Are all online hotel prices created dynamic? An empirical assessment

Understanding how tourist firms set their online prices is important given their growing reliance on Online Travel Agencies (OTA). The article investigates whether the narrative of a pervasive presence of dynamic pricing provides a realistic description of hotels’ online pricing behavior and thus challenges the view that dynamic pricing should be considered the prevailing norm for the industry. The evidence suggests a heterogeneous attitude across hotels, with uniform pricing being more widespread in most hotels of our sample, namely, the 3-star or less, while dynamic pricing is more likely applied in higher quality hotels.