Managers' perceptions of environmental issues in Australian hotels

ThiS article describes a study carried out among management staff of Australian hotels relating to their perceptions of environmental issues and the environmental practices of their hotels. The issues surveyed included environmental accreditation, costs and financial benefits of environmental programs, customer attitudes, 'green' corporate images and staff orientation towards environmental practices. Out of the 165 questionnaires sent to hotel management staff, sixty-five returns were received with sixty usable for this study. The findings showed that hotel managers generally agreed that environmental accreditation could be a potential tool for improving practices in hotels since they did not see any automatic financial benefits being serving environmental practices. Hotel managers perceived customers as being ambivalent towards the environment. But, importantly, they saw being environmentally friendly as providing a good corporate image in the wider community. This may have served as a major motivation for many hotels to adopt environmentally sensitive prac~ices. In the selected areas of water and energy conservation and recycling, hotel managers indicated a high level ofinvolvement oftheir hotels. This finding, that practices generally exceeded perceptions, was supportive of the suspicion that a 'green' corporate reputation was more important than actual practices

Segmenting the market of West Australian senior tourists using an artificial neural network

Measuring perceptions of customers can be a major problem for marketers of tourism and travel services. Much of the problem is to determine which attributes carry most weight in the purchasing decision. Older travellers weigh many travel features before making their travel decisions. This paper presents a descriptive analysis of neural network methodology and provides a research technique that assesses the weighting of different attributes and uses an unsupervised neural network model to describe a consumer-product relationship. The development of this rich class of models was inspired by the neural architecture of the human brain. These models mathematically emulate the neurophysical structure and decision making of the human brain, and, from a statistical perspective, are closely related to generalised linear models. Artificial neural networks or neural networks are, however, nonlinear and do not require the same restrictive assumptions about the relationship between the independent variables and dependent variables. Using neural networks is one way to determine what trade-offs older travellers make as they decide their travel plans. The sample of this study is from a syndicated data source of 200 valid cases from Western Australia. From senior groups, active learner, relaxed family body, careful participants and elementary vacation were identified and discussed. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd

Tour coach operations in the Australian seniors market

Growing interest in travel by seniors has generated numerous opportunities for the tourism industry to develop new products and services to meet the specific demands of this group of travelers. In the future seniors will become even more able to afford travel as the Baby Boomer generation commences to retire. One group of tourism operators that have benefited from the growth of the seniors market has been tour coach operators. This paper examines the perceptions of seniors towards tour coach attributes and then compares these perceptions against the perceptions that tour coach operators have of the needs of seniors using an identical group of attributes. The paper finds that tour coach users are generally satisfied with current levels of services. However, the research identified that tour coach operators appear to have overestimated their market share of seniors travel and are unaware of the needs of seniors who presently do not use tour coaches. The need to identify the needs of sen-iors not currently participating in tour coach travel will grow in importance as in-creasing numbers of Baby Boomers commence retiring in the next two decades

Input data management in simulation : industrial practices and future trends

Discrete Event Simulation has been acknowledged as a strategically important tool in the development and improvement of production systems. However, it appears that companies are failing to reap full benefits of this powerful technology as the maintenance of simulation models has become very time-consuming, particularly due to vast amounts of data to be handled. Hence, an increased level of automation of input data handling is highly desirable. This paper presents the current practices relating to input data management and identifies further research and development required to achieve high levels of automation. A survey of simulation users shows that there has been a progress in the use of automated solutions compared to a similar study presented by Robertson and Perera in 2002. The results, however, reveal that around 80% of the users still rely on highly manual work procedures in input data management

Uses of the Internet in the global hotel industry

This article discusses a study carried out among the membership of Global Hoteliers, an organization of executives in the international hotel industry. The study looked into the uses of the Internet, such as the World Wide Web and E-mail, and at any organizational and geographical influences on those uses. Hotel size, star rating, and hotel type were among the organizational factors which had some significant effect on certain aspects of the information hotels posted on the Web and on the use of E-mail. Similarly, the geographical location of hotels was also found to have a significant effect. The similarities and differences of the use of the Internet among global hotels call for future research into the relationships between market segmentation, organizational buying behavior, hotel operations and information technology

New Arabidopsis Recombinant Inbred Line Populations Genotyped Using SNPWave and Their Use for Mapping Flowering-Time Quantitative Trait Loci

The SNPWave marker system, based on SNPs between the reference accessions Colombia-0 and Landsberg erecta (Ler), was used to distinguish a set of 92 Arabidopsis accessions from various parts of the world. In addition, we used these markers to genotype three new recombinant inbred line populations for Arabidopsis, having Ler as a common parent that was crossed with the accessions Antwerp-1, Kashmir-2, and Kondara. The benefit of using multiple populations that contain many similar markers and the fact that all markers are linked to the physical map of Arabidopsis facilitates the quantitative comparison of maps. Flowering-time variation was analyzed in the three recombinant inbred line populations. Per population, four to eight quantitative trait loci (QTL) were detected. The comparison of the QTL positions related to the physical map allowed the estimate of 12 different QTL segregating for flowering time for which Ler has an allele different from one, two, or three of the other accessions