Love or hate? Hotels' gay-friendliness and their intention to maintain or diminish the hotel digital service relationship with OTAs

This study offers the first analysis of hotel managers' intentions to maintain or diminish a service business relationship with Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) based on an empirical assessment of transaction-specific variables, socio-relational variables and values-related variables (namely, gay-friendliness). Based on 206 questionnaires administered to EU-based hotels, the study suggests that a hotel's intention to maintain seems to be impacted by both the economic dimension and the hotel's self-perceived gay-friendliness. The intention to diminish follows a different path, being mainly motivated by opportunistic and transaction-specific characteristics of the service. Our results suggest that hotels geared toward the LGBT travel market can benefit from being listed on OTAs without suffering brand image drawbacks. Moreover, like is already common in the CSR realm, OTAs should allow hotels to include LGBT-related information and explicitly expand their search engines to target gay-friendly hospitality.