Shaping Social Media Analytics in the Pursuit of Organisational Agility: A Real Options Theory Perspective

Although social media analytics has been extensively adopted by the hotel industry, how hotels leverage social media analytics capability (SMAC) to create business value remains unclear. Underpinned by real options theory (ROT), this study presents a framework to examine the mechanisms by which organisational agility indirectly influences hotel performance through the mediating role of SMAC. We tested the framework by drawing on a dataset of matched data from hotel practitioners and the customer reviews attached to each surveyed hotel on TripAdvisor. Our empirical results confirm that the appropriate deployment of SMAC has the potential to develop positive word-of-mouth and improve customers’ perception of hotel quality. More importantly, our findings highlight the important role of SMAC in mediating the effect of sensing agility on hotel performance. However, SMAC cannot mediate the impact of responding agility on hotel performance. This study contributes to hotel management research by emphasising the importance of SMAC and enriches the extant literature on organisational agility in the tourism context.