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This paper aims to review existing restaurant classifications within the literature in the restaurant management field. The authors discuss intra-industry ramifications of the limited use of recognized typologies and the need to prescriptively guide the description of restaurant context in the literature to communicate the internal and external validity of findings.

Restaurant categories from accepted typologies are used as keywords to collect 345 empirical studies from ten relevant journals serving the global restaurant management discipline. Content analysis of titles, abstracts and methodology sections is used to examine three propositions regarding the standardization, rationalization and efficiency of restaurant classification in imparting restaurant context in published works.

Findings show inconsistent use of existing typologies and limited use of effective restaurant descriptors to inform users about the situational context in which data were gathered or hypotheses were tested. There is a general preference for categories commonly associated with those of the National Restaurant Association.

Researchers should standardize descriptions of restaurants in manuscript titles, abstracts and methods sections, thereby enhancing integration of international research, the ability to conduct macro-level industry studies, and communication of findings to practitioners for operational use.

Recommendations are offered to optimize the use of restaurant classification so that the content of empirical studies may be more effectively accessed, digested and compared, thereby enhancing the communication of advances in the restaurant management body of knowledge to practitioners and other researchers.

The study aims to offer a general review of website evaluation, with particular application to the winery tourism field. Automated website evaluation is explored as a complementary tool in the evaluation of small and medium enterprise (SME) winery websites.

The study adopted a mixed-method investigation including a critical review of winery website evaluation literature and analysis of winery website scores generated through a free service of a commercial automated evaluation scoring system.

No standards currently exist for winery website evaluation metrics and current evaluation processes suffer from human rater bias. An automated evaluation scoring system used in the study was able to discriminate between a sample of known best practice websites and other independently formed samples representing average wineries in the USA and in North Carolina.

Wineries and other small business tourism firms can benefit by incorporating automated website evaluation and benchmarking into their internet strategies. Reported human rater limitations noted in manual evaluation may be minimized using automated rating technology. Automated evaluation system metrics tend to be updated more frequently and offer better alignment with trending consumer expectations for website design.

The current study used an automated website quality evaluation tool that serves to move winery website design efforts forward and supports the goals of reputation management for tourism businesses relying on internet marketing.

Integrates perspectives across operations, marketing, human resources, and organizational theory in a conceptualization of the theoretical relationships between customer competency and marketing and operations practices in service firms. Suggests service firm strategies to leverage customer competency by managing process variation in an industry through service firm co‐operation when altering process structure does not support or achieve a differentiated market position for individual firms; by using market segmentation on the basis of customer productcore competency to develop new service offerings; by balancing the mix of customers at different competency levels with the firm’s productive capacity; and by optimizing socialization of four types of new customers: “Virgin Newcomers”, “Virtual Newcomers”, “Value Switchers” and “Vagabond Switchers” who have different levels of experience with competing firms and expectations for competency fit with new firms.

The purpose of this paper is to profile the Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes (WHATT) theme issue “Services management and the growing number of Asian travellers: what needs re-thinking?” with reference to the experiences of the theme editor and the theme issue outcomes from countries within and beyond Asia.

The paper uses structured questions to enable the theme editor to reflect on the rationale for the theme issue question, the starting point, the selection of the writing team and material and the editorial process.

This paper reports on research and discussions between academics and practitioners about an issue faced by many countries with established hospitality, tourism and travel industries. Specifically, what are the adjustments needed to mirror the radically changing demographic landscape of inbound tourism – now characterized by more affluent and mobile Asian visitors?

This paper builds on the outcomes of an international conference on “Managing and Delivering Services in the Asian Century”, and offers a response to the changes needed to better serve Asian travellers.

It provides guidelines for destinations, hospitality organizations and travel operators that have traditionally relied on European and American source markets to help them re-think their service delivery process, management and operations.