Group Forecasting Accuracy in Hotels

Yield management helps hotels more profitably manage the capacity of their rooms. Hotels tend to have two types of business: transient and group. Yield management research and systems have been designed for transient business in which the group forecast is taken as a given. In this research, forecast data from approximately 90 hotels of a large North American hotel chain were used to determine the accuracy of group forecasts and to identify factors associated with accurate forecasts. Forecasts showed a positive bias and had a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 40% at two months before arrival; 30% at one month before arrival; and 10-15% on the day of arrival. Larger hotels, hotels with a higher dependence on group business, and hotels that updated their forecasts frequently during the month before arrival had more accurate forecasts.

Authenticity in Scaling the Vision: Defining Boundaries in the Food and Beverage Entrepreneurship Development Cycle

The October 2015 Food and Beverage Entrepreneurship Roundtable brought together over 30 food and beverage industry leaders, entrepreneurs, faculty, and students at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University. Discussion topics covered entrepreneurship in the food and beverage industry, including development, intrapreneurship, operational efficiency, beverage product development, and technology. The roundtable began with the presentation of a five-point framework on food and beverage venue development. The first three phases focused on the launch of a venue, including how to define the guest experience; the creation of operational functionality by strategically planning out the design, flow, and efficiency of a defined space; and development capacity. The remaining two points of the framework focused on post-opening considerations, including operating systems and culture development. Participants discussed the importance of culture in the growth of a business. They suggested that intrapreneurship needs to be fostered in the culture of an organization and in an educational curriculum for those who are preparing to enter the industry. Participants also discussed the fine balance between setting expectations for an experience and subsequently being able to maintain this experience in a fast changing environment. In particular they considered what it means to say no to customers. A discussion on the beverage industry focused on how to distribute products in a crowded marketplace. One method to ensure that the product gets into the hands of the consumers is face-to-face sales. Finally, in the technology session, the group discussed technology adoption, specifically focusing on the point at which technology detracts from the guest experience, how to minimize operational risk from technology, and how to maximize consumers’ adoption rates.

The Impact of Supervisory Monitoring On High-End Retail Sales Productivity

Based on a two-stage analysis of a panel of data on 12 outlets of a high-end retailer for 24 months, we investigate how the level of supervisory monitoring affects retail sales productivity. In the first stage, we use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compute the relative productivity of retail outlets in using their labor and capital resources to generate store sales. In the second stage, we regress the logarithm of DEA scores on contextual variables to obtain consistent estimators of the impact of contextual variables on productivity (Banker and Natarajan in Operation Research 56:48-58, 2008). Contrary to agency theoretic prediction that supervisory monitoring leads to an increase in retail sales productivity, our empirical results indicate that the higher the level of supervisory monitoring, the lower is the retail sales productivity for high-end retail outlets.