Challenges of Hotel Branding. An Overview of the Romanian Seaside Hotel Industry

Brands have well-known advantages for companies, from ensuring product differentiation to the much appraised and hard to gain brand loyalty. Due to the particular features of services, service branding requires specific attention, and although it was given less consideration than product branding in the dedicated literature, during the past years a certain amount of attention was also bestowed on service branding. The highly competitive environment of hotel industry has claimed use of brands and brands have become vital to their marketing strategies. In the hotel industry, brands have become quality cues and have gained their place among the factors the purchase decision is based on. The paper is aimed at presenting several facets of branding in the hotel industry, and at briefly asserting the current state and challenges faced by the Romanian Seaside hotel industry related to branding.