe that I am, I can definitely see myself using this website in the future
in order to figure out how safe a hotel really is. What makes this bed bug registry so good is
the fact that you cannot report a lack of bed bugs, that way hotels cannot go into this
registry and claim to be the cleanest hotel ever. This site only reports on hotels that have
had bed bugs.
In my next blog post I will research: What do smaller inns or hotels do in order to compete
with the bigger and more well known hotels?
I think you make some good points here. A lot of hotels are definitely good at scamming customers by simple things like the camera lens. I agree with the fact that many hotels are doing this only to increase the number of gust bookings online.
ReplyDeleteInteresting topic, I don't make many hotel reservations but after reading your posts i'll b able to decide on where to go much more practically.
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