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The Retrofit State of the Nation Survey has tracked the perceptions of social housing sector professionals’ views of retrofit since 2010. It has taken the form of three surveys conducted in 2010, 2013 and 2015. Here, the authors bring together the three surveys to specifically address the adoption and perceived effectiveness of retrofit technology in social housing projects. The purpose of this paper is to identify the changing perceptions of social housing professionals over a period of significant policy change within in the sector.

The research takes the form of a cross-sectional attitudinal, self-completion survey, covering sections considering the adoption levels and perceived effectiveness of different retrofit technologies. The target sample was medium to larger scale registered social housing providers. The surveys were conducted in 2010, 2013 and 2015.

In terms of effectiveness, the reliance on tried and tested technologies is apparent. Emerging or more complex technologies have declined in perceived effectiveness over the period. It is clear that social housing has adopted a wide range of technologies, and the larger providers, with whom this survey is undertaken, potentially represent a significant pool of UK retrofit experience.

The survey provides a record of the changing attitudes of social housing providers to specific technologies over the period of 2010-2015, which has seen significant changes in the energy and social housing policy. The findings show the link between policy instruments and adoption, with policy instruments mapping to adoption in the sector. Perceived effectiveness reflects a preference for more established technologies, an issue that is highlighted in the recent Bonfield Review.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed appraisal of the quality of domestic retrofits.

This paper presents the results of technical surveys on 51 retrofits undertaken before, during and after the retrofits.

Failures are observed to be endemic and characterised into five themes: 72 per cent showed moisture issues pre-retrofit, 68 per cent had moisture risks post-retrofit, 62 per cent did not adopt a whole house approach, 16 per cent showed inadequate quality assurance protocols and 64 per cent showed evidence of insufficient design detailing. Each theme is further subcategorised with a view to identifying implications for future policy.

The findings suggest the 10 per cent Ofgem retrofit failure rates predictions are an underestimate and so there may be a need for additional investigations to understand the trend across the UK.

Recommendations to reduce the failure rates may include making changes to the current inspection regime, widening understanding among installers; providing standard repeatable designs for repeated features; and empowering occupants to trigger inspections.

The sample is representative of a substantial proportion of the homes in the UK suggesting that retrofit quality may in many instances be below the required standards.

Risks of moisture issues and underperformance in domestic retrofit are a concern for government industry and households. This research shows that many installation failures are the result of not implementing existing guidelines and a change to the enforcement of standards may be needed to enact a fundamental change in installer practice and process control.

To improve building performance and meet statutory carbon reduction targets, a radical transformation of existing UK building stock is needed. Much previous research on building performance has focussed on large-scale construction. However, retrofit of existing housing stock – which will contribute the majority of the requisite efficiency improvement – is carried out by practitioners in the repair–maintain–improve (RMI) subsector. These practitioners are the sole traders and micro-firms who constitute two-fifths of employment in the construction sector. The study aims to examine the factors influencing these practitioners in RMI work to understand how better to engage them with improved building performance.

A total of 31 semi-structured interviews were conducted with RMI professionals from around the UK and analysed using template analysis.

The analysis identified capabilities of the practitioners who influence building performance, including knowledge and co-ordination of people and resources; opportunities including state action and customer demand; and motivations including pride in work, customer care and satisfaction, maintaining a viable business and working relationships.

The participants were a small, mixed group in terms of firm size and specialisation. The qualitative approach adopted provided detailed insights but does not make claims for statistical generalisability or representativeness of the findings. Future work could look to extend the findings with a statistically representative survey.

For a successful transition to high standards of building performance, modelling is not enough. Initiatives are needed to address the multiple factors which determine engagement in energy-efficient retrofit: capacities, opportunities and motivations. The desire of RMI practitioners to meet customer expectations could be used to develop pragmatic building performance evaluation, guided by householder satisfaction criteria.

The study examined the attitudes and experiences of an under-researched sector who are essential to the delivery of improved building performance. This study makes a novel contribution by applying an established psychological model of behaviour change, the capability, opportunity, motivation – behaviour model, for the first time in this domain.

Through structural equation modeling, Fishbein and Ajzen's modified theory of reasoned action model (TORA) is used to study the impact of innovation on Indian consumers’ purchase behavior of new processed foods. The results indicate that subjective norms are a key factor in understanding Indian consumers’ new food purchase decisions regardless of their level of innovation. Specifically, subjective norms are found to have direct effects on attitudes, intention to buy, and purchase behavior for new processed food products. Surprisingly, attitudes have little effect on less innovative consumers’ intention to buy. Additionally, product familiarity had a significant impact on Indian consumers’ attitudes, subjective norms, intention to buy, and, ultimately, purchase behavior of the low innovator and high innovator groups. Marketing implications are discussed.

Nowadays, various hotels and third party websites allow guests to express their stay experience in the form of textual content and ratings termed as user-generated content (UGC). This study aims to explore the influence of UGC along with the financial aspect on the sales of the hotel. This will help them in making efficient business decisions and revenue generation by realizing the requirements of the guests. The proposed model provides an insight into the theoretical and practical significance of the concerned explanatory variables to the hoteliers.

This paper considers the number of rooms, six aspect ratings (room, cleanliness, location, service, value and sleep quality), review length and readability as the independent variables. Revenue per available room is taken as the dependent variable. Log-linear regression analysis is performed on a data set of 78 hotels situated in Delhi National Capital Region to validate the relationships. Moreover, the differential impact of hotel type on these exploratory variables is studied.

Research findings show that along with the financial aspect, the UGC components also play a key role in generating sales for the hotels. It was further observed that the two hotel categories, i.e. luxury and budget have different natures and also the characteristics of luxury hotels overshadow those of budget.

This study uses the textual content of the reviews along with the numerical ratings. This is a unique combination for studying sales of hotels according to the knowledge of authors, where earlier studies focused only on the financial aspects.

How ICL identified the need for a new “mind set” is described and the action taken to create it. A programme of training was instituted, which was unusual in being both mandatory and applied to the board itself. The concepts of career management are introduced which will be developed further in a subsequent article.

Spousal influence in the decision‐making process for purchasing consumer goods has been extensively investigated in the academic literature. There have been few studies, however, that have looked at this issue in a cross‐cultural context, especially that of cultural assimilation. Reports the results of a cross‐cultural study of consumer decision making for 16 product categories across three different household samples: US nationals, Indian US immigrants, and Indians living in India. Two major conclusions emerge: the three groups differ significantly in extent of spousal influence: and, in general, the immigrant group is found to be positioned between the American nationals and the culture they left behind, lending credence to acculturation/assimilation theories.

Understanding customers' revisiting behavior is highlighted in the field of service industry and the emergence of online communities has enabled customers to express their prior experience. Thus, purpose of this study is to investigate customers' reviews on an online hotel reservation platform, and explores their postbehaviors from their reviews.

The authors employ two different approaches and compare the accuracy of predicting customers' post behavior: (1) using several machine learning classifiers based on sentimental dimensions of customers' reviews and (2) conducting the experiment consisted of two subsections. In the experiment, the first subsection is designed for participants to predict whether customers who wrote reviews would visit the hotel again (referred to as Prediction), while the second subsection examines whether participants want to visit one of the particular hotels when they read other customers' reviews (dubbed as Decision).

The accuracy of the machine learning approaches (73.23%) is higher than that of the experimental approach (Prediction: 58.96% and Decision: 64.79%). The key reasons of users' predictions and decisions are identified through qualitative analyses.

The findings reveal that using machine learning approaches show the higher accuracy of predicting customers' repeat visits only based on employed sentimental features. With the novel approach of integrating customers' decision processes and machine learning classifiers, the authors provide valuable insights for researchers and providers of hospitality services.

Presents a conceptual model that examines the determinants of the internationalization process of franchise systems. The basic assumption of the model is that the internationalization decision is essentially a cost/benefit assessment that is filtered through the perceptions of top management. Consequently, the central constructs of the model are perceived risk and perceived benefits which are shaped by a set of organizational and environmental factors, and which, in turn, determine the strengths of intentions to internationalize.

Seeks to fill some of the gaps in the business literature regarding the consumer market in Japan. Accomplishes this through a replication of the classic 1974 work of Davis and Rigaux relating to family purchase decision making. An egalitarianism scale was included for the final analysis to allow for differences in couple perceived traditionality‐modernism. Finds that the heavily patriarchal orientation of Japan still exists with husbands exerting heavy influence in the final stage of the decision‐making process and offers suggestions for management.