Welcome to International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management’s (IJCHM) special issue on advances and trends in the hospitality and tourism industries. I would like to pay special thanks to our Guest Editors Seyhmus Baloglu, Mehmet Erdem, Pearl Brewer, and Karl Mayer for their intriguing and thought-provoking special issue.

If you have other key issues and topics that you would like to see addressed in a special issue, please feel to contact me.

Fevzi OkumusEditor-in-Chief

In the past few decades, globalization and technological advancements have contributed immensely to an already competitive business environment in hospitality and tourism industries. The ever-evolving advancements provide advantages as well as challenges for operations of all types and sizes across the segments of the hospitality and tourism industries. In order to gain and maintain a competitive edge, it is essential to explore and understand innovative activities and practices.

In such an environment, research is becoming more important to identify, understand, and make predictions about emerging issues and trends. This special issue explores the on-going advances, issues and trends for the hospitality and tourism industries. Given the theme, the topics of manuscripts submitted for this issue were broad and focused on a wide variety of fields and functional areas such as marketing, human resources, operations, finance and accounting, crisis management, sustainable development, information technology, gaming, education, destination marketing and management, and so on. This special issue of the IJCHM contains a number of studies that conceptually and empirically deal with, and provide practical solutions to, some of the emerging issues and trends in hospitality and tourism industries.

The first paper investigates hotel performance measurement systems in retrospect. Ruggero Sainaghi in “Hotel performance: state of the art” explores responses for critical questions asked by both academicians and practitioners in past decades: how do we measure the success of a hotel business? What factors determine performances? The paper is based on the analysis of 152 contributions and uses the balanced scorecard as a model to rationalize the main streams of research. The analysis shows the gradually assumed importance of the balanced scorecard as a satisfactory performance measurement system. Four main functional research fields have been identified (strategy, production, marketing, and organization). Customer, strategy and process perspectives are the areas of more frequent research. Sainaghi indicates that this evidence is consistent with the structural features of the hotel business and with the importance held, respectively, by customer relations and the protection of the efficiency of management processes. Given the profound diversity of national contexts, researchers focusing on internal determinants should use external control variables more extensively.

A closely related issue to performance is the nature of the relationship between firm performance and customer satisfaction, the true bottom-line in any industry. Haemoon Oh and Miyoung Jeong in “Evaluating stability of the performance-satisfaction relationship across selected lodging market segments” present new methods of examining structural differences among segmented markets beyond traditional average performance comparisons so as to help marketers and researchers gain better insights into segment differences for meaningful strategy development. The paper finds that guest satisfaction is influenced by the same performance variable to the same magnitude and direction across different lodging segments examined. This paper advances the methods of hospitality and tourism research to developing marketing strategies based on the effect-based segment differences. Use of the assessment method illustrated in this paper also requires future market segmentation studies to rely more on theories than data.

Handling customer complaints and service recovery strategies influence both customer satisfaction and performance. Min Gyung Kim, Chenya Wang, and Anna S. Mattila in “The relationship between consumer complaining behavior and service recovery: an integrative review” review and integrate two streams of literature, customer complaining behaviors (CCB) and service recovery, related to service failures in a single framework and model. Framework offers a starting point for broadening our thinking on consumers’ complaint-handling processes, and insight for hospitality managers into how to effectively deal with dissatisfied customer experiences.

Employee satisfaction is as important as customer satisfaction. Shiang-Lih Chen McCain, Henry Tsai, and Nicholas Bellino in “Organizational justice, employees’ ethical behavior, and job satisfaction in the casino industry” examine the antecedents and consequence of casino employees’ ethical behavior, and propose that both distributive and procedural justice have positive influences on such behavior, which in turn positively affects workers’ job satisfaction. The study aims to help casino management pinpoint areas for enhancing and promoting employees’ ethical behavior. The findings show that casino employees’ ethical behavior is positively influenced by both procedural and distributive justice. Of the proposed determinants of casino employees’ job satisfaction, distributive justice has the strongest effect. The authors suggest that action could be taken by management to enhance employees’ perception of both distributive and procedural justice to motivate ethical behavior. Furthermore, casino managers should be aware that distributive justice plays a more important role than procedural justice and ethical behavior in enhancing casino employees’ job satisfaction.

Distribution channels play a vital role in linking demand with supply. Ajith Nayar and Srikanth Beldona in “Interoperability and Open Travel Alliance standards: strategic perspectives” argue that one of the primary changes in the travel distribution model has been the expanding potential of interoperability between systems brought about the advent of Extended Markup Language-based specifications developed and published by the Open Travel Alliance (OTA). The paper evaluates strategic perspectives from key industry players over the potential of this technology and examines the factors pertaining to their adoption. Findings indicate that suppliers and intermediaries see distinctive levers of advantage from OTA messaging specifications. While suppliers seek to build flexibility to add/delete channels and subsequently leverage greater control over inventory distribution, intermediaries seek to consolidate on their aggregation capabilities through wider content and enhanced dynamic packaging as value for end-customers.

Paige Vaughn, Carola Raab, and Kathleen B. Nelson in “The application of activity-based costing to a support kitchen in a Las Vegas casino” examine the activity-based Costing (ABC) method as a feasible and appropriate tool for the casino and hotel industry to apply to support kitchens in order to eliminate the monthly allocation of overhead based on variable costs. ABC methods are compared to traditional allocation methods to determine if allocations can be eliminated entirely, and to establish if some outlets would be significantly impacted by the accounting change. The findings indicate that the ABC approach can be applied to support kitchens and be utilized to eliminate traditional allocation methods based solely on food cost in the food and beverage operations in the field of hospitality.

The impact of information technology in travel and tourism is pervasive. Natasa Christodoulidou, Daniel J. Connolly, and Pearl Brewer in “An examination of the transactional relationship between online travel agencies, travel meta sites, and suppliers” examine how business relationships between online travel agencies, travel meta sites, and travel suppliers are perceived in the hospitality industry based on transaction cost theory from the supply chain field. The results show that the relationship structure has an impact on the type of contractual agreement online travel agencies and meta sites have with travel suppliers and with each other.

Obviously, this special issue does not fully reflect cross-sectional emerging trends and issues in hospitality and tourism as it is limited to a handful of articles. Having said that, we also believe that this special issue is a thought-provoking piece and will stimulate further research. We hope that you will find some elements of interest to you and enjoy reading the articles.

Seyhmus Baloglu, Mehmet Erdem, Pearl Brewer, Karl MayerGuest Editors

Advances and trends in hospitality and tourism

Citation

Publisher