Does hotel location tell a true story? Evidence from geographically weighted regression analysis of hotels in Hong Kong

Abstract

This study is among the first attempts to understand hotel location choice by developing a local spatial model to investigate spatial determinants of hotel locations in an urban tourism destination, taking Hong Kong as the study context. The spatially diverse relationships between nine factors (i.e., land area, green land, traffic land, residential land, commercial land, institutional land, metro station density, attraction density, population density, and average income) and the number of hotels in Hong Kong are quantified by geographically weighted Poisson regression. Results indicate that (1) factors influencing hotel location choice vary across regions; (2) traffic factors do not always affect hotel location choice in urban destinations; and (3) the effects of independent variables in peripheral regions are strong and decrease gradually in the urban center, revealing a ‘poached egg’ pattern, where hotel clustering is associated with agglomeration effects.