Marketing Guest Houses in South Africa

Guest house owners are often owner-managers whose resources of time andmoney are extended to the limit. It is important that they market theirestablishments wisely. The objective of this research was to investigateaccommodation search tools and selection criteria as deemed important byguests and perceived important by owners.Data was collected in the form of questionnaires completed by owners andguests. The ordinal level response data was rescaled before beinginterpreted.The main findings of this report were that owners placed more emphasis onproviding internet search tools than on network marketing to attract newcustomers. Further, while owners and guests agreed on the broad groupingsof cleanliness, security and service as being important guest house selectioncriteria, owners tended to exaggerate the importance of each of the individualcriteria and lacked the ability to adequately perceive the degree of importanceof criteria as the guests saw them