Management of the change process in hotel companies: An investigation at unit level

The management of change has become an organisational necessity in the 1990s and will continue to be a major factor in the management of hotel companies in the future. This article investigates and evaluates management of the change process at unit level in hotel firms. The data was gathered through in-depth semi-structured interviews with ten hotel managers in the UK. Lewin’s three-stage model was found to be of limited use in practice. A five-stage model of the change process emerges from the research findings. This model reflects a more practical view of the management of change as an on-going, continuous process. Finally, the limitations of the research are discussed and further research areas identified.     

A grounded theory approach to developing a career change model in hospitality

The purpose of this paper is to create a substantive theory explaining career change. A grounded theory approach was employed to explore the decision to change careers for young hotel managers. We use data from a series of open-ended interviews with people who have left the hotel industry to create a model explaining early career changes. This paper expands on current literature by analyzing the viewpoint of those who have changed careers to better understand the phenomenon, and seeks to identify the key reasons why young hotel professionals change their careers. In contrast to most current research, the findings indicate that job satisfaction and professional identity were not key factors in the decision to change careers. However, dissatisfaction with career progression did seem very important, and work to life conflict, which is seldom studied in career change literature, was found to be a key component of career change.     

An analysis of attitudes towards management during culture shifts

Based on the principles of the Social Exchange Theory, the purpose of this study is twofold: (1) to investigate the underlying dimensions of employees’ attitudes towards management factors during a time of organizational change with a focus on culture shift, and (2) to evaluate the relationships of these dimensions with job satisfaction and job recommendation. The data were gathered from 1807 employees of a world-wide hospitality company with 744 hotels. The online survey instrument was utilized. Analyses included factor and multiple regression. Study findings enabled the development of an “attitude towards management” scale during culture shifts. The findings of the research introduce and conceptualize the culture shift term within the hospitality industry context. Results also validate the efficacy of the Social Exchange Theory in predicting and explaining the attitudes of employees during the organizational change process. Additionally, findings suggest key strategies for hotel businesses to successfully manage an organizational change.     

Developing energy conservation and carbon reduction indicators for the hotel industry in Taiwan

This study develops and weights energy conservation and carbon reduction (ECCR) indicators for the hotel industry in Taiwan to create an instrument to help address climate change. Eighteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior hotel managers, environmental specialists, and government officials to identify the preliminary ECCR framework. An expert panel then was invited to review the structure of ECCR criteria and the compiled criteria in a structure for item modification. An analytic network process questionnaire survey was employed to determine the relative weights of the criteria. The data analysis reveals seven categories in the ECCR framework: communication and participation, top management commitment, energy, water, waste, building, and purchasing. A total of 32 indicators were identified and prioritized in terms of their relative importance to ECCR contributions. The results of this study suggest that the success of ECCR implementation depends primarily on management support and staff engagement. Hotel operators can improve their environmental management by initiating ECCR practices based on the proposed ECCR indicators.     

The role of relationship quality in raising organizational change acceptance: The case of the Greek hotel industry

This study examines whether the quality of an employee's relationships, within the context of the hotel industry, has an influence on their behavioral intention towards organizational change. The researchers suggest that the quality of relationships is an important element of an individual's social capital and can be evaluated using five key dimensions: the extent to which relationships are tangible, responsive and reliable, as well as the extent to which they offer empathy and assurance. Furthermore, this research examines whether organizational commitment and job satisfaction have an effect on the association between relationship quality and an individual's behavioral intention towards organizational change. The data collected from a sample of 100 hotel employees in Thessaloniki, Greece, show that relationship quality has a positive association with an individual's behavioral intention towards change. Additional results highlight the roles of job satisfaction and organizational commitment as mediating variables. Managerial implications relevant to the findings and pathways for further research are also discussed.     

Designing Collaboration Process Facilitation in Hotel Management Teams to Improve Collaboration Performance

This study proposes a structured collaboration process providing procedural guidance to facilitate smooth collaboration among hotel management teams. Design science research (DSR) and action research methodologies were followed to develop and evaluate an effective process facilitation based on collaboration engineering (CE) for group-oriented solutions in the hospitality industry. We interviewed members of the hotel management teams who used our process for insights and feedback and conducted a second-round iteration to optimize the designed artifact. According to the research findings, the designed artifact was perceived as easy to follow. Hospitality groups that deployed the proposed process facilitation reported good collaboration performances. Interviewees listed several merits of our collaboration process, including structured collaboration guidance, strict time control, and idea generation encouragement. As one of the first studies to adopt DSR methodology in hotel management teams, this paper puts forth a valuable approach to collaboration engineering in the hospitality industry.     

Improving hotel budgetary practice—A positive theory model

Budgeting is the most widely used management accounting technique. This research considered contemporary hotel sector practice and theory concerning budgeting. The rationale for existing practice was further explored through qualitative research. This led to the development of recommendations concerning budgetary processes within the hotel sector.The results identified some aspects of practice that can be improved, particularly participation in the budgeting process at lower management levels in organizations and the financial training needs of non-financial managers. These findings have implications for management in the industry and recommendations for how current budgeting practice in hotels can be enhanced are given.     

An introduction to helpful forecasting methods for hotel revenue management

Revenue management is a key tool for hotel managers’ decision-making process. Cutting-edge revenue management systems have been developed to support managers’ decisions and all have as an essential component an accurate forecasting module. This paper aims to introduce new time series forecasting models to be considered as a tool for forecasting daily hotel occupancies. These models were developed in a state space modelling framework which is capable of tackling seasonal complexities such as multiple seasonal periods and non-integer seasonality. An empirical study was carried out to illustrate how a practitioner may apply and compare the performance of different models when forecasting a hotel’s daily occupancy. Results showed that the trigonometric model based on the new modelling framework generally outperformed the majority of the other models. These findings are potentially useful to the entire revenue management community facing the challenge of accurately forecasting a hotel’s daily demand.     

Assessing holiday satisfaction of Australian travellers in Vietnam: An application of the HOLSAT model

The hotel business model has been diversified in response to the various needs of consumers. Many previous studies focused on the alteration factors of the hotel business model from the consumer's point of view. Although it is one of the factors that affect alteration of the hotel business model, the manager's perspective is also an important alteration factor. This article emphasizes that it is necessary to consider not only the consumer side, but also the management side based on two approaches of the strategy theory: the positioning approach and the resource-based approach.

Surveys were conducted by mail in order to gather information regarding what managers in Japan consider to be important components of a hotel. As a result, “location” was found to be the most important component, followed by “annex facilities” and “deployment system”. Once the components were ordered according to their relative importance, a strong relationship was found between the managers' preferences and the characteristics of “syukuhakusyutai-type” hotels, which are ‘direct management’ (DM) hotels located usually in the city. In Japan, the number of “syukuhakusyutai-type” hotels has recently increased, therefore capturing the spotlight in the hotel industry. However, the results of this research are not compared with those of much previous research conducted on hotel choice attributes, because the measured variables differed significantly.     

Application of EMSs in a hotel context: A case study

In the last decade, hotel companies have become increasingly interested in the application of environmental management systems (EMSs). However, research on the effectiveness of EMSs in the hotel industry has been sparse. This study aims to address this research gap by exploring and evaluating the application of EMSs in a hotel context. Various approaches to EMSs are identified in the literature on environmental management and EMSs, including six core EMS elements specific to the hotel industry context. To develop a rich and deep understanding of the application of EMSs in the hotel industry, a qualitative case study was conducted in which data were collected from three levels of employees, executive, supervisory and general, from an international hotel. A series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted and relevant documents were collected for analysis. Four influential factors were identified in the formation stage of the hotel's EMS: (1) Corporate governance, (2) Piloting activities, (3) Initial gap analysis and (4) Partnership with external consultancy. It was also found that the six elements identified in the environmental management literature play important roles in the implementation of EMS in this case. In addition, although EMSs can help promote a bottom-up approach to change, a top-down approach to implementing EMSs was more suitable for a hotel with a predominantly Chinese workforce, due to cultural issues. This study identified a number of factors specifically related to EMSs to complement mainstream environmental management research.     

“I have to watch my back”: Exploring Chinese hotel guests’ generalized distrust and coping behavior

The hospitality industry has been suffering from a pervasive climate of suspicion among guests who are concerned about potential hygiene or safety issues. From the perspective of protection motivation theory, this study presents a conceptual model elucidating the underlying mechanism through which generalized distrust shapes hotel guests' defensive coping behavior. Exploratory semi-structured interviews and online posts were combined to identify hotel guests' on-site coping strategies and underlying mechanisms. Then, an online questionnaire was distributed to 532 respondents, and structural equation modeling was used to test the proposed research model. Results provide empirical support for the “cognition–emotion–coping behavior” pattern in cognitive appraisal theory. This study offers valuable insight into the management of hotel guests’ generalized distrust.     

Improving Hotel Efficiency Through Integration of Service and Project Management Cultures

This article proposes that efficiency of hotel organizations could be improved by integrating service-oriented operations with project management principles. Such integration would instill innovation, proactive attitudes and regulated risk-taking needed to pursue ongoing improvement and proactive response to change. By managing each change as a project, embedded in smoothly running operations, hotels would extend their life span by continuously reinventing themselves. The implementation of such strategic shift would necessitate reliance on empowered staff, placed in a flexible environment that engenders favorable climates for service, innovation, and strategic human resources (HR). The end result is synergy achieved through a complementary mix of service and project management cultures.     

Applications of Business Process Redesign in Hotel Daily Operations

Abstract

The growing yet competitive global economy necessitates businesses to continuously seek ways to execute more efficiently while delivering products or services to customer expectations of quality and timeliness. Business process redesign (BPR) is an approach to analyze, evaluate, and change existing processes and sub-processes in the product/service manufacture and delivery cycle. Delivery of services is more difficult due to the nebulousness of the customer final interpretation and the rapid evaporation of the delivery occurrence. The drop in American travel since September 11, 2001 has devastated hotel occupancy. Hotels delivering services matching or exceeding customer expectation will be more likely to survive the ebb of customer room night sales.

This project applied BPR to a process of airport van delivery in a large US hotel. Following customer complaint, the hotel gathered staff to discuss and propose solutions to reducing customer wait times at the airport curb. An initial analysis by management indicated that communications and employee training were two interventions to the process that would likely improve the process. During the analysis period, customers riding in the van were surveyed to determine their satisfaction with the pickup service. The process was redesigned to add more communication devices to the concierge work area and to improve van driver training. Customers were resurveyed following the intervention. Significant improvement was noted in operator courtesy and friendliness and decreased wait time. Allowing time to analyze processes within an operation can yield rapid improvements often without major financial expenditure.     

Organizational Learning and Hotel Performance: The Role of Capabilities’ Hierarchy

Building on the capabilities’ hierarchy concept, a model of the effect of organizational learning on hotel performance is proposed and tested in this study. Data was collected from 240 managers in the hotel industry of United Kingdom and Pakistan via survey. The results revealed strong direct inter-relation between different level of capabilities and an indirect relation between organizational learning and performance through these capabilities. This paper makes theoretical contributions to management as well as hospitality and tourism research by generating an integrative and unifying framework for an organizational learning performance relationship, clarifying capabilities inter-relationships and empirically revealing the exact way these capabilities enhance performance. Also, it has practical implications for hotel managers’ understanding on the development and use of capabilities as a hierarchy in enhancing their hotel performance.     

Impacts of peer-to-peer accommodation on the hotel industry: Hoteliers’ perspectives

The sharing economy is a new phenomenon that has considerable implications for traditional industries in general and the hospitality sector in particular. Although some recent studies have investigated the effects of sharing economy on the hotel industry, they primarily focused on quantifying its effects which are not exploratory for a phenomenon. This study attempts to achieve two research objectives. First, an exploratory qualitative method via a semi-structured in-depth interview is employed to investigate the impacts of P2P accommodation on the industry from hoteliers’ perspectives in China. Second, the current study provides valuable insights about traditional hotel marketing and operations. A social science perspective is proposed because prior hospitality research, merely in its commercial sense, fails to capture the essence of hospitality. Results indicate that P2P accommodation has effects on the hotel industry in terms of host–guest interactions, product offerings, staff empowerment, and platform collaboration. The study also suggests that the extent to which P2P accommodation impacts the hotel industry is different in terms of hotel star ratings and operating model. P2P accommodation and the hotel industry in China have a supplementary relationship. This study contributes to social studies of the hospitality literature by gaining insights from hotel senior management level. It also has great implications for the hotel marketing and management practices within the sharing context.     

Hotel career management in China: Developing a measurement scale

This study aims to develop a measurement scale for organizational career management (OCM) in China's hotel industry. The scale development procedure includes four steps: developing initial items, implementing purifying measures, data collection, and assessing the reliability and validity of the proposed measurement scale. Both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) are used to test the reliability and validity of the measurement scale thus developed. The development process results in a reliable and valid scale for hotel career management incorporating three dimensions: (1) career appraisal and advice, (2) a career development program, and (3) career training. Given the scarcity of research on career management in China, the measurement scale developed in this study will serve as a foundation for future research. The findings of this study may help to stimulate further empirical research on the relationship between hotel career management and employees’ career commitment and career satisfaction.     

Total quality management, market orientation and hotel performance: The moderating effects of external environmental factors

With the market competition of hotel industry being heated, it is critical that hotels have a breadth of resource and more flexible forms to meet the needs of a changing marketplace. In the past, the relation of total quality management (TQM), market orientation, and performance are equivocal. These mixed results may be due to some factors or not to include the environmental factors. This study adopts the Input-Processing-Output (IPO) concept model to construct all variables research model. The research surveyed samples of 588 and used Structural Equation Model and discriminate analysis for analysis and testing. The results show that TQM positively affects hotel performance. Market orientation positively affects hotel performance. Market orientation has the mediating effect between TQM and hotel performance. External environment factors truly play a moderator between TQM, market orientation and hotel performance, especially when external environment factors greater changes are going to help to build relationship with customer, to enhance hotel performance and further to gain chance of hotel's survival.     

How do dynamic capabilities explain hotel performance?

This research study explores the relationship between three dynamic capabilities and their impact on hotel performance. Specifically, we examine the relationship between human resource management (HRM), quality management (QM) and sustainability. In addition, we analyse how QM and sustainability explain hotel performance measured by occupancy rate, average daily rate (ADR) and revenues per available room (RevPAR). These capabilities can generate income, enabling hotels to adapt as quickly as possible to the changing environment. Findings show a significant relationship between HRM, QM and sustainability. The relationship between QM and hotel performance and between sustainability and hotel performance is fully mediated by the differentiation competitive advantage. Our results represent an advance in hotel theory and management because they integrate HRM, QM and sustainability, and show their ability to be a source of competitive advantage and profitability.     

境外酒店环境行为研究述评

文章以国际学术界具有较高权威性和较大影响力的旅游、管理学研究期刊中检索到的1995~2012年间的48篇酒店环境行为学术文献为研究文本,运用文献计量学方法,对文献的数量变化、期刊、研究地域范围以及研究主题、研究方法及研究风格等信息进行统计、分析和比较,提炼和分析了境外学者在酒店环境行为研究中的成果和观点,为酒店企业环境行为的研究和发展提供参考依据。     

基于细节服务的酒店形象影响因素研究

细节服务作为酒店管理多元化发展的一个分支,对挖掘、整合和利用酒店资源,发现、赢得和稳定客户,识别、利用和树立良好的酒店形象有着不可忽视的作用.本文首先从细节服务的视角出发,剖析了细节服务的关键因子及其对酒店形象的影响.在此基础上构建了基于细节服务的酒店形象影响因素模型,并提出了相应假设;然后运用统计方法对其进行了验证,实证结果基本符合本文的研究构思和假设;最后,本文就如何依托细节服务提升酒店形象提出了相应对策.