Title: Social media adoption: an exploratory international case study of hotel organisations

Authors: Karin Högberg

Addresses: School of Business, Economics and IT, University West, Trollhättan, Sweden

Abstract: The pressure on organisations to adopt social media technologies is increasing, due to the large usage among customers and stakeholders. Nevertheless, there are still uncertainties about why organisations adopt social media and researchers call for more empirical studies in this research field. This study focuses on a hotel chain that recently made the decision to adopt social media. A technology-organisation-environment (TOE) framework is used to analyse the hotel chain and local hotels' perception of the social media adoption. 22 interviews in 14 hotels in seven European countries have been conducted. The results shows that the hotel management and the local hotels have different views on why social media should be adopted and that there are several organisational challenges for the hotels, such as example to create structures for social media usage within the organisations.

Keywords: social media adoption; technology adoption; hotels; technology organisation environment framework; TOE framework; hotel chains; hospitality industry; hotel management; organisational structure.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDCET.2017.082514

International Journal of Digital Culture and Electronic Tourism, 2017 Vol.2 No.1, pp.67 - 82

Received: 28 Apr 2016
Accepted: 05 Sep 2016

Published online: 27 Feb 2017 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article