The Role of Micro Influencers in the Consumer Decision-Making on Budget Hotels in the Indian Context

The hospitality industry is a dynamic one that has evolved in its services and operations from being merely an accommodation provider to now being an experience provider. In more recent times, hotels have been engaging more frequently with micro influencers benefitting from their reach among the desired target audience through their followers as well as gaining marketing advantage at a large scale but at a relatively low cost and involvement rate. Budget hotels, especially, like OYO, Fab, and Key hotels as well as the luxury brand budget accommodation arms like Ginger, Fortune, Fairfield and more have been widely hopping onto this trend. With the goal of understanding the impact that micro influencers have on consumer decision making on budget hotels in the Indian context, this study set out to understand the role that micro influencers play in the consumer decision making on budget hotels, gain insights on the importance and usefulness of user-generated content, find out if social media has an impact on consumer decision making, and understand the reasons behind the conversion of consumers’ purchase intentions to actual purchase actions. Involving two hundred respondents pan India, through the random and snowball sampling techniques, eight factors were considered, namely: Influencer Marketing, Role of Influencers, User Generated Content, SMIs, Purchase Intention, Economic Value, Aesthetic Value, Perceived Value. The results to the survey form circulated among the respondents were analyzed and interpreted with the help of Factor and Regression Analyses conducted on the SPSS software by IBM. Ultimately, five hypotheses relating to customer decision making while choosing budget hotels and the role of micro influencers in it were focused on in the study and proven to be true based on the findings.