Editorial

Citation

Okumus, F. (2009), "Editorial", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 21 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijchm.2009.04121faa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Volume 21, Issue 6

We have another strong issue for IJCHM with interesting articles providing invaluable practical and theoretical implications. This issue consists of one spotlight interview article, five full research articles and two research-in-brief (RIB) papers.

In the spotlight article, Sandra Naipaul and Raymond Wang provide insights and implications for hospitality management and education through an interview with an entrepreneur, leader, hotelier, and philanthropist in Central Florida, Mr Harris Rosen. This study presents insights on several key issues in hospitality management and education, including: entrepreneurship, leadership, education, and philanthropy. I believe that every student studying hospitality and tourism, every instructor teaching hospitality and tourism and every practising manager in the industry should read this interesting paper which provides many invaluable implications for theory and practice in our field.

In the second article, Johye Hwang and Li Wen investigated the effect of hotel overbooking and compensation practices on customers’ perceptions of fairness and loyalty and examine the effects of customer gender, reservation time, membership status, length of stay, payer source, and reservation channel on perceived fairness toward overbooking. The findings show that customers who perceive a hotel’s overbooking and compensation practices to be unfair are less likely to be loyal to the hotel in the future. Women were more likely than men to perceive the practice of hotel overbooking as unfair. This is one of the first research articles looking at the invisible costs of overbooking in terms of customers’ long-term behaviour by addressing questions of whom to walk and how to compensate the walked.

In the next article, Emmett Steed and Zheng Gu investigated and documented current US hotel management company practices in budgeting and forecasting. The authors surveyed key corporate financial executives of hotel management companies operating in the USA. The authors claimed that current budgeting and forecasting methods used in the industry present opportunities for improving accuracy. Some significant differences were identified in budgeting and forecasting processes between large and small management companies. The study recommended a centralized budget process that can enhance accuracy, improves efficiency, and reduces “gamesmanship”.

João Neves and Sofia Lourenço illustrate the value of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for strategic analysis and performance management in the hotel industry. This study shows that DEA can be used for strategic design and performance management through the analysis of two cases. The DEA allows managers to analyse performance in terms of productivity and scale, to identify benchmarks (or peer units), to determine the targets (or optimum values) for inputs and outputs, and to detect slacks in the usage of resources or the production of outputs.

Osman Karatepe, Ilkay Yorganci, and Mine Haktanir developed and tested a model, which examines the effects of customer verbal aggression on emotional dissonance, emotional exhaustion, and job outcomes such as service recovery performance, job satisfaction, and turnover intentions. They found that emotional dissonance and emotional exhaustion were found to be significant outcomes of customer verbal aggression. The results further revealed that customer verbal aggression and emotional dissonance intensified turnover intentions. Emotional exhaustion reduced service recovery performance and job satisfaction and aggravated turnover intentions.

Hanqin Qiu Zhang, York Qi Yan and Yiping Li attempted to demystify the mechanism behind the negative event of the so-called “zero-commission” tours that have become synonymous with the booming Chinese outbound tourism in the past decade. The validity of the proposed nine factors causing the zero-tour and their respective degrees of relevance to the phenomenon are also investigated and empirically tested in the study. This study can serve as a reference for the drafting and implementation of both policy and business countermeasures to curb the zero-commission tours. Consequently, this would facilitate more positive contributions of the Chinese outbound tourism industry to global tourism development.

The first research in brief paper by Ivan Wen reviewed the literature on theories affecting consumers’ online purchase intention of travel products. It explored the literature on the theoretical foundation of factors influencing customers’ online purchase intentions in general and in the travel industry specifically. The next research in brief paper by Rob Law investigated online buyers’ views for and against disintermediation of hotel reservation. Hong Kong residents who had previously booked hotel rooms online showed experienced online buyers were more positive towards technology-assisted hotel room reservations and less positive towards travel agents than their less experienced peers.

Fevzi OkumusEditor