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The paper aims to offer a preliminary insight into the issue of whether service providers eliminate their offerings in various stages of their life cycle, and if so, whether elimination decision‐making differs depending on the service's life cycle stage.

Data were secured by means of a structured questionnaire which was completed through personal interviews. Respondents answered all questions having a recently eliminated service in mind. The initial calls and follow‐up efforts generated 164 usable responses (49.8 per cent response rate).

A service may be eliminated from a service provider's portfolio in any stage of its life cycle. Further, in terms of precipitating circumstances, evaluation factors and elimination strategies, the service elimination process differs depending on the stage of the service life cycle that the elimination decision is taken.

The most important implication is service providers eliminate services not only as a response to a crisis possibly caused by drops of sales volume, but also for other reasons. In this respect, service portfolio rationalization and particularly service elimination may result as a consequence of strategic management decisions taken for positive (e.g. development of a new service) or negative (e.g. competitive actions) reasons. Within this framework, the service life cycle (SLC) model, as a strategic tool for analysis and decision‐making, may well serve to guide the rationalization process.

The research questions of the study have been examined for tangible products, but this is the first relevant study that is conducted in a service context.

In an increasingly technology-driven retail landscape, retailers face the challenge of making the most effective decisions regarding the selection and use of innovative technology. Although previous research provides insights into the added value of technology, it does not directly guide retailers in overviewing and selecting technology that supports their sales operations. This chapter contributes to the field of retail technology studies by introducing a sales-oriented model intended to assist retailers in inventorying available technologies and making decisions regarding the selection and use of these technologies for their physical stores. The model uses an updated version of the seven steps of selling as a foundation and, in line with the resource life cycle, decision support system and self-service technology literature streams, proposes applying technology in such a way that it supports the stages of the retailer's sales process. This chapter concludes with a discussion of practical guidelines for applying the model.

This study aims to use Simon’s theory of strategies to explain Ever Rich’s strategies for introducing innovation. Ever Rich is a very successful duty-free shop in Taiwan that makes profits by improving airport lobby/terminals and enhancing Taiwan’s tourism brand image. This study shows a design artifact to explain Ever Rich’s strategies for introducing innovation. The design artifact is based on Herbert Simon’s classical work of Sciences of the Artificial. The design artifact is also grounded in the theories of customer service life cycle, input-process-output model of strategic entrepreneurship and docility-based distributed cognition.

The authors interviewed the executive management with the pre-determined 14 questions regarding resource inputs, processes of resource orchestration and outputs.

Introducing innovation requires appropriate strategies. Based on Herbert Simon’s research on “Science of the Artificial”, this case shows a design artifact of strategies for introducing innovation. The design artifact is in line with Ever Rich’s corporate philosophy, including training and education of duty-free professionals, customer-oriented services, guarantee stringent quality control of products, newness and innovation and contributions to community. The design artifact, therefore, serves as a source of discovery with benefits for knowledge-building and relationship-building that are useful for students and practitioners.

The success of this case and the reasons of success can be an inspiration for others.

A significant contribution of the paper is that the design artifact serves as a source of discovery with benefits for knowledge-building and relationship-building that are useful both for students and practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to review and structure the literature on the integration between marketing and supply chain management (SCM) and to contribute to the body of knowledge by developing a framework for integrating marketing and supply chain strategies.

The paper draws its insights and conclusions from a review of the literature in both fields, marketing and SCM, followed by an interaction research approach which helped to refine and validate the theory‐derived framework from the perspective of practitioners.

In the existing body of literature on marketing and SCM integration, three perspectives can be differentiated: the interfunctional perspective, the process perspective and the perspective of integrated business concepts. The proposed framework builds on these perspectives and moves them onto a strategic level. Integrating marketing and supply chain strategies involves the management of four integration levels: corporate integration; strategic customer integration; strategic supplier integration and marketing and supply pipeline strategy integration.

The proposed framework points managers at the managerial issues of marketing and supply chain strategy integration and illustrates the need for an interaction approach which challenges the traditional view of marketing in the demand creation and SCM in the demand fulfilment role.

Marketing and SCM integration is a topic which has received considerable interest in both fields for the last 30 years. Despite the notion that a close integration can contribute to the company and even supply chain success, no contribution to date addresses the integration from a strategy perspective. This paper leverages existing knowledge and advances our understanding of the strategic integration issues companies are facing in today's supply chain network‐based competition.

The Internet is causing fundamental changes in the economics of service industries as new, network‐based global e‐business models emerge, where small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) have been identified as key users of Internet commerce. Initially the paper contextualises the research issues via a review of the theoretical opportunities afforded firms of all sizes. Correspondingly, an examination of the practical impediments from an SME perspective suggests that, among other things, there are major hurdles for SMEs going online including strategic appreciation of the dynamics of the Web and the development of capabilities for managing the information infrastructure for e‐business. To illustrate the inherent issues, the findings of empirical research are presented. Both inductive and deductive methodological approaches were employed to investigate e‐business awareness, attitudes and activities among a sample of Irish (north and south) service sector SMEs.

The aim of the study is to explore the adoptions of augmented reality and virtual reality used by hotels in terms of increasing room sales and reaching out to potential clients. Mobile technology is an exceedingly important tool for hotels to provide booking-related information and also creates a great opportunity for innovative services and experiences for customers.

Based on extensive literature, study examines how the augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are important in the selling of hotel rooms and providing an innovative experience to guests while selecting and booking of hotel rooms.

The contribution of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) is to discuss the increasingly significant role in the selling of hotel rooms. This chapter deals with the mobile technology to provide an opportunity and a platform to hotel management as well as guests.

In order to fully comprehend the level to which hotel guests accept the use of these technologies for hotel selection, this study focuses on mobile technologies, such as smartphone applications. Since mobile technology has space for growth and will fundamentally alter the way that hotels are now managed.

The rapid adoption of the Web as a commercial medium has caused firms to experiment with innovative ways of doing business. Those firms that effectively market themselves on the Web have a distinct advantage. This paper presents two e‐commerce Web site design strategies and 12 e‐commerce models for gaining that advantage.

In the general facilities management literature, it is assumed that there is a causal link between facilities management practices and performance. The role of facilities management in facilitating organisational performance, and thereby in providing competitive advantage, is widely acknowledged. However, the mechanisms of how this happens in higher educational establishments are quite unclear, prompting performance evaluation researchers to question whether performance evaluation in fact does add value, and enhance organisational performance. Assessment of performance of buildings of institutions delivering higher educational services has become a matter of particular interest to governments seeking to increase the effectiveness of educational provision and maximise value for money. This paper presents initial findings of the characteristics of important aspects of a performance evaluation approach related to higher education properties, and discusses the development of a framework based on the balanced scorecard to measure performance relating to higher education establishments.

The time to structure these fragile business arrangements is before they begin. With joint ventures, planners find success in the design studio, not in the repair shop.

This paper seeks to explore the performance of UK hotels, in terms of various service attributes, and whether it influences customers' intention to stay again.

Data are used from online customer ratings of 664 hotels in the UK for the purpose. The approach is based on an interesting use of statistical regression reported in the literature that attempted to classify different cues in hotels as critical, satisfier, dissatisfier, etc. In this study, six prominent attributes are considered, namely: customer service, cleanliness, room quality, value for money, quality of food, and family friendliness, rated by guests, based on their experiences of staying in hotels.

The findings reveal that “Value for money” is a critical attribute, while “Customer service”, “Room quality” and “Quality of food” are dissatisfiers. Business guests, and guests of independent hotels, exhibit similar behavior, but for leisure guests, and guests of chain hotels, “Value for money” is a dissatisfier.

“Value for money” is a critical attribute, in that good performance, in terms of this attribute, is critical for positively influencing guests' intention to stay again; however, failures in terms of this attribute cannot be compensated by improving service in terms of other attributes. There are three dissatisfier attributes (“Customer service”, “Room quality”, and “Quality of food”), implying that an inadequate performance in terms of these attributes could significantly adversely impact guests' intention to stay again.

This study would appear to be the first to use the extensive data available on the internet on guest ratings of hotels.