Editorial

Citation

Okumus, F. (2008), "Editorial", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 20 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijchm.2008.04120daa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Volume 20, Issue 4.

We are very proud to announce that among Emerald’s 180 journals, IJCHM ranked third with 451,268 downloaded articles in 2007. The first two Emerald journals were European Journal of Marketing and Management Decision. IJCHM also ranked third in 2006 and fourth in 2005. This proves that we publish articles that are interesting and useful to our readers. It also gives me great pleasure to note that IJCHM now has a stronger and more international Editorial Advisory Board (EAB). We already have a very strong EAB and most of our existing EAB members have agreed to continue service to the EAB. In addition, we have hand selected new members to join our EAB who will greatly help us raise the profile of IJCHM even further.

This new issue contains articles on online distribution, design of travel websites, jazz musicians’ experience in creation of life performance, workplace problems, outsourcing, budgetary practices, managing stakeholders for sustainable tourism and identifying key drivers of guest delight. All articles included in this issue are empirical research papers providing first hand evidence from the hospitality industry. Accurately reflecting our journal’s title and scope, we have authors in this issue who work in New Zealand, Hong Kong, Cyprus, Switzerland, the UK, the USA and Canada.

Marketing themes are featured in three articles. In the opening article, Gabriel Gazzoli, Woo Gon Kim and Radesh Palkurthi question whether the global hotel companies getting their online distribution strategies right. By using the internet, they collected and analyzed 2,800 room rates. Their findings indicate that US properties seem to do a much better job than their international partners in regards to “best rate guarantee,” “rate parity,” and room availability across online channels. In the following article, Rob Law and Billy Bai look at how the preferences of online buyers and browsers differ on the design and content of travel websites. They interviewed a total of 862 international travelers in the Hong Kong International Airport and found that travel website users viewed quality factors important, and they were generally satisfied with travel websites. Although these online buyers and browsers had a positive view for purchase intention in the long term, there existed significant differences between the two groups of users in all attributes of customer satisfaction and purchase intention. The following paper by Krzysztof Kubacki shares interesting findings about jazz musicians’ experience in the creation of live performance. The author carried out biographical interviews with professional jazz musicians. The respondents identified audience, agents and venue owners as important elements of their product; however, they were inclined to see their live performance rather as an experience created by the product itself. The author suggests that venue managers should closely consider the consequences of poor relations with artists.

The next article is on human resources management. Jill Poulston questions whether there is a relationship between hospitality workplace problems and poor training problems. Self-completed questionnaires were used to collect data from hospitality students and employees in New Zealand. The research findings indicate that poor training is associated with workplace problems, and improving training can reduce workplace problems such as under-staffing and theft. Tracy Jones provides an insight into budgetary practice in UK-based hotel organizations. The author used a census-based questionnaire of hotel organizations’ Finance Directors and found that the key reasons organizations produce budgets are to aid control, evaluate performance and aid planning. Neither the top-down, bottom-up or combination approaches to budgeting dominated in the UK. Seldjan Timur and Donald Getz examine the current network of inter-relationships of stakeholders representing government, the community, and the tourism and hospitality industry, and their perceptions of critical stakeholders in destination development. They used the network analysis and the stakeholder approach and found that the destination marketing/management organizations (DMOs) and key stakeholders have the highest centrality in urban destinations. Their study demonstrates the use of a network analysis methodology as a potential tool for researchers and managers in examining destination stakeholder relationships.

Finally, in their research in brief paper John Crotts, Bing Pan and Andrew Raschid provide a method for identifying those key drivers that contribute to guest delight. The authors used two questions to obtain liked and disliked service attributes and two additional questions to identify the delighted and highly satisfied guests as measured by their overall satisfaction and intent repeat visit. The authors suggest that the four questions they used could be an economic and useful way to discover the key drivers of guest delight.

Fevzi OkumusEditor