Is There Hospitality for Disabled Travelers?

There is a plethora of options about what constitutes “accessibility.” Countries like England and Canada are making significant progress in improving accommodations. The Americans with Disability Act is being revised, but critics say hotels are not complying with either the letter or the spirit of the law. The author, a retired FIU professors who writes about disabled travel from his wheelchair, explores these issues from a very personal point of view.

Market-Driven Hotel Brands: Linking Market Orientation, Innovation, and Performance

"Market orientation" is a term popularized by marketing practitioners to indicate the extent to which a firm is market driven. This presumed linkage between market orientation and profitability has caught the attention of scholars, but, surprisingly, only two prior studies have reported a positive association between the two. Given the special relevance to the hotel industry of being market driven, we believe this industry provides the ideal setting for demonstrating the link between market orientation and performance. This research examines this linkage in the hotel industry. The results of our study suggest that market orientation is positively and significantly related to innovation, subjective performance, and objective performance. This result yields a number of useful ideas about how to harness the power of the marketing concept.

Multimedia Training: Why Some use it and Some Do Not

Forms of interactive multimedia, including CD-ROM, DV-I, Laserdisc, and virtual reality, have given a new perspective to training in many industries. As the hospitality industry and other service industries continue to grow, these forms of technology are becoming of increasing interest as organizations strive to deliver more efficient and effective services to customers and employees

Benchmarking Quality Management in Hotels

In the early 1980s many hotels in the United States adopted quality assurance as a business strategy. By the late 1980s independent and chain hotels realized that total quality management (TQM) was a more powerful process and they began utilizing many of its components. For over 10 years, hotels have flirted with a variety of tools, processes, and theories to improve service to the guest

Trends for Meetings and Expositions Industry

During the last decade, the meetings and expositions industry has flourished, even as it has struggled to cope with difficult challenges. This is a taste of things to me. In the years ahead, the global population will continue to grow and change, science and technology will tighten their hold on business and society and the world will knit itself ever more tightly into a single market. As a result, both opportunities and trials will abound.

Male and Female Hotel Controllers in the '90s

Female hotel controllers generally are expected to display the same managerial characteristics and are evaluated on the same criteria as male controllers, yet there is a significant difference in their base salaries. The authors explore some of the differences between male and female hotel controllers and make overall comparisons with previously-collected data.

Cruise Brand Management

Brands have always been associated with cruise and line voyage operations, but the branding concept has taken on new meaning in the modern cruise industry. In the consolidation of cruise lines under a few major corporate structure today, the acquiring entity has most often chosen to invest in lines acquired under their existing names, retaining separate brand identity. The author summarizes industry experiences with the acquisition and management of multiple brands under a single corporate structure, together with the rationale and advantages, this article is an updated and expanded version of that first given at the Seatrade Cruise Shipping Convention March 11, 1999.

Lean and Mean Do Not Equal Profitable and Hospitable

Lean and mean hospitality organizations are relevant today. The authors explore research findings from Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) studies, in general, and cite findings from the hospitality industry to make the case for lean and loving hospitality organizations.

Electronic Channels of Distribution: Challenges and Solutions for Hotel Operators

This paper addresses the issues of hotel operators identifying effective means of allocating rooms through various electronic channels of distribution. Relying upon the theory of coercive isomorphism, a think tank was constructed to identify and define electronic channels of distribution currently being utilized in the hotel industry. Through two full-day focus groups consisting of key hotel executives and industry practitioners, distribution channels were identified as were challenges and solutions associated with each.

In Retrospect: Quest of Hospitality Faculty for Identity

It has been 100 years since Iowa State University first offered a program in hospitality education. One of the pioneer educators in the field presents a retrospective based upon a career that spanned much of that period.

Returning to Server-Centric Hospitality System Applications

Application service provider models represent an alternative to in-house information systems and are gaining favor within the hospitality industry: The models, which place technical system components at a remote site, are described as server-centric. ASPs allow hospitality management to share investment dollars, system costs, and technical staff expenditure with an ASP operator, thereby concentrating on providing enhanced guest services. Although considered a viable alternative to in-house processing, not everyone agrees this is a favorable trend.

GENIAL Design: A System for Improving Guest Satisfaction with Hospitality Design

Over the past decades, hospitality design has lost sight of its basic goals of providing the guest with safe, pleasant, convenient accommodations and providing the owner with a facility which can be operated efficiently and profitably over the life of the structure. The author offers the acronym GE- NIAL, Guest, Environment, Needs, Interiors, Accessibility, and Long-term, as a means of keeping owners, developers, managers, and designers aware of the desired goals of the facility throughout its design and development. The author believes that the use of this acronym will promulgate de- signs more attuned to guest and owner/operator needs, resulting in in- creased guest satisfaction and increased profitability.

Management Misperceptions: An Obstacle to Motivation

Managers and supervisors create a motivational environment by being responsive to the needs and wants of employees. However, managers have many misconceptions about what workers want from their jobs. The author discusses how to create the best organizational environment.

Leadership in the Hospitality Curriculum

Although some universities have introduced leadership courses in their curricula, schools of hotel and restaurant management are not following suit. As the industry's rate of growth and complexity outpaces that of its human resources, the formation of hospitality leaders becomes indispensable.

Vanguard Management: An Emerging New Paradigm

There is an increasing body of evidence that significant and exciting changes are under way in how some organizations are seeing their world and transforming themselves to fit this new vision. The change is so fundamental as to constitute a paradigm shift. There is further evidence that some hospitality firms may be part of this transformation. The author advocates the use of vanguard management in this article