The results provide several contributions to the hospitality literature as well as to restaurant operators.
First, a content analysis of recent hospitality literature summarizes research that has applied the hedonic pricing model by industry, variables, and analysis methods. Future researchers can use this information to find what is lacking in the previous studies and improve their future research.
Second, the proposed model includes new, additional variables to explain meal price variations. Most of the previous studies on meal price have included three common variables: food, service, and décor. In addition to those, the hedonic pricing model in this study includes variables, such as ease of access (first floor location), franchising, and the number of blogger reviews, that have not been tested in previous studies. Third, data collected in this study are from the perspective of customers, from ZAGAT Survey and restaurant blogs. Previous studies used expert reviews such as Michelin Star (Gergaud et al., 2007) and Exxon Mobil’s star ratings in explaining the pricing of products. In addition to physical characteristics of restaurants (parking, private room availability, first floor location, franchising, and cuisine type), this study used data determined by customers (meal price, food quality, service, décor, and the number of blogger reviews).