An index for measuring horizontal differentiation in hospitality

Abstract

Amid a continuous and evolving offer of new services, the hospitality industry is immersed in a highly competitive changing environment, being differentiation an essential strategy to survive and gain a competitive advantage. As a consequence, a differentiation strategy is continuously being defined and adapted. Beyond the vertical differentiation, focused on objective quality signals, horizontal differentiation offers more chance and alternatives to hoteliers for using own resources and capabilities to gain a competitive advantage. In particular, product analysis and competition evaluation are a must-be to offer a value proposition co-created with the customer. Considering the great range of services, and the need to compute all properly and understandably, this work aims to design and index that can integrate all services of a hotel and allow comparison to evaluate the level of differentiation.