Understanding the role of human capital is one of the key considerations in delivering and sustaining competitiveness. Managing employees in the hospitality industry is particularly a challenging task as the industry is considered to be labor intensive. High turnover and increasing employee demands are among the problems that are identified as threats to maintaining a strong competitive position. Successful hotels attempt to retain their best employees in an effort to adapt to changing environments and increased competition. Effective hotel human resource systems can produce positive outcomes, through effective employee retention strategies that focus on work force motivation, attitudes and perception. The positive implementation of these strategies can influence and create employee satisfaction. This study aims to focus on the relationship between the mediating variables of motivation, attitudes, perception and their effect on employee satisfaction. These findings are based upon an extensive survey carried out between April 2009 and June 2009 in the small mountainous state of Uttarakhand, located within the Indian sub-continent. Although the area of study is confined to the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand, the authors contend that the findings and implications can be applied to other remote developing tourist destinations in other regions.
Service Learning in Sport Management: A Community Health Project Sport management has become an increasingly popular academic discipline in colleges and universities. Sports have become a major industry, resulting in both increased need for professionals and more opportunities to train students effectively for sport careers by providing them with the kinds of learning environments that produce critical thinkers and problem solvers. How to go about creating learning environments that enhance student learning about sport organizations is a challenge faced by most professors. While the sport management curriculum is rife with opportunities to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills, all too often the learning environment best suits a passive style of learning. This traditional academic style of teaching and learning involves students listening to lectures, reading, taking test and quizzes, writing research papers, and watching films or video (Parkhouse, 2005). The strength of this method is its strong theoretical underpinning; its weakness is its failure to engage students in the pedagogical value of real-world experiences in sport organizations. Service learning is a method of teaching and learning that can make up what is missing from more traditional approaches to learning. Sport management courses can be designed and implemented as service learning, featuring projects addressing, for example, community health challenges. Though the curricular design presented here could be applied to address any community problem, it was used by the researchers in a fund raising project benefiting a malaria mitigation effort in which bed nets were distributed as a low-cost means of prevention. It is a requirement, however, that service learning be based on recognized community and humanitarian needs. Service learning is an experiential pedagogical approach that goes beyond mere classroom instruction. Service learning involves the blending of service activities and classroom instruction with the purpose of meeting real community needs as students learn through active engagement and reflection (Geleta & Gilliam, 2003; Mumford & Kane, 2006). One benefit of service learning is that it connects hands-on learning to classroom knowledge. This connection of practical application to theory enhances the academic curriculum and also provides a structure helping students to reflect on their service experience (Prentice & Garcia, 2000). Service learning provides meaningful experiences that enable students to learn by doing rather than only reading, talking, and writing about doing (Parkhouse, 2005). It is a pedagogy that fosters critical-thinking and problem-solving skills as it supplements traditional curricula and classroom activities. In addition, service learning fosters civic responsibility, personal and social development, and opportunities for career exploration (Prentice & Garcia, 2000). Malaria Mitigation Is a Recognized Need Fighting deadly malaria is clearly a recognized need. Malaria is one of the world's most dire public health concerns, causing over a million deaths and up to 500 million clinical cases each year. It is particularly devastating in Africa, where there are some 3,000 deaths from malaria every day and 10 new cases every second. Malaria is the leading cause of death for Africa's children under age five. More than a third of the world's total population now lives where the disease is endemic, so it takes a high toll on households and also on health care systems, impeding development. It is estimated that malaria reduces growth of gross domestic product by approximately one percentage point per year (World Economic Forum, 2006). It is the poor who are most affected by malaria. They have less access to information, services, and protective measures, and less power to avoid living or working in malaria-affected areas. …
The objective of this research study was to determine the effect of hotel rate increases and discounts against a reference price in an effort to determine if consumer willingness-to-purchase rises and fall accordingly with the changes. The results of price increases against a reference price indicated that as the rates rose, a consumer's willingness-to-purchase decreased in direct relation to the magnitude of the increase. The results for rate discounts when compared to an established reference provided a non-linear relationship, and at certain levels provided no significant change in a consumer's willingness-to-purchase. This is an interesting finding that there is a nonlinear relationship between hotel rate discounts and consumers' willingness to pay. It explains some of the dilemmas faced by hotel managers with reference to hotel rate discounts and increases.
This study's findings, together with the results of earlier studies of the relationship between advertising and market prices, provide considerable empirical support for the pro-competitive view of seller advertising. Data on attorney fees and advertising practices in seventeen metropolitan areas across the U.S. were used to estimate the effect of market advertising intensity on firm demand elasticities, holding other possible influencing factors constant. The results obtained for all three routine legal services examined are consistent with the hypothesis that advertising increases competition among sellers in a market.
This study's purpose was to assess the impact of temporal, seasonal and calendar effects, on guests' comments in hospitality. The current study analyzed the differences in food and service quality using guests' comments collected by a national restaurant firm over a period of one year. Comments were analyzed for season of the year, weekend versus weekday, busy versus slow days, and day of the week. Findings included statistically significant differences of (positive and negative) comments between day of week and busy/slow periods. Most notably, positive food quality comments were submitted more often during busy periods, indicating a possible need for training of employees who work during slow periods.
Steve Smith, Managing Director of IT security consultancy Pentura, looks at the implications of using open source in business and argues that security is just one issue that organisations need to consider when contemplating an open source system.
Drawing on Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, this research develops and tests a conceptual model of the positive influence of brand resources and brand love during consumers' stressful life transitions. Our online survey of consumers going through a life transition finds that when brands provide social and financial resources, the resulting brand love leads to increased brand equity and life satisfaction. These positive effects of brand resources are stronger for negative transitions than positive transitions and are attenuated without brand love. Further qualitative investigation of user-generated content of consumers going through a life transition to college finds evidence of the resource-brand love relationship. Implications for brand managers and consumer well-being are discussed.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine how much the lodging shared economy (LSE) utilizes minimum length of stay (MLOS) controls to maximize revenue and reduce housekeeping expense, since cleaning between guest visits represents a substantial variable cost for each guest’s stay. Hosts in the LSE are becoming increasingly perceptive in maximizing revenues. Design/methodology/approach Daily data for one year were collected for Vacation Rental by Owner properties in Hilton Head Island, SC and Orlando, FL. The collected data include daily vacancies for two different lengths of stay. Linear regression was used to explore the relationship between relative demand and vacancy length of stay differences. Findings During high-demand periods, there were few differences between the availability of short-term and longer-term reservation vacancies, which indicated hosts were not encouraging guests to stay longer during each visit. These results reveal differences in vacancies for three-night vs six-night reservations. A host can generate more revenue and decrease expenses by maximizing booked nights per visit. Research limitations/implications Due to confidentiality issues, this study does not capture vacation bookings but instead captures vacancies. In addition, Average Daily Rate was not utilized in this study. Practical implications LSE hosts can maximize revenues using MLOS controls. Minimizing housekeeping costs boosts a host’s profitability. Originality/value Although this research has been conducted for hotel MLOS, there is a gap in the literature regarding LSE hosts’ use of MLOS.
The co-creation of value is emerging as the new frontier in marketing. Value creation is now conceptualized as shared by both producers and consumers, making the terminology separating these roles increasingly archaic and obsolete. To date, the literature has emphasized this process primarily from the firm’s vantage point. Current understandings point toward a balanced, shared, harmonious relationship between producers and consumers, where controlling the co-creation process with consumers ensures a predictable and satisfactory outcome for a company. Because the consumer perspective has received less theoretical and empirical attention, we conducted an in-depth investigation that details the consumers’ experiences of co-creation within the context of a brand community. What we found is very different from a balanced, controlled process depicted in the literature. Based on these findings, we argue that the notions of control and predictability that have served as the established foundation for marketing theory and practice may require serious revision in light of examining how consumers create value. Because of this, our data lead us to propose some new ideas about managing brand experiences in increasingly interconnected and chaotic environments, where control is rapidly shifting more to the side of consumers, and no one now holds any sort of majority control.
Utilising secondary data, the present study investigated the effect of operational attributes and product type (cuisine) on the price that consumers paid in restaurants. Contrary to the commonly held belief, food quality generally had the lowest impact on price. High-end restaurants differed significantly from low-end restaurants on the effect of food, service and ambiance quality on the price that consumers paid. Study results clearly indicated that high-end restaurants displayed a concave curve in all three operational attributes in relation to increasing price points. For low-end restaurants, the curves of operational attributes were either horizontal or convex in relation to increasing price points.
