Advertising expenses and operational performance: Evidence from the global hotel industry

Abstract

We investigate the impact of advertising on hotel management companies’ (HMC) operational efficiencies on a sample of 90 international HMCs over the period 2010–2019. We employ time-dependent conditional frontier estimators to investigate the effect on HMCs’ technological change and technological catch-up levels. Our findings support the existence of a non-monotonic convex relationship between HMCs’ advertising expenses and their operational performance. Lastly, we also utilize the double bootstrap approach in a truncated regression setting to validate the overall effect of advertising expenses on HMCs’ operational performance levels. The findings suggest that advertising expenses decrease operational inefficiencies. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.