Cornell Hospitality Quarterly

Restaurant operators who seek to increase table turns during peak periods may want to speed up the meal's pace. However, excessive speed may make customers feel rushed. A survey of 218 respondents found that too fast a pace does affect customer satisfaction with the meal experience, with fine-dining customers more sensitive to pacing issues than customers in casual or upscale casual restaurants. Regardless of restaurant type, too fast a pace during the meal itself diminishes customer satisfaction, but speed during check settlement is often appreciated. The effects on customer satisfaction of the pace of welcome, seating, and taking drink orders depend partly on the type of restaurant and on the meal type. Guests at fine-dining restaurants do not want these preprocess events to be rushed. Additionally, a faster pace during these preprocess events at dinner diminished satisfaction ratings as compared to lunch.

The regional In-N-Out burger chain is at a crossroads. With the passing of its matriarch, a new generation of owners is considering speeding up the company's growth, franchising the company, and expanding its product to a national audience. The question is, How will existing customers respond to the chain's expansion? In this context, the childhood memory elicitation method allows researchers to understand how consumers initially formed their relationships with a brand (or product). The age at which consumers formed a relationship with In-N-Out affects their view of the prospective expansion. Those who formed an early attachment were comfortable with expansion plans, but those who became attached as adolescents considered the expansion to be a violation of their view of the company as their trendy, exclusive club. The authors discuss the results specifically for the In-N-Out situation and more generally for other companies looking for methods or measurements to augment their research toolkit.

Given the potential severity of allergic reactions to certain foods, restaurant operators and staff need to know how to prevent guests from eating what could be fatal food. When the state of New Jersey enacted a law to create a fact sheet to explain safe handling of food allergens, a research team examined the information and communication challenges regarding food allergens— including knowing what foods cause the most trouble and how to avoid cross-contamination. The team then created a fact sheet that depicts the suspect foods and explains specifically how to avoid triggering food allergies in guests. This fact sheet will be displayed in all restaurants in the state.

This study demonstrates a methodology to quantify the links between customer satisfaction, repeat-purchase intentions, and restaurant performance. Using data from a national restaurant chain, the authors constructed a series of mathematical models that predict how the level of customer satisfaction with certain attributes of guests' dining experience affects the likelihood that they will come back. In turn, the model shows how guests' “comeback” scores and other variables affect restaurant performance (i.e., sales and entrée counts). Robust and statistically significant, the models showed that restaurants that pay attention to food quality, appropriate cost, and attentive service have the greatest chance to increase guests' intent to return. In turn, that intent to return is a chief driver of increased sales.

An assessment of how hotel guests view in-room technology compared the importance of those technologies to how they perform. Based on 265 responses, this importance-performance analysis indicates that important basic technologies like in-room temperature controls and alarm clocks fail to perform in the way guests want, while relatively new technologies like plasma screen TVs and in-room printers and faxes are less important but perform well when they are in place. In addition, the study finds that internet access is an integral part of the lodging product.

All hospitality operators want employees who can learn their jobs quickly and have personality traits that allow them to maintain their performance over time. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to find individuals who possess all of the desirable attributes, and thus, some degree of compromise is generally required. The prevailing view is to select those with great personalities and then train them for the technical job requirements. However, strict adherence to this perspective is not advisable. The study presented in this article found that both general mental ability and conscientiousness are important for predicting the performance of restaurant employees on the front line. Moreover, it appears that these two individual characteristics are important at different stages of an employee's job tenure. Using data from 241 line-level restaurant employees, the study found that general mental ability was a better predictor of performance for new employees, whereas conscientiousness was a better predictor of performance for experienced employees. These findings have direct implications for staffing decisions, as well as new employee training and development and performance management.

The Quarterdeck Beachside Villas and Grill is a small property that faces an all too common set of challenges, most of them stemming from steep seasonality. Located on Nova Scotia's south shore, the Quarterdeck sells out during the summer months but is nearly empty during the winter. This case study examines the Quarterdeck's marketing approach and outlines strategies for driving off-season demand by focusing specifically on identifying guests' needs and desires to develop new product bundles and marketing communications. Although these ideas emerge from the Quarterdeck's particular circumstances, the strategies are applicable to many small hospitality companies that face seasonal demand.

The situation of steeply seasonal resorts, such as Nova Scotia's Quarterdeck Beachside Villas and Grill, requires innovative thinking. For the Quarterdeck, this would include finding ways to shift demand from high-season to off-season times, or perhaps even a more radical approach, including selling the villa units as condominiums.

Marketing the Quarterdeck may be a matter of touching on the emotions of current and potential customers.