Cornell Hospitality Quarterly

When a hotel guest seeks to recover damages from an innkeeper based on negligence, that negligence may be established by proving an innkeeper's failure to comply with a statutory or regulatory standard of care. On the other hand, compliance with statutory standards has been assumed to compel a finding of no liability for the innkeeper by the court. But that's no longer true. In this example a trial judge instructed a jury that compliance with the fire code established as a matter of law that the innkeeper had met his duty of reasonable care and thus required a finding of nonliability. But the state Supreme Court, on appeal, rejected that proposition. The high court reasoned that compliance with a statutory regulation does not constitute conclusive evidence of due care: “If the defendants knew or should have known of some risk that would be prevented by reasonable measures not required by the regulation, they were negligent if they did not take such measures....” Now it's more important than ever that innkeepers keep abreast of technological advancements and industry standards, and that they exercise common sense and good judgment regarding mitigating potential injuries to guests, no matter what the local law prescribes.

Over the past 40 years the property rights of business owners with regard to access by union organizers have been in flux. A 1956 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court established the principle that union organizers who are not also employees need not be granted access to an employer's property unless there is no reasonable alternative means for the organizers to reach those employees. In the same ruling the court was careful to reiterate the right of employees to organize themselves and the duty of the employer not to restrict that effort unless it interferes with the operation of the business or worker discipline. In several cases following that ruling, the National Labor Relations Board and appellate courts reinterpreted the Supreme Court ruling to broaden the organizers' right to reach employees, particularly on such quasi-public property as shopping malls and, by inference, the entrances to hotels. The current standard is a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that reiterates the concept that property owners cannot be compelled to grant access to nonemployee organizers if those organizers have other reasonable means to communicate with workers.

To prevent environmental or cultural damage that curtails tourism, operators and planners need to cooperate with government authorities and managers in other industries to establish planning strategies and other mechanisms to ensure that tourism to a locale does not exceed the capacity of that destination. The goal of sustainable tourism can be achieved if the capacity of the many attributes of a destination to support human activity can be assessed and not exceeded. An environmental impact assessment (EIA) is one mechanism for determining that capacity. An EIA should take into account the relationship between demand from travelers and the sensitive environmental characteristics of the site. Unfortunately the actual capacities of many locations are only partially known or have been learned only in retrospect. An ecosystem approach to travel planning, one that accounts for demands of other industries on the environment, will help create plans for sustainable tourism and development. Such a plan is in effect in such places as Prince Edward Island and the Maldive Islands. Ecotourism promises to be one aspect of sustainable tourism, although the current concept of ecotourism is so ill defined as to be deceiving.

Indoor air quality (IAQ) is a topic of increasing concern for facility managers in the hospitality industry. Present IAQ regulations, as exemplified by most municipal, county, and state codes, are grossly inadequate according to recent pronouncements from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. For hospitality firms to avoid potential legal jeopardy, they must evaluate their facilities' IAQ, mitigate air-borne contaminants, and ensure that their ventilation practices meet the highest current standards. Fortunately, the long-term savings arising from clean air and accommodations for smokers outweigh the costs of following OSHA guidelines. The implementation of a written indoor-air-quality maintenance program will also help to prepare a facility to meet OSHA's proposed IAQ compliance plan.

Restaurateurs who have long felt constricted by having to modify their procedures to conform to the data requirements of rigid transaction-processing systems now have access to better, more-responsive systems. As vendors begin to transfer applications to more-flexible platforms, the transaction-processing marketplace will be dominated by PC-based registers (PCRs). Future designs are likely to feature modular configurations, increased settlement functionalities, and wireless devices. PCR systems are being configured using network technology.

Dining consumers determine which restaurants meet their quality and value standards. Restaurateurs who fail to measure up will soon see declining customer counts as guests switch to competing restaurants. “Dineserv” is proposed as a reliable, relatively simple tool for determining how consumers view a restaurant's quality. The 29-item Dineserv questionnaire comprises service-quality standards that fall into five categories: assurance, empathy, reliability, responsiveness, and tangibles. By administering the Dineserv questionnaire to guests, a restaurant operator can get a reading on how customers view the restaurant's quality, identify where problems are, and get an inkling of how to resolve them. Dineserv also provides restaurateurs with a quantified measure of what consumers expect in a restaurant. Those expectations are important, because unfulfilled expectations drive guests away.

Cities can benefit greatly by being selected as the site for association meetings, but there is not a uniform selection process used by all associations. Cities should therefore conduct market research and be creative in dealing with each target association. Factors specific to each situation are crucial in determining whether a city makes the final cut, and understanding those factors can provide a marketing edge (e.g., knowing that there may be many people involved in the site-selection process, identifying who they are and what power they possess, and directing attention to the decision makers). Determining an association's venue and facility needs will help determine target customers, and taking steps to reduce the planners' financial, social, physical, psychological, and functional risks can improve a city's chances of being selected. While an association may have a written procedure for meeting planning, in some cases nontask variables are more important than the formalized, task-related variables.

Poor indoor-air quality has been identified as one of the five greatest environmental problems the public faces. For hospitality enterprises, the most problematic area of the entire air-quality debate is secondhand tobacco smoke, despite the industry's efforts to accommodate both smoking and nonsmoking customers by establishing smoking areas. There are four ways that air contaminants can be lessened: elimination, isolation, filtration, and dilution. The best approach is to eliminate the source, with isolation being a second-best choice. Filtration removes the gases and particulates given off by tobacco smoke while dilution is accomplished by increasing the exchange of outside and inside air. This paper presents the first known study of indoor-air quality at a casino-hotel. In each of 24 sampling areas, four measurements were taken under a variety of occupancy loads: temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide, and respirable particles. The findings led to a series of recommendations regarding air-handling units, outdoor-air intake and circulation, air dampers, exhaust filters, and idling vehicles.