Editorial

Citation

Okumus, F. (2010), "Editorial", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 22 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijchm.2010.04122baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Volume 22, Issue 2

I am pleased to report that last year was another successful year for the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management (IJCHM). In 2009, we received over 160 manuscript submissions – an improvement of about 20 percent compared to 2008. Our acceptance rate was about 30 percent in 2009. Similarly to 2006, 2007, and 2008, among Emerald’s 225 journals, IJCHM was ranked third again in 2009 in terms of downloaded articles. In total 476,471 article downloads were made from IJCHM in 2009. Overall, we are pleased that IJCHM has been now widely recognized as one of the top-tier academic journals in the hospitality field. We have recently revised our Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) and have added new EAB members from Canada, Cyprus, Egypt, Germany, Japan, Thailand, Spain, South Africa, the UK and the USA. We have over 70 EAB members from different countries. Certainly, our EAB is now much stronger and more international.

We have articles in this issue presenting research findings and discussing a wide variety of hospitality and tourism related research topics. In the first article, Ada Lo, Lawrence Stalcup and Amy Lee present empirical findings on how hotels implement customer relationship management practices at the property level using the customer relationship management (CRM) value chain. Using semi-structured in-depth interviews, they collected data from 45 hotel managers from 17 hotels. This study modifies Buttle’s (2004) CRM value chain to analyze hotels’ CRM practices. The findings of this study provide a source for industry practitioners to compare and benchmark their practices and to obtain useful CRM ideas.

In the next article, Asad Mohsin and Tim Lockyer assess the service quality perception of customers of luxury hotels, New Delhi in India. Their performance analysis demonstrated that for responses relating to front office, room service, and in-house café/restaurant, the importance score is statistically significant to and higher than the performance rating. Overall, the results indicate significant difference between expectations of the guests and actual experiences, thus highlighting important managerial implications. The article by Jing Xu and Andrew Chan explores the way in which quality of experience and brand equity is developed in the hotel industry. This article reviews the hospitality and brand equity literature and provides a conceptual framework for understanding hotel brand equity. This study attempts to fill in the gaps in the discussion of the way in which hotel brand equity is developed.

Matthew Alexander, Chien Chen, Andrew MacLaren and Kevin O’Gorman explore the “Love Motel” concept by examining the changing attitude of consumers in Taiwan. The empirical findings are grouped into three interrelated areas: growth of Taiwanese love motels due to more liberal attitudes towards sexual practice; a change in the public perception of motels due to increased standards and an increased satisfaction with the personal consumption experience; these hotels are designed for couples. The phenomenon of “Love Hotels” is absent from hospitality management literature. Therefore, this paper begins to fill that gap by beginning a discussion on this possibly controversial sector. In the next article, Clark Kincaid, Seyhmus Baloglu, Zhenxing Mao and James Busser evaluate the usefulness of the TANGSERV scale by examining the effect of tangible quality constructs on restaurant patrons’ affect and behavioral intentions. Study results show that the food and service construct and accessibility construct of tangible quality exhibit positive impact on the affect towards restaurants, which in turn influenced re-patronage intention for restaurants. This study helps restaurant managers select the most important tangible restaurant feature for consumers and guide the investment resources to address customer expectations.

Rachel Dodds and Jacqueline Kuehnel provide an exploratory case study of mass mainstream tour operators in the Canadian market and evaluate their awareness level of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Their findings suggest that CSR is gaining momentum as companies begin to realize that their stakeholders are demanding accountability that goes beyond shareholders’ interests. The authors suggest that in the case of tour operators CSR initiatives are preliminary and there is little implementation of such practices. In the final article, Abel Alonso and Yi Liu examine winery operators’ involvement with wine tourism and current challenges they face in several emerging Western Australian wine regions. This study shows a great potential for the development of wine tourism and many foresee their own future involvement in hospitality and tourism. However, the authors point out that the fragmented nature of the wine industry; financial limitations and geographical distance from large cities or tourist traffic are current barriers limiting further development. The study constitutes an effort to extend the very limited existing knowledge on newly developing wine regions in Western Australia.

In the Research in brief paper, Amarjit Gill, Stephen Fitzgerald, Smita Bhutani, Harvinder Mand, and Suraj Sharma examine the relationship between transformational leadership (TL) and employee desire for empowerment (EDFE). Employees working in the hospitality industry from Canada and India were surveyed to test the relationship between TL and EDFE in countries that differ substantially in their levels of cultural power distance. Study results suggest that the improvement in the degree of EDFE is positively related to the improvement in the degree of perceived TL implementation in the hospitality industry in both countries.

Once again, I hope that our readers find all the articles published in IJCHM strong, relevant and useful. I want to take this opportunity to thank again our authors, editorial board members and ad hoc reviewers for their hard work and commitment in shaping each of these papers into the exceedingly quality that we have come to expect from IJCHM.

Fevzi OkumusEditor-in-Chief