Customer relationship management in small–medium enterprises: The case of Turkish tourism industry

In this study, the factors influencing the implementation of customer relationship management (CRM) at small and medium-sized tourism enterprises in Cappadocia were analyzed. The findings of the research indicate that communication-distribution infrastructure, business dynamics, customer relations and innovation-quality factors affect CRM. Business dynamics plays an especially critical role in customer relations. It was also determined that the most important barriers to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the tourism sector are inadequate supporting budgets, lack of senior management commitment to CRM and poor communication.     

Wisdom of crowds: Conducting importance-performance analysis (IPA) through online reviews

This paper proposes a methodology for conducting importance-performance analysis (IPA) through online reviews. The methodology is composed of three stages: (1) mining useful information from online reviews, (2) estimating each attribute's performance and importance, and (3) constructing IPA plot, where the latent dirichlet allocation (LDA), the improved one-vs-one strategy based support vector machine (IOVO-SVM) and the ensemble neural network based model (ENNM) are respectively used. A case study on two five-star hotels is given, and the results obtained by the proposed methodology through online reviews are compared with those obtained by the existing methods through questionnaires (or online ratings). The results indicate that the proposed methodology can obtain effective analysis results with lower cost and shorter time since online reviews are publicly available and easily collected. The proposed methodology can give managers or market analysts one more choice for conducting IPA or serve as a preparing process of large-scale survey.     

Text mining a decade of progress in hospitality human resource management research: Identifying emerging thematic development

The authors identified the emerging research streams based on the published research literature in human resource management (HRM) from 1994 to 2003 in the International Journal of Hospitality Management. Textual data were collected and content-analyzed by a text-mining program aided by human judgments. The results from the content analysis of both the computer-aided and human judgmental methods were then integrated and conceptually graphed to map meaningful findings that were logically precise, humanly readable, and computationally tractable. Through this unique approach, nine major HRM research themes emerged and each thematic development based on time and country was interpreted and discussed.     

Importance-performance analysis (IPA) of sustainable tourism initiatives: The resident perspective

While importance-performance analysis (IPA) is one of the most ubiquitous methodological tools utilized in tourism research, its supply-side application to residents has been lacking. Additionally, little research has examined residents' perceptions of sustainable tourism initiatives (STIs) or their community's performance on these STIs. Given this gap, this study conducted an IPA of resident attitudes towards STIs across three U.S. counties in the Commonwealth of Virginia with varying levels of emphasis placed on sustainable tourism within their strategic plans. The results revealed residents of the three counties placed uniformly high levels of importance on the STIs, but varied in their perceptions of performance. The county with the most emphasis placed on sustainable tourism within their plan was found to have the highest performance evaluations. Methodological and theoretical considerations are discussed in detail, including the placement of cross-hairs and how IPA can be situated within social exchange theory and Oliver's expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm.