Hotel plan popularity factor analysis of hotels in the Keihanshin region

摘要

Tourism is recognized by the United Nations World Tourism Organization as the worlds' largest growth industry. Tourism in Japan has a tremendous impact on the Japanese economy, including employment and regional vitalization. The Japanese government designated Japan as a “tourism-oriented country” in 2003 and has implemented various tourism promotion measures. In the present research, we attempted to ascertain hotel plan purchasing factors by devising “purchase rate” as an indicator that expresses sales of hotel plans in each region by using daily data on the number of room vacancies and number of full occupancy days for hotel plans of hotels in each region, focusing analysis on hotels in Kyoto, a global travel destination, as well as those in Osaka and Kobe, major areas in the Kinki region. In our analysis, we used k-means, a non-hierarchical cluster analysis method, in hotel plan grouping. We discovered seasonal fluctuations and a day-of-the-week effect in hotel plan sales in each area and obtained new knowledge concerning hotel plan popularity factors by excluding the day-of-the-week effect.