Characteristics of magazine advertisements on hotel service: A content analysis

Because of the characteristic of intangibility and the ephemeral nature of service, it may be difficult for guests to form a proper expectation on the quality of hotel service. Most hotels try to solve this problem by providing potential guests with the information about the attributes and benefits of the available hotel service through advertising. So far, several innovative advertising techniques have been suggested by scholars and practitioners to overcome the impact of intangibility on potential guests’ learning processes, including tangibilizing the advertising message, enhancing the level of information vividness, and adopting the reliability theme… and so on. This exploratory research represents an initial attempt in this area and aims to investigate the features of advertising strategies commonly employed by hotel marketers and to provide substantial evidence to test the awareness of the implications of generic service characteristics for effective advertising of hotel service.