Consumer democracy in hospitality industry : a study on the role of Facebook

Social media and social networking sites are often credited to have democratised consumer-to-consumer communication and empowered them. Service providing businesses on these days are constantly challenged through social networking sites by consumers on issues of quality of services, products and experiences that they have. Unlike in the past, consumers presently have been enabled with a more democratic medium of communication by user-generated content (UGC) in social networking sites that prevents service providers from manipulating opinions and views of customers to their favour. In the hotel industry, social networking sites, primarily Facebook, have enabled hotel guests to communicate with each other on their grievances, service dissatisfactions and critiquing hospitality service providers in their failure to provide quality, responsible and efficient services to them. This study examined the comments of guests in Facebook profiles of four major international hotels and the comments with a qualitative approach. The findings of this study had conceptual implications in relation to consumer democracy and managerial implications with respect to the hotels.