Mergers and acquisitions in the hotel industry: A comprehensive review

This study aims to evaluate the current status of merger and acquisition (M&A) studies in the hotel industry and propose directions for future research. Forty-six articles were identified from ScienceDirect, Scopus, and EBSCOhost including 31 empirical and 15 conceptual articles. We review these articles from five perspectives, namely, journal/year distribution, methodology, research context, theoretical foundation and major topics. Findings reveal most studies on M&As in the hotel industry (hotel M&As) focus on performance, motivation and objectives. Developed economies (DEs) are the major research contexts and quantitative approach is the dominant research method. To this end, we propose seven research directions that cover outstanding themes as follows: 1) exploring M&A process, 2) M&A performance assessment, 3) identifying M&A impacts on stakeholders, 4) examining cross-border M&As, 5) examining emerging economies (EE)-based M&As, 6) investigating macro environment impacts, and 7) premium determinants and their impacts on hotel M&As.