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Overview

Anderson has been actively engaged with industry throughout his academic career – starting with a collaboration with US Airways playing a critical role in his doctoral dissertation.  Anderson continues to work on joint research projects with industry as well as consult on more applied projects.  While many of these collaborations result in proprietary results and/or IP, below is a summary of publicly available information on a few engagements.

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An example of a multi-firm collaboration with Amadeus,  IHG and Foresight Factory resulted in an industry focused whitepaper that examines the drivers that will shape the hospitality industry in the future. The report includes further analysis into the industry impact of these drivers by Cornell’s Center of Hospitality Research . The paper explores what lies ahead for the hospitality industry when it comes to service, loyalty and the booking experience. Threaded throughout is the increasingly powerful role technology plays in meeting the needs of the modern-day traveler.
Working with the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) I outlined the role of user generated content in reshaping hotel classification systems.  This work resulted in an industry report as well as an academic publication in Service Science.

A collaboration with Wyndham Destinations led to the development of a pricing system for short-term rentals, the details of the system and approach as well as its financial impact are outlined in an Informs publication.

In conjunction with the New Mexico Tourism Department we developed a digital hotel index to benchmark the readiness of hotels within the state of New Mexico to rebound from Covid-19.  As part of the study we developed online training materials for hoteliers within the state to improve their digital marketing, website presence and engage with consumers online.  An earlier student project focused on best practices for website design at a small independent hotel, the St James Hotel in Red Wing MN, resulting in an industry facing report on Search Engine Optimization.
I have had many engagements with vendors and platforms focused on social media, specifically the impact of social media upon customer engagement and satisfaction and ultimately upon firm performance.  In a joint collaboration with ReviewPRO and Smith Travel Research I conducted the first extensive study that looked at the impact of social media upon firm performance – this work resulted in both academic publications, industry facing reports highlighting the important role of online reviews for service firms as we quantified the impact of reviews upon hotel demand (and pricing power).  A subsequent publication highlighted the agency relationship (i.e. the difference in these impacts between branded and independent hotels).  As a result of these studies we established an Index of customer satisfaction by hotel brands (and sub-brands)
We extended our earlier studies on social media to further include consumer engagement effects. A report stemming from collaboration with TripAdvisor outlines the impact of responding to reviews on TripAdvisor – highlighting both the financial and guest satisfaction impacts of responding to both negative and (some of) positive reviews.  Given the increasing importance of reviews, through a series of collaborations we highlighted the differences in reviews across platforms with a Cornell Quarterly (CQ)  publication focusing on response bias (i.e. who decides to post a review) and a Service Science publication focused on differences across platforms (e.g. Google, TripAdvisor, etc…).

A unique comprehensive partnership with Best Western Hotels resulted in a series of research studies with a notable CQ paper highlighting the impacts of customer engagement (through reviews and customer feedback channels) upon booking channel (Direct versus OTA) preference.

Almost 20 years ago I started getting interested in the impact of online selling (distribution and digital marketing) upon firms.  As part of this early recent I conducted a study joint with Expedia and JHM Hotels to look at the impact of selling online at intermediaries (like Expedia, Priceline and Booking.com) upon demand at hotel direct channels (their websites and call centers). This collaboration resulted in a report where I coined the term Billboard Effect to reflect the lift created by 3rd party selling, I followed this initial study up with 2 more detailed papers with an expanded analysis using a commercial data sample and a  3rd report using random sample of US customers.  More recently I summarized a natural experiment  in a CQ article that highlights the impacts of hotels delisting from all OTAs.

Pricing has always been a key aspect of many of my consulting and research collaborations, one of my earliest collaborations with Dollar Car Rental resulted in an Operations Research publication that used financial option theory or Real Options to price the flexibility afforded to customers given that they can make and cancel many types of reservations (for rental cars, hotel rooms, dining reservations, etc…) for free.

I have had a long history of working on opaque selling – a form of selling pioneered in travel by companies like Priceline and Hotwire. An early collaboration with a recently graduated student working at Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants resulted in report and ultimately a paper on Setting Prices on Priceline, this collaboration was extended as I developed a subsequent paper at  Setting Prices on Hotwire as well as a teaching case I use in many of my modeling courses.

I continue to work collaboratively and as a consultant with many organizations, please reach out if you are interested in engaging – canderson@cornell.edu.

Consulting and Applied Research

  • Pricing, Distribution and Revenue Management
  • Social Media
  • Hospitality and Travel Analytics
CONTACT CHRIS ANDERSON

Questions? Contact Chris!