Best Practices in Human Resources

No hotel can have excellent operations without excellent employees – and that requires excellent human resources practices

The Transformational Impact of Intense Virtual Teamwork Experiences on Team Member Psychometrics: An Exploratory Study

Managers seeking to assure the success of teams in their organizations often resort to the use of psychometric measures to assign individuals to teams. We obtained psychometrics of 13 virtual teams before and after they engaged in five weeks of intense virtual collaborative activities. We found that significant changes in psychometrics had occurred during this period, suggesting that intense virtual teamwork experience themselves may modify individual psychometrics as teams strive to achieve their goals. While exploratory in nature, the statistical results are strong and serve as a cautionary note to all companies that use psychometrics to guide their actions

Best Practices in Hotel Operations

Operations is the heart of a hotel. Efforts to improve operations can focus on a single department or address the entire organization

Best Practices in Service Quality

To achieve the highest service quality, managers of a baker’s dozen of lodging operations have given authority to their employees

Revisiting the Best of the Best: Innovations in the Hotel Practice

[Excerpt] To what extent will current industry best practices stand the rest of time? Will existing excellent practices become integral to the organization or become obsolete and be discarded? The answers to these critical questions rest on the process of continuous reassessment and renewal that is a feature of organizational learning. Organizational learning often begins with an individual champion who recognizes a gap between what is and what could be, engages in a process of discovery and data gathering, and then develops an idea – often in the form of a new practice – to produce a change in the organization.1 The question we discuss in this paper is how well best practices persist. Specifically, we discuss whether the best practices chronicled in a comprehensive study of the U.S. lodging industry five years ago are still being used and the extent to which they have been refined or modified over the years.2 The original best-practices study constituted a compilation of what industry practitioners and customers considered to be the most effective strategies and techniques used at the end of the twentieth century by the lodging industry’s best operators to create excellence for all stakeholders

Understanding Switchers and Stayers in the Lodging Industry

Service companies worldwide spend billions every year on customer-loyalty programs and other preferred-guest programs aimed at getting their guests to continue their patronage, although it’s clear that many customers defect to competitors. One way to improve customer retention is to analyze guests’ behavior according to four distinct guest segments, which are based on their staying or switching behavior. The four groups are satisfied switchers, dissatisfied stayers, satisfied stayers, and dissatisfied switchers. Two groups, satisfied stayers and dissatisfied switchers, generally behave as one might expect—either staying or defecting based on their level of satisfaction. The other two groups, satisfied switchers and dissatisfied stayers, do not conform to expectations. Most confounding are satisfied switchers, who report being satisfied but then choose alternative hotels, rather than routinely choosing the hotel with which they have expressed high levels of satisfaction. Thus, although marketers have long advanced the presence of guest satisfaction as instrumental in ensuring repeat business, satisfaction does not appear to drive repeat purchases for all consumers, as previously had been assumed. Also intriguing, dissatisfied stayers are unwilling or unable to exert the effort to identify and use alternative hotels, even though they are unhappy with the elements of the hotel at which they stay. Looking at demographic differences, older guests and women selected the hotel for familiarity and self-image needs. Older guests were more likely to be satisfied stayers, while younger respondents were more inclined to be satisfied switchers. Hence, while the respondents in this study reported equivalent levels of satisfaction with the hotel regardless of age, they demonstrated different switching behavior. Respondents’ educational level did not affect satisfaction or loyalty, but purpose of travel differentiated the respondents. Business travelers were the least satisfied, least loyal, and least involved of the guest segments. Additionally, business travelers were more likely to be dissatisfied switchers than other types of travelers. Hotel managers can use this information to better define those groups in which they want to develop strategic investments and from which they are most likely to obtain the greatest long-term value. The findings suggest that hotel companies should reexamine the target markets for their customer-retention programs to aim at customers groups that are most likely to respond to those programs

Using Tourist Travel Habits and Preferences to Assess Strategic Destination Positioning: The Case of Costa Rica

A study of 118 U.S. travelers to Costa Rica is analyzed to highlight how consumer preferences and patterns of consumption can be used to reveal the status of a particular destination in its life cycle. Using a model for destinations\u27 psychographics developed by S. C. Plog, the analysis shows that Costa Rica may be increasingly appealing to the middle of the psychographic distribution. While this trend is not inherently bad, it challenges Costa Rica\u27s destination managers to consider carefully what type of further development they will allow. This research illustrates the means by which other destinations can assess their own positioning to ensure that they are using strategies to attract the most profitable tourist segments

Adoption of Information Technology in U.S. Hotels: Strategically Driven Objectives

Using two unique, independent samples of U.S. hotels, this study examines the utilization of information technology (IT) in all hotel sectors, from deluxe to budget, to reveal strategic differences and similarities. Overall, the findings suggest that the U.S. lodging industry has focused on employing technologies that improve employee productivity and enhance revenue but has not given strategic priority to technologies designed to improve guest services. The hotel sector, lodging type, size/complexity of the property, and independent versus chain affiliation influenced the number and type of technologies adopted. Luxury and upscale hotels adopted more IT than economy and budget hotels. Similarly, IT development was greatest for certain lodging types such as convention hotels, conference centers, and casinos, and lowest for other types, such as motels and bed-and-breakfasts. Chain-affiliated properties typically adopted more technologies than independent hotels

B2B Sales Force Productivity: Applications of Revenue Management Strategies to Sales Management

Firms should be able to apply the time-based philosophy of revenue management to their sales forces. To do so requires a revision in the way most sales divisions traditionally have viewed salesperson time. Hence, a different type of proposed measure, revenue per available salesperson hour, is proposed to better integrate the value of the salesperson\u27s time as a factor in sales potential and revenue calculation. This article seeks to (1) foster a positive perception of revenue management as a viable sales approach, (2) establish a framework for such a strategy, and (3) set a useful road map for facilitating execution

Best Practices in the U.S. Lodging Industry: Overview, Methods, and Champions

When a lodging operation is doing an innovative and excellent job in a particular area, the industry benefits from spreading the word about the practice. But first one has to discover those best practices