Liuyi Ling

Optimal Pricing Strategy of a Small or Medium-Sized Hotel in Cooperation With a Web Site

E-commerce is becoming an increasingly important marketing channel, because it offers ease, convenience, and customization of products and services to customers. However, small and medium-sized hotels in China seldom create and run their own Web sites due to the low volume of visits and high cost. In order to improve sales and marketing, hotels cooperate with third-party Web sites to establish an electronic channel. Thus, the hotel improves its revenue from an increased occupancy rate, and the Web site generates revenue from the difference between the wholesale room rate provided by the hotel and the discounted rate for customers. Through developing a Stackelberg game model for the cooperation, this article investigates the optimal pricing strategies of hotels and Web sites; analyzes the effects of some parameters, such as standard room rate, on hotel and Web site revenues; and designs a revenue sharing strategy to achieve full channel coordination. This article demonstrates the existence of the equilibrium condition of cooperation between a Web site and several hotels. Managerial implications are suggested for cooperation between a small or medium-sized hotel and a Web site.

Online Coopetition between Hotels and Online Travel Agencies: From the Perspective of Cash Back after Stay

In the online marketplace, many hotels are concentrating on increasing their market share by establishing cooperation with online travel agencies (OTAs). Meanwhile，hotel websites and OTAs are marketing the hotel rooms at the same price as a result of the strong competition for the same pool of customers. Therefore, it is necessary to balance the cooperation and competition between hotels and OTAs. This study investigates the online coopetition (cooperation and competition) through an economical game analysis of an online supply chain consisting of a hotel and an OTA. It first provides an optimal solution to determine the unit commission fee of the hotel to maintain the cooperation. Afterwards, it studies the pricing process of the OTA to determine the cash back value for the customers with respect to the OTA’s maximal profit. Moreover, the deeper analysis of the cooperative model demonstrates that a quantity discount contract based on the revenue sharing could eliminate the competition and coordinate the participants in the online supply chain.

Optimal pricing strategy of hotel for long-term stay

Along with the economic development and tourism prosperity, long-term stay in hotel is very common in realistic practice in recent years. This paper does some research on how hotel pricing for long-term stay. By developing an operational optimisation model, this paper derives the optimal pricing strategy for long-term stay, and demonstrates that this strategy is beneficial to hotel as well as its customers. Moreover, this paper further analyses the effects on the optimal room rate and hotel revenue, of standard room rate, variable cost, hotel capacity, the number of individual customers, as well as the properties of long-term stay. Eventually, a numerical experiment is employed, and the results are consistent with reality.

Optimal Pricing Strategy of Hotel for Cooperative Travel Agency

In practice, in order to improve its revenue, hotel cooperates with travel agency, website, government, corporation, etc., and provides them with low room rate. This paper does research on the pricing problem of hotel for long-term cooperative travel agency. Through building pricing model, this paper proves that cooperation is beneficial to hotel and travel agency, derives the optimal pricing strategy of hotel, and analyzes the effects on the room rate for travel agency and hotel revenue, of hotel capacity, standard room rate, daily variable cost, the number of individual customers, and that of customers from travel agency. Eventually, it suggests some managerial implications.

ATC based coordination of distributed production planning and supplier selection

In a supply chain, several plants produce one kind of product jointly, each of which makes plan autonomously. Hence, in order to minimize the total cost of the supply chain, a strategy is needed to coordinate the plant plans. ATC (analytical target cascading) is considered more suitable for such distributed planning environment. Each plan outsources some components to produce the product, so sub models are built in ATC model for plant to negotiate component supply plans with suppliers and select supplier, according to production plan. The numerical study in this paper demonstrates (1) ATC is an efficient method for coordinating the distributed production planning by comparing ATC with AAO (all at once) method, (2) the negotiation model is powerful in negotiation with suppliers and supplier selection.

Travel Package Modeling: Optimal Bidding Strategy of Tour Operator to Cooperative Hotels

In the travel package industry, in order to obtain stable and sufficient source of hotel rooms for package products, the tour operators would like to cooperate with hotels located at the tourism destination. Meanwhile, the hotels also appreciate the cooperation as a way to improve occupancy rate and then revenue. This paper develops models of travel package in several scenarios to analyze the relationship between the tour operator and the hotel. Through theoretical analysis and numerical studies, this paper finds that the tour operator will bid a low wholesale room rate to the hotel with high capacity or/and a small number of individual tourists. On the other hand, the hotel with large capacity or/and less individual tourists will reserve more rooms for the travel packages, while the one with high room rate and stable source of individual tourists is not likely to remain so many rooms for the tour operator.

ATC-based task allocation in virtual enterprise

A virtual enterprise (VE) consists of several autonomous and heterogeneous member enterprises (MEs) that move towards their own objectives. In order to improve its efficiency and responsiveness, the VE has to effectively synchronise and integrate business components that are distributed across the MEs. This paper probes task allocation problem in a virtual enterprise. ATC (Analytical Target Cascading) is used to coordinate the production task allocation in order to achieve the optimal solution with high customer satisfaction and low total production cost. The numerical study in this paper demonstrates that ATC is an effective coordination method.

Olympics Performance Evaluation and Competition Strategy Based on Data Envelopment Analysis

This paper develops performance evaluation and competition strategy techniques in Olympics scenario. In the performance evaluation technique, the ranking methods based on the best and worst frontiers are used. In the competition strategy, a competition DEA method is presented to direct the competition opponents and intensity for each Olympics participant. KeywordsData envelopment analysis (DEA); Efficiency evaluation; Competition; Olympic Games

Coordination for the travel package of flight and accommodation

This paper studies how a hotel and an airline cooperate to provide the travel package of accommodation and flight. Since the hotel and the airline make decisions autonomously, this paper builds Stackelberg game model to solve this travel package problem. It obtains the equilibrium of the cooperation of the hotel and the airline; derives the effects on the equilibrium, of the hotel and the airline capacities, standard price, etc.; analyzes the ones on the total additional revenue and its sharing by numerical study; designs a coordination mechanism to maximize the additional revenue produce by the package.

Full ranking procedure based on best and worst frontiers

In the traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) structure, the efficiency score for one decision making unit (DMU) is calculated by measuring the distance of the evaluated DMU to the best practice frontier. Recent researches have provided the reasonability of considering the worst practice frontier as a supplement to the traditional DEA techniques. The existing researches take only one type of frontier into account, and they cannot compare the evaluated DMU with both the best and the worst performing DMUs. A DEA-based procedure is developed to consider the best and the worst frontiers in the same scenario where the ratio of two distances (RDS) measure is proposed. The principal application of this approach is for ranking, and, as a complement tool, for performance evaluation. The proposed approach can be used in a wide range of applications such as the performance evaluation of employees and others. Finally, a bookstore data set is used to illustrate the proposed approach.