PRIORITY DIRECTIONS FOR DEVELOPING MARKETING STRATEGIES IN UZBEKISTAN’S HOTEL INDUSTRY: RETURNS BY DIRECTION, SEASONALITY AND A BOUNDED REALLOCATION OF THE MARKETING BUDGET

Abstract

Priorities for hotel marketing are usually asserted rather than measured, and the assertion is almost always that digital communication comes first. This article measures them. It follows 160 hotels in Tashkent, the heritage cities and secondary cities of Uzbekistan over twelve quarters and estimates what happens to a hotel’s RevPAR index when it moves one point of its marketing budget from digital communication to each of five other directions: direct booking capability, revenue management, service quality and training, off-season and MICE programmes, and partnerships with tour operators. Because budget shares sum to 100, every estimate is a comparison between directions rather than a return in isolation. Within hotels, direct booking capability leads at 0.088 index points per point of budget (t = 4.29), followed by off-season programmes at 0.083 (t = 3.89), service quality at 0.071 (t = 3.30) and revenue management at 0.064 (t = 2.65); partnerships show no detectable return (0.025, t = 1.19). Comparisons across hotels reverse much of this ranking, putting revenue management first and off-season programmes and partnerships below zero, because they reflect which hotels choose which mix. The expectation that priorities differ by location is not supported: the interaction of off-season programmes with locations outside the capital is 0.040 (t = 0.78). What does differ is the season: the same spending returns 0.145 in the low season against effectively zero in the high season (interaction 0.106, t = 4.69). A reallocation that moves 19.9 points of the marketing budget, without taking any direction beyond the shares hotels already use, raises the RevPAR index by 1.10 points (bootstrap interval 0.51 to 1.69), about one per cent, which is what a rise of 0.9 points of revenue in the marketing budget would buy. The priorities that follow are therefore ordered, bounded and, in one case, seasonal.