Cornell Hospitality Quarterly

We explored the idea that the timing of executives’ career moves was consistent with Bak’s notion of self-organized criticality. Consistent with predictions, time series analysis of job changes for 43 hospitality executives obeyed a power law and revealed a mixture of predictable and unpredictable patterns with a musical nature (pink noise distribution). The data showed better fit for traditional ‘organization men’ versus opportunistic ‘trailblazers.’ These differences in career patterns (rhythms) could be used to reliably distinguish between these two executive-types using neural nets. Potential implications for executive coaching and development are discussed.

In view of the synergistic interaction between technology and hospitality services, this article reports the findings of a study that analyzed articles related to information technology (IT) published in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly (CQ) and its predecessor, Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly (CHRAQ), a first-tier journal that places emphasis on the application of research to hospitality businesses. Through an examination of content from CHRAQ’s inaugural issue in the early 1960s to the latest volume (in mid-2011), ninety-five articles were identified as relevant. A content analysis revealed that more than half of the articles focused on the hospitality industry in general and that a substantial number of IT-related articles had been published since the 1980s. This article contributes to a better understanding of the progress of the IT research conducted by hospitality researchers over the past five decades.

This study examines information technology (IT) applications, the adoption of electronic data interchange (EDI) among hotel systems, and management support for IT departments in a sample of Hong Kong hotels. The empirical results indicate that most hotels have not installed decision support or strategic management tools. In addition, the ratio of EDI implementation between hotel systems and web applications is relatively low. The rate of adoption of automated credit card authorization, which can enhance the security of customer data, is only 6 percent for the property management system (PMS) and 17 percent for point of sale (POS) applications. In keeping with the increased importance of hotel IT systems, the background of hotel IT managers has changed dramatically in the past decade. Many more have IT-related qualifications, with almost 70 percent holding a bachelor’s degree or higher. Because of the low adoption of EDI, the authors propose a revised EDI adoption model. The original model includes perceived benefits, external pressure, and organizational readiness. Within organizational readiness are financial resources and IT competence, and to those two factors the new model adds IT managers’ attitude toward and awareness of EDI.

A study of the online browsing and purchasing habits of some 1,400 outbound travelers in Hong Kong demonstrates the analytical power of weight-of-evidence (WOE) data mining. The WOE approach allows analysts to identify and transform the variables with the most predictive power regarding the likelihood of tourists’ online preferences and decisions. The study found that just over one-third of the respondents browsed hotel-related websites, and about half of those browsers had booked a room on those sites. Browsers in Hong Kong tended to be young, well educated, and well traveled. Those who used the hotel websites for purchases were, of course, part of the browser group, and were likewise relatively well educated. However, one unexpected variable set off those who used the websites for a hotel purchase, the length of their most recent trip. One possible reason is that long-haul tourists want to be sure of their accommodations, or this may reflect hotels’ free-night offers. The convenient use of model-based customer segmentation and decision rules would help hospitality practitioners effectively manage their marketing resources and activities, and enhance information-based marketing strategies to attract target customers.

The hotel industry continues to develop strategies for addressing consumer-generated online reviews, and particularly responding to poor reviews, which can have a damaging effect on a hotel’s reputation. To gain a greater understanding of the dynamics of poor reviews, this study analyzed 1,946 one-star reviews from ten popular online review websites, as well as 225 management responses from eighty-six Washington, D.C., hotels. A comprehensive complaint framework found that the most common complaints related to front desk staff, bathroom issues, room cleanliness, and guestroom noise issues. Complaints were also analyzed by hotel characteristics, including chain-scale segments, and reviewer characteristics, including purpose of travel and geographic location. Examining the reviews, highly rated hotels often respond to online complaints with appreciation, apologies, and explanations for what had gone wrong. Compensation adjustments are rarely mentioned by any hotel. The increasingly prominent role of social media necessitates that hotels use online reviews for market research and service recovery opportunities, regardless of whether they respond publicly.

Using online reviews in the co-creation of the service experience remains an attractive but elusive goal, based on case studies of how four high-end hotels in the western United States respond to customers’ reviews posted on TripAdvisor. Chosen specifically because they represent two divergent approaches for responding to reviews, the two sets of hotels provide a springboard for further study of how hotels can interact with customers through social media. Two of the hotels regularly responded publicly to guest comments, whereas the other two almost never posted answers to guest complaints—even though they monitored and reacted to those complaints. A comparison of management styles from the two sets of hotels was disparate in the following three areas: perceived accuracy of online reviews, internal communications style, and the approach to using online reviews for management purposes. First, hotels that responded frequently considered posted reviews to be an honest gauge of consumer sentiment, whereas nonresponders believed that reviews represented only extremely positive or negative views. Second, frequent responders had a collaborative communication style that involved regular meetings and consultations, whereas the infrequent responders (IRs) met only as needed. Some of the IRs also typically relied on an external corporate manager to handle social media, whereas the frequent responders commonly used internal staff. Finally, while all the hotels viewed posted comments as one mechanism to identify and solve customer problems, only one hotel went beyond that to make customer reviews a part of a strategic approach to an ongoing relationship.

Hotels that appear near the top of the list of search results or an online travel agency page usually get more attention and hits than those showing up lower on the page, but other factors create exceptions to this rule. This study demonstrates that the complexities of the consumer decision process extend beyond mere page position. Other factors that influence consumers’ attention to options in a list of hotels include the number of options and the presence of images. The study underlines the principle that the position of a hotel in a list and on a web page fold helps determine subjects’ attention. Beyond that, presenting test subjects with a lengthy set of hotel options (twenty hotels in this case) seemed to overwhelm the subjects, who tended to reduce their consideration set using different strategies, notably by focusing on price. In addition to creating a more favorable consideration of a hotel, presenting images of the hotels meant that the subjects evaluated more hotels, and reviewed each option more carefully by paying more attention to both the images and the accompanying text. The presence of images not only helped to alleviate the perceived information overload problem but also induced more hedonic elements in decision making, including encouraging guests to consider a hotel that did not otherwise shine in the text description. As a result, we recommend reducing the number of options on one page, understanding web visitors’ conversion rates through a nonlinear formula of attention, and providing appealing and interesting images when a hotel is inferior in terms of other criteria.

As a method of determining what types of social media messages work best for hospitality firms, this study examined what types of messages gained the most clicks of “Like” and comments on Facebook. An analysis of the number of likes and comments regarding nine hundred and eighty-two Facebook messages from ten restaurant chains and two independent operators revealed clear patterns. The more popular keywords involved information about the restaurant (e.g., menu descriptions) and the less popular messages were those that contained marketing-related words (including “winner” and “check”). Dividing the messages into four media types, namely, status (text only), link (containing a URL), video (embedding a video), and photo (showing photos), revealed that photo and status receive more likes and comments than the other two categories. Social media messages can also be categorized into two message types: sales and marketing (about two-thirds of the messages in this study) and conversational messages. Based on number of likes and comments, conversational messages are endorsed by more Facebook users. Finally, cross-effects of media type and message type affect the number of comments a message received. Although these results do not expressly assess Facebook users’ reactions, the guidelines developed here should help managers improve their use of Facebook, as well as provide groundwork for developing a defined typology of Facebook messages and an automatic text classifier with the machine learning techniques.

Although traditional travel agents have played an important role as proxies enabling travelers to make connections with hotels, the emergence of the internet has changed the traditional relationship between hotels and travel agents. Instead of a traditional agent–principal relationship, online travel agents (OTAs) seem to act as more than just intermediaries and more as business partners or vendors. Scholars have previously observed troubled, if not hostile, relationships between hotels and OTAs. This article reports a case study analyzing online comments on the 2009 feud between Choice Hotels International and Expedia.com. This analysis identified eight themes in three overall categories: the background to the feud (i.e., characteristics of the hotel industry, current business environment, Expedia’s business practices), the perspectives of hospitality industry professionals on the feud (i.e., wake-up call for hoteliers, Choice Hotels’ decision), and expectations concerning the nature of the relationship between hotels and OTAs (i.e., a symbiotic relationship between hotels and OTAs, experience of dealing with guests who book through OTAs and Expedia, and recommendations for hotels). Chief among the study’s conclusions is that hotels must find ways to make the most effective possible use of available technology and distribution channels, and perhaps even form consortia to share information about third-party distribution channels.