The determinants of managerial responses to hotel guests’ reviews: an exploratory study in the city of Milan

The spread of eWOM and travel review websites has profoundly changed the consumer decision-making process along with firms’ strategies. A key topic of discussion, both for academics and practitioners, is the opportunity to reply to online consumers’ reviews. Although some studies have recently investigated the subject, this topic need to be further explored. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the variables that influence hotels’ propensity to reply to guests’ reviews. The results of the research suggest that hotel managers show more propensity to reply to negative guests’ reviews of their native language. Possible motivations and implications are discussed

Hotel Selection: The Evaluation of Competitive Alternatives and Their Impact on Guests’ Service Expectations

The analysis of the factors that affect the hotel selection by guests is an interesting area of research with important managerial implications. Customers rarely focus their evaluations and build their expectations on a single hotel property. Consequently, a key factor is to understand how customers perceive the quality of services’ attributes and which is their importance and performance when compared with other competitors. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of a few competitive issues considered during the hotel’s selection and affecting the expected service. The results of the paper show that Psychological factors, Marketing communications and word of mouth, Hotel product and services and Price have positive and statistically significant influence on expectations. Competitors’ offers and actions have no significant impact on expectations in this first step. Further research is needed to better explore this last factor

Hotel performance: Rigor and relevant research topics

Academic research (rigor) in alignment with practitioners’ challenges (relevancy) has been advocated as a way of overcoming the ivory tower syndrome. Performance measurement is at the heart of strategic management processes, as it provides a mechanism of demonstrating outcomes. Given the importance of this topic for both theory and practice, this article explores the contribution of academic outputs in terms of academic research outputs (rigor) and current practitioners’ needs (relevancy). Using network analysis and cross-citation bibliometric approaches, a sample of 1,155 articles is examined and fourteen clusters are identified. The emergent topics and subtopics from the academic literature are compared to ten insights proposed by Ernst Young to the hotel sector. The findings suggest a good fit between the two approaches together with some gaps. Based from empirical results, nine propositions are articulated

Physical Modeling for Programming of TANOS Memories in the Fowler-Nordheim Regime

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Crystalline and liquid Si3 N4 characterization by first-principles molecular dynamics simulations

Silicon nitride (Si3 N4 ) has a wide range of engineering applications where its mechanical and electronic properties can be effectively exploited. In particular, in the microelectronics field, the amorphous silicon nitride films are widely used as charge storage layer in metal-alumina-nitrideoxide nonvolatile memory devices. Atomic structure of amorphous silicon nitride is characterized by an high concentration of traps that control the electric behavior of the final device by the trappingde-trapping mechanism of the electrical charge occurring in its traps. In order to have a deep understanding of the material properties and, in particular, the nature of the electrical active traps a detailed numerical characterization of the crystalline and liquid phases is mandatory. For these reasons first-principles molecular dynamics simulations are extensively employed to simulate the crystalline Si3 N4 in its crystalline and liquid phases. Good agreement with experimental results is obtained in terms of density and formation entalpy. Detailed characterization of c-Si3 N4 electronic properties is performed in terms of band structure and band gap. Then constant temperature and constant volume first-principles molecular dynamics is used to disorder a stoichiometric sample of Si3 N4 . Extensive molecular dynamics simulations are performed to obtain a reliable liquid sample whose atomic structure does not depend on the starting atomic configuration. Detailed characterization of the atomic structure is achieved in terms of radial distribution functions and total structure factor