TWO WAY COMMUNICATION EFFECT ON ONLINE HOTEL BRANDING

Abstract

Hotel website is one of the tools that supports online branding, in order to make it easier for customers to serve hotel bookings online. In addition, it is also used as a place to find information from the hotel. However, in the context of testing the relationship between web sites with branding and hotel reservations, not many researcher have done so. Therefore, this research aims to develop, and test models based on website interactivity theory to explore the relationship between website interactivity, brand knowledge dimensions, and brand value in the context of hotel booking websites. The results were taken from the sample of 120 domestic tourists in Yogyakarta that show the quality of the website had significant influence on brand and online ordering. Analysis using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was conducted to test the hypothesis. The results showed that the interactivity dimension of the website, namely two-way communication had positive effect on the dimensions of brand knowledge, namely brand awareness and brand image, which increased the value of the brand which in turn had an impact on customer purchase intentions.