How will tourists select accommodation for their holiday after the COVID-19 Outbreak?. Insights from France

Set against the background of uncertainty and crisis generated by COVID-19, policy makers, destination marketers and tourism and hospitality managers are struggling in trying to envision how, and till when, tourist behaviour will be changed and transformed by this pandemic and how tourists will select the accommodation where to stay during their holiday.
So far, a limited number of academic studies have been devoted to analysing how travellers will select the accommodation for their holidays. This urges academicians to fill this gap with the aim to provide practitioners with fresh and insightful knowledge to support their decision making in a tourism era where everyone seems to be shifting towards a “new normality” of uncertain duration.
This study was therefore carried out to contribute to this debate by presenting and discussing findings of an empirical investigation applying a factor-cluster analysis on a sample of 225 French consumers/travellers to profile them based on accommodation selection criteria. Further, a series of chi-square tests was run to investigate whether significant differences exist among clusters based on their sociodemographic characteristics (i.e., gender, age, level of occupation, employment status) and travel-related variables (i.e., the preferred type of accommodation and the length of the holiday).
Findings contribute to deepening the scientific debate about how tourists’ behaviour is being transformed in a tourism era affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, our results will provide accommodation marketers with useful information to be used to effectively plan and implement their service design to meet tourists’ expectations and needs.