Irish theme pubs : an evaluation of environmental cues

A major phenomenon in hospitality retailing in recent years has been the growth in Irish theme pubs. These pubs consist of a collection of both tangible and intangible attributes referred to as environmental cues or atmospherics. Although environmental cues have been found to have a significant influence on consumer behaviour, little research has been conducted into their effects within Irish theme pubs. Using an established research framework, the aims of this study were to identify and evaluate environmental cues within Irish theme pubs and to establish how the dimensions of this framework influenced customers of Irish theme pubs in Melbourne. Qualitative interviews were conducted with customers of six selected Irish theme pubs and with the owners of these establishments. Whilst confirming the impOliance of environmental cues to Irish theme pub customers, the study also provides information that has application for hospitality retailers.<br /

A situational model development in hospitality retailing : the case of Irish pubs

Although importance of situational influences on consumer behaviour has been recognised for some time, little research has been conducted into their effects on hospitality retailing. Over the past decade the Irish theme pub sector has enjoyed extensive growth, which recent studies attribute to the situational components inherent within the environment. This study identities and evaluates the situational components that influence consumers within Irish theme pubs and gauges impact of each of the dimensions of an established situational model on customer behaviour using gender and age cohorts. A three phase, mixed method research design was used and respondents were selected from six Irish theme pubs in Melbourne. The study found that both physical and social situational components have a significant influence in attracting, serving and satisfying the needs of consumers.<br /

An investigation into the influence of situational components in hospitality retailing

Although the importance of situational influences on consumer behaviour has been recognised for some time, little research has been conducted into their effects in hospitality retailing. Over the past decade the Irish theme pub sector has enjoyed extensive growth, which recent studies attribute to the situational components inherent within the environment. This study sought to identify and evaluate the situational components that influence consumers within Irish theme pubs and to gauge the influence of each of the dimensions of an established situational model on customer behaviour among gender and age cohorts. A three phase, mixed method research design was used and respondents were selected from six Irish theme pubs in Melbourne. The study found that both physical and social situational components have a significant influence in attracting, serving and satisfying the needs of consumers

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Exploring the impact of the constructs of the three-domain approach on private social and commercial hospitality provision

This article explores the constructs of private social and commercial hospitality in a panoramic examination of the impact and potential future development of the three-domain approach. Focused primarily (but not exclusively) on the books In Search of Hospitality: theoretical perspectives and debates, and Hospitality: A Social Lens, the article describes how the three-domain approach provides a theoretical framework to inform the holistic study of hospitality and discusses the importance of the broader phenomenon of hospitality in private, social and commercial hospitality provision

Australia in the Asian Century - A critique of the white paper

This article critiques the Australian Government\u27s White Paper: Australia in the Asian Century. It begins by reflecting on the relationship between Australia and Asia suggesting that this is measured solely through the narrow economic lens of Australian interests. The critique then focusses on the key drivers presented as the means by which Australia will navigate the Asian century concluding that although Australia punches above its weight in terms of living standards, equity and social inclusion, the White Paper overstates the country\u27s capability and capacity particularly in the areas of skills, education, innovation and relationship development. This presents a number of unrealistic expectations, presenting difficulties for the current government to fund the fundamental initiatives required to deliver on the promises contained in the document

The development of a service delivery improvement model for the Malaysian hotel sector: a focus on the developing, formulating, synthesising and refinement of a new model

The hospitality and tourism industry makes a significant contribution to the economic development of many countries with some being reliant on tourism as a major catalyst for growth and development. This is the case in Malaysia where the tourism industry has been hosting large numbers of tourists arriving for business or vacation purposes as well as transient passengers en-route to other destinations. Indeed in 2009, the hospitality and tourism sector contributed RM26.6 billion towards the Malaysia Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and it was ranked second, after the manufacturing sector, in terms of overall economic contribution (Ministry ofFinance/Central Bank of Malaysia, 2010). The Malaysian hotel industry has experienced signcant growth in the last 10 years and many hotels in Malaysia are now opulent, with new hotels achieving the highest standards of presentation. However, service delivery often lags behind the physical environment and struggles to meet international standards and therefore the expectations of international guests. There are diverse views among service quality researchers as to how to improve service delivery standards. This paper seeks to examine an appropriate service delivery improvement model that provides a framework that can be used to attract, train, motivate and retain employees. The main arguments relate to the means to achieve customer satisfaction and to develop customer loyalty. The general view among scholars is that there is a link between employee satisfaction and job performance. This is evident within the literature where many strategies that have been developed to enhance both products and services in a variety of contexts are presented