Abstract
I’m very pleased to introduce our special issue on “Advances in Technology and Hospitality Information Strategy.” Over the past several issues, I have challenged scholars to engage in research that extends their work to a broader array of disciplinary and applied topics. This issue is a perfect reflection of this call to action. Although the papers focus on technology and information strategy, the foundations and implications of these papers extend well beyond this focal domain. I would like to thank the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly (CQ) Board Members Rob Kauffman and Peter O’Connor, and Eric Clemons and Ting Li, for facilitating this effort. Their tireless efforts provide a salient example of how we can transform the ways we examine and come to understand the most important challenges in our industry. I am blessed to have the opportunity to work with the best—and nicest—minds in the field, and sleep well at night knowing that the future of hospitality research will continue to add value to hospitality practice.
I’m pleased to introduce Robert Kauffman and Peter O’Connor, who offer their comments on this issue.
—J.B.T.
Examining Advances in Technology and Hospitality Information Strategy
Hospitality managers have turned to IT to streamline reservations, capture new customer data, and build market share. Internet-based reservations, advertising and communication, social media, and mobile phones offer technology-led opportunities for value cocreation with customers. We aim to stimulate sharing of new ideas, current applications and emerging managerial know-how for the hospitality industry, while bringing new submissions to CQ.
Rob Law, Daniel Leung, Norman Au, and Hee Andy Lee open with a survey of hospitality industry IT research in CQ and its predecessor since the 1960s. Then, Rosanna Leung and Rob Law evaluate EDI adoption among Hong Kong hotels. They conducted a survey to inventory IT capabilities across brands and quality levels. They critique a framework for IT decision-making involving benefits and competitive pressures. They suggest the importance of managerial attitudes and awareness in support of IT organizational readiness.
Distinguishing between people who browse and those who purchase from hotel web sites is an important management and process-refinement problem. Haocun Edmond Wu contributes a new data-mining technique involving consumer segmentation and heuristic decision rules that form a weight-of-evidence grouping approach that leads to better identification and understanding of consumer behavior.
Stuart Levy, Wenjing Duan, and Soyoung Boo analyze one-star online reviews and responses for Washington, D.C., hotels. They collected 1,946 poor web-based reviews of hotels. They discuss guest complaints, and identify how hotel management can use online reviews to build consumer insights, manage service recovery, and assess how to respond when social media are involved. Sun-Young Park and Jonathan Allen share new approaches for problem-solving and customer engagement through responses to online reviews. From cases on four high-end hotels, they show how handling online reviews is a strategic opportunity to support service excellence and customer responsiveness.
Bing Pan, Lixuan Zhang, and Rob Law explore consumer online hotel choice decisions with eye-tracking experiments. Text and images in social media diminish information overload, while encouraging consideration of properties consumers may overlook. Linchi Kwok and Bei Yu further report that restaurant-related postings with text and pictures evoke more positive consumer reactions than do pictures or videos alone.
A market power shift has occurred between hotels and OTAs due to the internet. Hee Lee, Basak Guillet, and Rob Law analyze the 2009 conflict between Choice Hotels International and Expedia.com. They suggest that hotels need to invest in IT, share information, and combat the market power of digital intermediaries to regain a more central industry position.