Advances in Hospitality and Leisure: Volume 3

Editor-in-Chief

Safety and security today, has been identified as one of the five global forces that drive the tourism industry. The topic of safety and security in the tourism industry has gained vital importance, mainly after 9/11 incident, thereafter both academicians and practitioners have started looking into crisis management issues seeking workable solutions to mitigate these negative impacts. Therefore, with a view to overcome such problems, this paper undertakes an in-depth study regarding the safety and security in Kashmir and its impact on building destination image. The conclusion suggests that safety and security is a prerequisite for an ideal destination image. Therefore, proper strategies should be formulated to minimize the negative impact of such incidents.

The objective of the current study was to examine the relationship between visitation patterns of museums at home when compared to museums visited on holidays taken. The data were collected from a sample of residents of Alta, a fjord town in northern Norway. A multiple discriminant analysis was first conducted to ascertain the factors that increased the probability of visiting a museum at home. The variables that correlated significantly with the discriminant function were collectively named “cultural consumption”. Subsequently, a bivariate correlation analysis was performed in order to examine the relationship between the significant discriminant function and the frequency of visits of the same sample to museums on their holidays. Theoretical and practical implications of the study are also discussed.

Over the next decade the older travel market will experience a generational shift as the pre-war generation is replaced by the baby boomer generation. For destinations such as Norfolk Island that have built a substantial market segment based on older tourists this generation shift will have significant implications. While changes will be required in the type of products and experiences offered by the Island's tourism industry the increased size of the baby boomer generation offers considerable scope to increase yield. This paper examines these issues and discusses the need to recognise the importance of the baby boomer tourist as a distinct and separate tourism segment. To illustrate the possible impact of generation change the paper proposes a product gap model.

This study focuses firstly on the importance for forecasting accuracy of allowing for intervention events in the modeling process. Seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) models are therefore estimated both with and without intervention effects (the September 11, 2001 events) using data for the period 1990–2001. These models are used to generate forecasts for 2002 and the first part of 2003, and forecast accuracy is assessed using mean absolute percentage error and root mean square percentage error. The second focus of the study is to examine the impacts on tourism demand of the major crises that occurred during the period 2001–2003. The chosen US metropolitan destination is New York City, which was severely affected by the September 11 events, and within New York the US Metropolitan Museum of Art is selected, as this is a very well-known and visited destination for which seasonal data are available over the period 1990–2003. The artificial neural networks (ANNs) and SARIMA forecasts are compared with forecasts generated by the much simpler automatic Holt-Winter's seasonal double exponential smoothing model as well as two naïve forecasting models to ensure that minimum performance standards are being met.

Hospitality literature is deficient in empirical research that specifically focused on human resource information systems (HRIS) in hospitality. To fill this gap in literature, this research has proposed a model, based on a review of previous research, to serve as a starting point toward building an empirical research agenda in the hospitality discipline. It has two primary objectives: firstly, to examine the factors that contribute to the decision to implement a HRIS in a small-size restaurant chain; and secondly, to develop a research agenda in an area where progress has been limited in the hospitality discipline. Results of the current study indicated that financial resources, culture, and computer competency are better predictors of any successful implementation of HRIS in restaurant chains.

The purpose of this study is to examine empirically different characteristics between theme park visitors who did and did not visit theme parks during the SARS outbreak period in Taiwan. The data consisting of 1,255 respondents were obtained from visitors to the five leading theme parks. Discriminant analysis was used to analyze respondents’ characteristics such as age, benefit sought, product involvement, and risk perception to examine significant differences between the two categories of respondents. Results of this study showed that younger or more frequent visitors more likely continued to visit theme parks during the SARS outbreak. Besides, visitors who continued to visit theme parks perceived greater infectious risk than those who did not visit theme parks during the SARS outbreak.

This qualitative study collected regarding recalled service encounters by consumers across a broad range of encounters not just in service failures found respondents recalled service encounters from the hospitality leisure industry in 42% of encounters. Usually, the consumer recalls and reports at least two types of fairness when recalling a service encounter with procedural fairness the most reported, followed by interactional and then distributive fairness. The study suggests using fairness across a spectrum of service encounters and not just when a service failure is recalled and is also the first hospitality or service sector study to view service encounter outcomes into types of initial satisfaction, service recovery, and double deviation and then to follow up by assessing fairness types across outcomes.

Despite the competitive necessity of New Service Development (NSD), research into NSD and specifically within hospitality is scant. As tourists are becoming more sophisticated and less loyal, hotels need to continuously innovate to address the dynamically changing tourists’ demands and the fierce competition. This study aims to explore the level, type and processes of NSD efforts that Greek hotels undertake for creating, assessing and further improving their NSD practices. To achieve that, literature on NSD is critically reviewed and expanded. Data from the Greek hotel sector revealed not only that hotels need to substantially increase their NSD activities, but findings also confirmed the fact that, in contrast to manufacturing, NSD in services should consider the ad hoc nature of processes in service development as well as the role and participation of guests and other stakeholders in NS processes.

Following increasing competition on the international tourism market, a great number of Swiss hotels which are generally family businesses with small structures and aging infrastructures, find themselves in a critical financial situation. Thus, many hotels having exhausted their economic potential, cannot adequately upgrade their performance. For this reason they are forced to respond to the requirements of potential investors by presenting the progress of their activities through models of cooperation with other hotel establishments and/or other actors. In view of the significance of this issue, the present article proposes to study the effect of collaboration intensity and the type of management on the performance of Swiss collaborating hotels. By adopting a global approach to performance, it appears that hotel performance is influenced by the intensity of collaboration. Regarding the effect of the type of management the results are more questionable.

While prior research on websites has largely focused on service quality perception by customers, little research has gone into the investigation of the specific sales function of the website. A survey of 111 German, Swiss and Austrian four and five star hotels was designed to test the responsiveness of hotels to reservation inquiries made through the options offered by the companies’ corporate websites (e.g. e-mail, online booking forms, request for proposal forms etc.) and to evaluate the hotels online sales performance in terms of the technical and process quality while dealing with a typical reservation request. The current study found that many hotels missed the opportunity to increase sales by failing to respond adequately to electronic reservation inquiries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of long-term debt and firm value in the lodging industry. Previous research on capital structure in the lodging industry has been conducted in an attempt to understand what motivates the use of debt. We explore this further by assessing whether or not this debt use translates into increases in firm value. The regression analysis shows that after controlling for size and risk, we find a positive relationship with long-term debt and the value of the firm. Return on assets is negatively related to firm value, but capital expenditures are not.

This research aims to assess the energy use and CO2 contribution and depict the international visitors’ environmental impacts of flight transportation in Taiwan. Two elements entailing the energy consumption and CO2 contribution of flight transportation of international travelers of Taiwan revealed the environmental impact caused by international travelers in 2004. The number of outbound visitors of Taiwan was over twice the number of inbound visitors of Taiwan in 2004. The total energy use of international visitors of Taiwan for one-way trip is 74.44PJ. The total CO2 contribution of international visitors for one-way trip is 5136.54kilotons. The results show that distance is the key determinant of energy consumption and CO2 contribution by international tourists.

An emerging male market within the spa industry is causing practitioners to consider if men and women differ in their service preferences at spas. This study explored the question via a self-administered survey instrument distributed to individuals located in resort communities along the Gulf Coast of the Florida panhandle. Analysis of the responses of 107 subjects indicated significant gender differences on the importance ratings of 12 out of 18 common spa services: aromatherapy, body scrub and exfoliation, facial, fitness facilities, lymph drainage, manicure, mud or seaweed wrap, pedicure, Pilates, Shiatsu, sport massage, and yoga. The services that men and women rated similarly in decreasing order of importance were Swedish massage, nutritional counseling, steam and sauna, hydrotherapy, spa cuisine, and reflexology.

With the move towards a consumer-orientated approach in the hospitality market, this article investigates the impact of the servicescape on female's hotel experiences and examines the helpfulness of the hotel grading to their female customers. The findings suggest that the hotel's products arguably did not adequately meet female travellers’ expectations, especially for businesswomen, and that the hotel grading offers scant information about the quality of hotel service and facilities catering for female customers. The industry needs to address its currently male-oriented service products to meet the needs of women travellers, particularly as they are anticipated to be the fastest growing segment of the travel market for the next century.