Search results

This study aims to investigate the impact of the loyalty program members’ satisfaction toward the hotel loyalty program benefits and the customer management relationship initiatives of individual hotels on the brand relationship quality (BRQ), i.e. their relationship quality with the hotel brand, and its outcomes. The moderating impact of membership level on the hypothesized relationships was also investigated.

A usable sample of 920 active members of a hotel loyalty program was obtained. Structural equation modeling with partial least squares method was used to estimate the structural relationships and to investigate the moderating effect of membership level.

Employee’s customer orientation, membership communication and hotel stay-related benefits are determinants of the loyalty program members’ BRQ. BRQ is also confirmed as a higher-order construct of three latent variables which include trust, satisfaction and commitment. Moderating effects of the membership were partially supported in this study. The strongest effect of BRQ is on members’ word of mouth followed by shares of purchase. BRQ is found to have negative relationship with members’ willingness to serve as marketing resource, but the impact was small.

This is a cross-sectional study with a population of active loyalty program members of only one luxury hotel group. The sample size of the top-tier members is also smaller in comparison to the other two groups.

This study contributes to the understanding of the antecedents and consequences of BRQ and the body of knowledge about loyalty program for hotel industry.

This is one of the few studies investigating the effectiveness of hotel loyalty programs from the active members’ perspective and the moderating effect of membership level on the relationships among BRQ, its antecedents and its outcomes.

This study aims to adopt a cognitive heuristic approach to investigate the interaction effect of a message source characteristic (reviewer expertise [RE]) and two message structure characteristics (review rating consistency [RC] and review valence [RV]) on the perceived credibility of hotel online reviews.

Data were collected from 242 university students and were analyzed by three-way analysis of variance through a 2 × 2 factorial experiments using a simulated hotel review page on TripAdvisor.

Results show a three-way interaction effect of RE, RC and RV on the perceived credibility of hotel online reviews. The main effects of the three factors are also determined. Higher perceived credibility scores are found for negative reviews, reviews written by experts and reviews with a consistent rating.

This study adopts an experimental approach and is the first to investigate the three-way interactions of message source and message structure characteristics of online hotel reviews. Data were collected from students in a university in Hong Kong. Results may not be generalizable to other markets.

Results suggest that reviews written by experts have higher perceived credibility. Hotels should pay attention to the content of online reviews and the expertise level of reviewers. Efforts should be exerted to create positive experiences for hotel guests that motivate expert reviewers to write positive reviews. Note that negative reviews have higher perceived credibility than positive ones. Hotels should promptly address negative reviews and provide professional responses to reviewers. Platform operators of user-generated content (UGC) should create well-defined reviewer profiles that can serve as cues that communicate the different expertise of reviewers.

This study is the first to test the three-way interaction effect of RE, RC and RV on the perceived credibility of hotel online reviews. Results provide recommendations to hotels and UGC operators and enable them to benefit from emerging UGC usage.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how hotels are implementing customer relationship management (CRM) practices at the property level.

Semi‐structured in‐depth interviews were conducted with 45 hotel managers from 17 hotels. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using content analysis.

All participating hotels have practices in place to manage customer relationships. The most commonly cited goal for CRM is guest retention. Evaluation and control are perceived as very important activities not only to create value for the customers, but also to track the performance of the guest contact departments and the customers' evaluations of the hotel/restaurant experiences.

The sample is probably biased towards hotels that are most interested in CRM and are heavily weighted towards higher tariff properties.

The study modified Buttle's CRM value chain to analyze hotels' CRM practices. Results of the study provide a source for industry practitioners to compare and benchmark their practices and to obtain useful CRM ideas.

CRM‐related research in the hotel industry has looked at a variety of specific practices and its role in achieving overall objectives at the corporate strategic level. Yet, no research has been done to investigate CRM practices at the property level for hotels using the CRM value chain.

Presents a special issue, enlisting the help of the author’s students and colleagues, focusing on age, sex, colour and disability discrimination in America. Breaks the evidence down into manageable chunks, covering: age discrimination in the workplace; discrimination against African‐Americans; sex discrimination in the workplace; same sex sexual harassment; how to investigate and prove disability discrimination; sexual harassment in the military; when the main US job‐discrimination law applies to small companies; how to investigate and prove racial discrimination; developments concerning race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; developments concerning discrimination against workers with HIV or AIDS; developments concerning discrimination based on refusal of family care leave; developments concerning discrimination against gay or lesbian employees; developments concerning discrimination based on colour; how to investigate and prove discrimination concerning based on colour; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; using statistics in employment discrimination cases; race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning gender discrimination in the workplace; discrimination in Japanese organizations in America; discrimination in the entertainment industry; discrimination in the utility industry; understanding and effectively managing national origin discrimination; how to investigate and prove hiring discrimination based on colour; and, finally, how to investigate sexual harassment in the workplace.

Presents over sixty abstracts summarising the 1999 Employment Research Unit annual conference held at the University of Cardiff. Explores the multiple impacts of globalization on work and employment in contemporary organizations. Covers the human resource management implications of organizational responses to globalization. Examines the theoretical, methodological, empirical and comparative issues pertaining to competitiveness and the management of human resources, the impact of organisational strategies and international production on the workplace, the organization of labour markets, human resource development, cultural change in organisations, trade union responses, and trans‐national corporations. Cites many case studies showing how globalization has brought a lot of opportunities together with much change both to the employee and the employer. Considers the threats to existing cultures, structures and systems.

The question of responsibility is not new to labour law. The earliest developments in labour law and social law sprang from a “legal revolution” to borrow the words of Georges Scelle, considering the concept of responsibility that prevailed in common law. Civil responsibility which was originally based on fault could now be based on the risk inherent to a socially useful activity so as to ensure that the responsibility for damages that might result from it be equitably shared. This development took place under the generalization of the industrial production mode, first within the frame work of laws respecting compensation for industrial accidents.

Despite laws like the Civil Rights Acts and the Americans with Disabilities Act, customers in restaurants are still faced with an inordinate amount of discrimination. The most prevalent forms of discrimination are race and disability based. Large restaurant chains such as the Waffle House and Cracker Barrel have learned nothing from the landmark Denny’s discrimination case as they face potentially larger class action suits today. Despite the bad news, there have been significant developments toward limiting restaurant discrimination. They are the industry wide impact of Denny’s diversity training programme and a recent court decision strengthening the ADA. The only true ways to limit and eradicate discrimination from restaurants is to continue educating our children about diversity, insist on expanding corporate diversity programmes, and increasing penalties on those organisations that do discriminate.

The authors explain their approach to teaching literatura infantil (children’s literature) in Spanish to bilingual teachers pursuing their master’s degree in bilingual education at a university in South Texas. In this Self-Study of Teacher Education Practice (S-STEP) research, the authors investigated how teachers can transform their practice and come to value their students’ abilities to interpret literature. They engaged the teachers in projects using quality children’s literature. The projects were carried out by graduate inservice teachers teaching Spanish/English bilingual students studying at different grade levels. Some teachers taught along the Texas/Mexico border and others taught in a large metropolitan school district in central Texas. The authors used their analysis of the inservice teachers’ projects as data to inform their own practice as teacher educators. In the first project, the bilingual teachers engaged their students in exploratory talk that allowed them to bring their backgrounds and experiences into discussions of what they read. The second project challenged the teachers to consider the importance of the images in high-quality illustrated children’s books. The teachers asked their students to read the images and expand their understanding of the books by considering more than the words in the texts. In the final project, the teachers guided their students through Ada’s stages of creative dialogue using children’s literature. The authors describe the projects in detail and give examples from four different teachers showing what they learned about teaching children’s literature and how they changed their perspectives about what their emergent bilingual students could do. Although only four teachers are highlighted, they are representative of students taking the course and engaging in the projects over three different semesters.

This monograph contains abstracts from the 2005 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, 6‐7th September 2005

The legal and political roots of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) owe themselves to the civil rights era of the 1960s, which passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968, and to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. From the 1970s to the 1990s, activism among the disabled became increasingly visible. In 1986, congress passed the Air Carriers Act, which addressed the rights of the disabled when using air transportation. Later in 1988, the Civil Rights Restoration Act was passed along with the Fair Housing Amendments Act (Historical, 2003).