Social media usage in Swiss luxury hotels

Master's Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Communications - Public Relations, Advertising, Marketing, Social Media, grade: A, The University of Liverpool, language: English, abstract: The prevalent digital area is shaped by technological innovations that allow constant communication from all around the world between organizations and customers and between customers and this development has shaped communication structures and practices of organizations. This research project connects theoretical communication constructs and current communication practices examined in four luxury hotel organizations in Switzerland. The theoretical basis of the study is the marketing communication triangle that connects internal, external and interactive communication factors. Synthesizing to the theoretical construct in depth interviews were conducted to discover the role of social media in internal, external and interactive communication processes. The study results reveal that social mediacommunication is on the way to get an integral part of the marketing communication strategy in the examined hotel organizations. By considering the current usage of traditional and new communication tools strategies are defined that assist the luxury hotel organizations to create a communication structure that incudes communication preferences of the organization the employees and the guests and still enables a consistent message delivery.