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As real estate departments and workplace organisations devote more attention to strategic planning, most of the work has focused on improving performance metrics and developing dashboards to communicate this information clearly and concisely. Yet these steps will take these organisations only part of the way. Once they have this information, they need to devote more time to developing strategies and plans. This review examines one of these activities ‐ developing high‐level occupancy plans. Representatives of the strategy and planning groups at ten leading corporations and the occupancy planning experts at seven service providers and system developers were interviewed for this survey. It was found that most firms continue to complete high‐level occupancy plans with tedious and time‐consuming data‐collection processes and spreadsheet analyses. These organisations could improve efficiency and the success of their plans in two ways: better analysis approaches and better data collection and organisation. This review summarises the best practices identified in these areas.

This paper presents the process and outcomes of developing a national capability for strategic and portfolio planning within SBC Communications, Inc., a Fortune 100 company, and reviews the progress made and lessons learned since this initiative was implemented in October 2001. At this time SBC Corporate Real Estate standardised the planning approach used by its regionalised staff in order to achieve consistent business practices. This multidisciplinary effort involved process design, development of tools and templates, training and deployment, facilitation and mentoring, production of prototype plans, and ongoing coaching during implementation in 2002. The new approach, featuring scenario planning and economic modelling, has elevated planning services to an advisory level by emphasising shareholder value while satisfying business unit needs. Within the first year of implementation, the process has been fully endorsed by corporate leadership and adopted by business unit management. Refinements to the planning approach and enhancements to the methodology are being incorporated on an ongoing basis as part of a continuous improvement programme.

The purpose of this paper is to present research which analysed energy consumption in the Melbourne central business district (CBD) office stock and examined all buildings to identify CO₂ emissions in 2005. The rationale was that, by profiling a large group of buildings, it would be possible to identify characteristics of the stock. For example, do older buildings typically emit more CO₂ per square metre than newer buildings?

This research conducted a detailed analysis of all Melbourne CBD office stock to identify which patterns and trends emerged regarding building characteristics and carbon emissions. The study examined variables such as building size, number of employees, occupancy levels, physical characteristics and building age.

By examining all office stock and aggregating data, the results confirm that it is possible to identify general physical building characteristics and carbon emissions. This research confirmed that clear relationships existed within the Melbourne CBD office stock in terms of building size, age and the density of occupation in relation to CO₂ emissions.

Practitioners can apply this knowledge to the professional advice they give to clients to assist in achieving increased energy efficiency in the office stock, for example in refurbishment being conscious that smaller buildings will be generally less energy‐efficient than larger ones.

This study aims to use a narrative-based simulation approach to explore potential implications of including or excluding a dayroom in the design of an internal medicine ward.

The approach involved: collecting data in facilities using field observations and experts’ interviews; modeling representative behavior patterns in the form of rule-based narratives that direct collaborative behaviors of virtual occupants; simulating the behavior patterns in two alternative design options, one of which includes a dayroom; and analyzing the simulation results with respect to selected key performance indicators of day-to-day operations and spatial occupancy, including occupant density in corridors, number and locations of staff-visitor interactions and duration of a doctors’ round procedure.

Simulation results suggest that the presence of a dayroom reduces visitors’ density in corridors and diminishes the number of staff–visitor interactions that can delay the performing of scheduled medical procedures.

A high level of uncertainty is intrinsic to the simulation of future human behavior. Additional work is required to systematically collect large volumes of occupancy data in existing facilities, model additional narratives and develop validation protocols to assess the degree of uncertainty of the proposed model.

A limited number of studies explore how simulation can be used to study the impact of building design on operations. This study uses a narrative-based approach to address some of the limitations of existing methods, including discrete-event simulations. Preliminary results suggest that the lack of appropriate spaces for patients and visitors to socialize may cause potential disruptions to hospital operations.

In recent years, neural networks have become popular in the scientific and business fields. In the hotel industry, researchers have recently devoted attention to the application of neural networks to the classification of tourist segments and the prediction of visitor behaviour. However, no previous attempt has been made to incorporate neural networks into hotel occupancy rate forecasting. This paper reports on a study about applying neural networks to the forecasting of room occupancy rates. The significance of this approach was tested with actual data from the Hong Kong hotel industry. Estimated room occupancy rates were compared with actual room occupancy rates. Experimental results indicate that using neural networks to forecast room occupancy rates outperforms multiple regression and naïve extrapolation, two commonly used forecasting approaches.

This paper aims to explore the international marina industry, encompassing both marina customers and managers. It also aims to put forth the argument that marinas as business entities can create and sustain competitive advantage by maximizing the advantages that stem from their superior resources and core competences.

To ensure proper representation for the marina managers worldwide, questionnaires were sent to 200 managers of various marinas on five continents, in order to receive a representative sample. The questionnaires were distributed for the most part via e‐mail (where an address was available), some by fax and additional questionnaires were distributed at the international ICOMIA conference for marina managers held in Sydney, Australia. Overall, 138 marina managers replied. The statistical analysis applied in the study is a structural equations analysis, which is known in the literature as covariance structure modeling and structural equations modeling (SEM).

The correlation between government intervention and occupancy is a negative correlation, meaning that the greater government intervention, the lower occupancy rate. The correlation between crowding and occupancy is a positive one. The remaining correlations are not significant. This shows that it is not possible to claim a relationship between the occupancy index and the other variables examined: view, services, level of security/safety, environmental protection, distance from competitors, proximity to customer/city and local community.

The study offers a method of classifying variables according to which marinas can be characterized. Second, these criteria are placed in clusters viewed by the marina managers as being related to one another, adding structure to the process of classification, which is similar to the “conceptual map” that exists in the minds of the marina managers.

This research provides corroborative empirical evidence to the hypothesis that occupancy can be used as a proxy for marina's profitability. Finally, the model provides tools for strategic planning and ongoing management of an existing marina and/or for the establishing of a new marina.

Identifies and describes issues associated with implementing integrated workplace strategies into commercial office facilities. In particular, recognizes some of the effects of such implementations, which are not always fully anticipated or considered by those who are initiators of such changes. Examines the current workplace environment to identify those factors which are promoting the redesign of specific workplaces and the expectations of users of such places. Describes a study of the implementation of an integrated strategy into the workplace of an international energy company, including a post‐occupancy evaluation which exposes the degree of satisfaction expressed by users to a range of performance characteristics of the revised workplace, in particular those which have a direct impact on business performance. Concludes by confirming the critical issues associated with workplace design which arise from the study and highlights those which justify investigation and research.

The purpose of this paper is to review the use of technologies for measuring space occupancy to guide the selection of appropriate tools for workplace post-occupancy evaluation (POE) studies. The authors focus on how actual space occupancy was measured in previous studies and the pros and cons of the different technologies and tools. This paper also addresses research gaps and directions for future research.

The space occupancy measures/tools are categorized based on the three types of technologies: environmental/ambient sensors, wearable sensors/smartphones and computer vision. A total of 50 studies are reviewed to identify the capabilities and limitations of these measurements.

Based on review results, the authors propose that although sensor technology can be a useful addition to the measures/tools list, a comprehensive review of the research goal, the occupants' behavior, and the environmental settings' characteristics should be conducted beforehand. Selecting appropriate technology is critical for collecting the proper behavioral data type, with a lower level of surveillance and increased validity.

This paper urges critical thinking about existing occupancy measures/tools across various fields, to inform the adoption and creation of new building occupancy measures. The knowledge of emerging sensor technology allows researchers to better study the temporal patterns of occupant behavior over extended periods and in a wide range of settings.

Online consumer reviews have become increasingly important for consumer decision-making. One of the most prominent examples is the hotel industry where consumer reviews on websites, such as Bookings.com, TripAdvisor and Venere.com, play a critical role in consumers’ choice of a hotel. There have been a number of recent studies analyzing various aspects of online reviews. The purpose of this paper is to investigate their effects in terms of hotel occupancy rates.

This paper measures through regression analysis the impact of three dimensions of consumer reviews (i.e. review score, review variance and review volume) on the occupancy rates of 346 hotels located in Rome, isolating a number of other factors that might also affect demand.

Review score is the dimension with the highest impact. The results suggest that after controlling for other variables, a one-point increase in the review score is associated to an increase in the occupancy rate by 7.5 percentage points. Regardless the review score, the number of reviews has a positive effect, but with decreasing returns, implying that the higher the number of reviews, the lower the beneficial effect in terms of occupancy rates is.

The findings quantify the strong association of online reviews to occupancy rates suggesting the use of appropriate reputational management systems to increase hotel occupancy and therefore performance.

A major contribution of this paper is its comprehensiveness in analyzing the relation between online consumer reviews and occupancy across a heterogeneous sample of hotels.