Given the nature of the innovation it soon became apparent that consumer reactions needed to be more fully gauged by constructing a prototype. This was because ‘it’s a very difficult concept to visualise because there was nothing else like it’. Hotel C also had an extensive customer monitoring system based on face-to-face discussions with customers, in-room questionnaires and social network sites, particularly TripAdvisor. However, unlike Hotel B, the marketing manager at Hotel C considered TripAdvisor as a domain for consumers and had never sought to engage consumers directly through the site. For Hotel E, however, the provenance of customer feedback generated by social network sites was difficult to establish:
‘TripAdvisor is something that we look at, the down side of TripAdvisor is the fact that it is an open community not a closed community and actually what a few hotel groups have been doing is putting bad reviews on competitor sites, really noticeably actually, a couple of groups are quite bad at that.’