Abstract

     The extant paper aims to explore the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on marketing activities. In this respect, the study adopted Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) using SPSS26 and Smart PLS-3 to analyze the descriptive survey that was distributed among 200 hotel managers. The findings revealed that although the pandemic affected the technology application in the hospitality sector positively, it also has negative impacts on marketing performance. The results also illustrated the considerable effect of technology on marketing performance. Thus, by providing a comprehensive research model, the study calls on hotel managers and executives to reconsider their marketing activities.

Introduction

     Just after the outbreak of the Covid-19 across the world, many countries set strict travel bans (tourism restrictions, border closures, etc.) to prevent further spread (Nuseira and Aljumahb, 2020). Most of the countries in the world enforced partial or complete border closures, and the travel ban impacted the majority of the world’s population. The hotel industry is among the four main pillars of tourism and traveling which has been severely influenced by this pandemic crisis (Zanker & Kock, 2020; Hemmington & Neill, 2021). Hence, The industry faced the crisis of reduced demand and high costs that threated the profitability (Polemis, 2020). Around 113 countries placed global travel bans since the outbreak of the pandemic until the first half of 2020. The World Tourism Organization has estimated a 60–۸۰% decline in 2020 compared to the previous year, which is 15–۲۰ times more than the case of the 2008 global financial crisis. The World Travel and Tourism Council has estimated that over 100 million jobs in hotel and tourism industries were in danger that over half of them were in Asia (International Trade Center, 4: 1). Then, after the decline of COVID-19 in 2021 and 2022, tourism tripled from January to July 2022 (+172%) compared to the same period of 2021 (UNWTO, 2022).

     On the other hand, the profitability crisis in the hotel industry made a decline in the number of workforces (Zou et al., 2020). Hotels also laid off thousands of people to reduce their costs in response to their economic crisis (Khan et al., 2021). Under such circumstances, technology and its capabilities can be a solution for hotels to implement their marketing strategies with minimal costs (Gursoy & Chi, 2020).

Conclusion

     The increasing technological developments in the contemporary world highlight the need to study the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on marketing. In other words, the need for developing marketing activities and the role of technology has become more tangible than ever before due to the recent global pandemic.

     The present paper sought to investigate the influence of using technologies on marketing performance considering the role of the COVID-19 pandemic. Marketing strategies based on digital technologies can have an overall positive impact on the marketing performance of hotels since they help users visit social media pages more often and review the comments of others. It has been revealed that new technological approaches like digital marketing could impact sales and profits and customers in a positive and profitable way (Baharuddin et al., 2022). Overall, digital marketing strategies can influence the marketing performance of hotels and increase their reservation rates given the widespread use of social media since they offer customized services to the users of digital media (De Pelsmacker et al., 2018).In this respect, the result of the present study confirmed the first hypothesis and it showed that the use of technology has a positive influence on hotels’ marketing performance.