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This chapter explores the strategic motives behind the decision of hotels to internationalize. It approaches the subject from the perspective of the soft-service sector and aims to develop an understanding of this phenomenon. The literature covers several different factors that stimulate the decision to expand operations abroad. The process requires a trigger that will initiate the process and control the assignment until completion. Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with international hotel chains to develop an understanding of the process. The findings reveal factors that can be distinguished between proactive and reactive and also be categorized under the four major motives behind internationalization: seeking natural resources, markets, efficiency and strategic assets or capabilities. The international strategy of hotel chains provides a roadmap for expansion and often acts as a trigger. The findings also reveal the significant role of vice presidents (VPs) of international development, development directors, agents and networks in initiating the process of internationalization and stimulating the chains towards specific parts of the world. One of the main differences between manufacturing and soft services is the wide variety of entry modes that are at the disposal of services. The findings are consistent with the literature published and provide an insight into the initial steps towards internationalization by hotel chains, in the post-COVID era.

Research question: What are the strategic motives behind the decision of hotels to internationalize?

This study aims to develop a parsimonious model to estimate US aggregate hotel industry revenue using domestic trips, consumer confidence index, international inbound trips, personal consumption expenditure and number of hotel rooms as predictor variables. Additionally, the study applied the model in six sub-segments of the hotel industry – luxury, upper upscale, upscale, upper midscale, midscale and economy.

Using monthly aggregate data from the past 22 years, the study adopted the auto-regressive distribute lags (ARDL) approach in developing the estimation model. Unit root analysis and cointegration test were further utilized. The model showed significant utility in accurately estimating aggregate hotel industry and sub-segment revenue.

All predictor variables except number of rooms showed significant positive influences on aggregate hotel industry revenue. Substantial variations were noted regarding estimating sub-segment revenue. Consumer confidence index positively affected all sub-segment revenues, except for upper upscale hotels. Inbound trips by international tourists and personal consumption expenditure positively influenced revenue for all sub-segments but economy hotels. Domestic trips by US residents added significant explanatory power to only upper upscale, upscale and economy hotel revenue. Number of hotel rooms only had significant negative effect on luxury and upper upscale hotel sub-segment revenues.

Hotel operators can make marketing and operating decisions regarding pricing, inventory allocation and strategic management based on the revenue estimation models specific to their segments.

It is the first study that adopted the ARDL bound approach and analyzed the predictive capacity of macroeconomic variables on aggregate hotel industry and sub-segment revenue.

This paper aims to analyse the evolution, current challenges, best practices, and trends in the international hotel industry.

The foundation for this paper was laid during a well‐attended Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes (WHATT) roundtable discussion between industry leaders and hospitality educators in May 2012. International hoteliering is discussed in the context of the theme for the 2012 Canadian WHATT roundtable and the strategic question: “What innovations are needed in the Canadian hotel industry and how might they be implemented to secure the industry's future?”

Through analysis of past and present trends, the paper predicts that current challenges such as labour shortages will continue to affect the industry in the near future.

In the conclusion the paper advocates innovative approaches for hospitality education, and states that Canada should learn from international trends and become more innovative and competitive if it is to secure the industry's future.

The paper draws on the vast experience in international hotel management of the co‐authors. As the team of authors represents both industry and academia, this paper will be of immense value to students, educators, researchers as well as managers. The co‐authors include a former president of the world's largest professional association for hotel managers (HCIMA/Institute of Hospitality) and a former CEO of the world's largest trade association for hotel managers (International Hotel and Restaurant Association).

Building upon previous research on country-of-origin. This study aims to investigate whether the effects of country-of-origin extend to the hotel industry, based on associative network and signaling theories.

Based on a self-administered survey with tourists in China, this paper investigates antecedents and outcomes of hotel brand image and the moderating role of a hotel’s brand origin.

Results reveal country, city and industry images positively influence hotel brand image. Hotel brand image then influences price perception, quality perception and overall satisfaction.

Country-of-operation image remains a relevant, powerful predictor of brand image; thus, hotels need to carefully manage country-of-operation image.

This paper incorporates and establishes the role of country-of-operation image on hotel brand image.

This article aims to explore how understanding the challenges faced by companies' attempts to create competitive advantage through their human resources and HRM practices can be enhanced by insights into the concept of strategic groups within industries. Based within the international hotel industry, this study identifies how strategic groups emerge in the analysis of HRM practices and approaches. It sheds light on the value of strategic groups as a way of readdressing the focus on firm and industry level analyses.

Senior human resource executives and their teams across eight international hotel companies (IHCs) were interviewed in corporate and regional headquarters, with observations and the collection of company documentation complementing the interviews.

The findings demonstrate that strategic groups emerge from analysis of the HRM practices and strategies used to develop hotel general managers (HGMs) as strategic human resources in the international hotel industry. The value of understanding industry structures and dynamics and intermediary levels of analysis are apparent where specific industries place occupational constraints on their managerial resources and limit the range of strategies and expansion modes companies can adopt.

This study indicates that further research on strategic groups will enhance the theoretical understanding of strategic human resource management and specifically the forces that act to constrain the achievement of competitive advantage through human resources. A limitation of this study is the dependence on the human resource divisions' perspectives on realising international expansion ambitions in the hotel industry.

This study has implications for companies' engagement with their executives' perceptions of opportunities and threats, and suggests companies will struggle to achieve competitive advantage where such perceptions are consistent with their competitors.

Developments in strategic human resource management have relied on the conceptual and theoretical developments in strategic management, however, an understanding of the impact of strategic groups and their shaping of SHRM has not been previously explored.

Given the increasingly competitive nature of the international hotel industry, understanding sources of competitive advantage is likely to become a critical management task in the 1990s. A framework for practising managers is presented within which to examine the link between the hotel′s resources and sustained competitive advantage, using anecdotal evidence from the international hotel industry. Three indicators that have the potential to generate durable advantages ‐ value, irreversibility, and inimitability – are discussed. The framework is applied to one major set of resources: organisational capability.

The purpose of the study is to explore the strategic growth challenges for the hospitality industry in the context of India. As the tourism industry is growing, Indian and global firms face new challenges which need to be addressed.

The study involved obtaining practitioner insights by conducting an industry round table discussion with senior managers who are in leadership positions with international and national hotel brands. The data so collected were then corroborated by a literature review.

The major challenges are in the domains of human resources (in terms of skill and knowledge base), land acquisitions, technology deployment as a strategic tool and understanding the dynamics of new generation consumers.

The paper has policy implications for both industry practitioners and government bodies setting up governing mechanisms for this industry segment.

There is very little formally documented research in the domain of hospitality management in an Indian context. This holds significance for other growing economies as well.

This paper aims to present practical answers to the strategic question: “What innovations are needed in the Canadian hotel industry and how might they be implemented to secure the industry's future?” It aims to capture the essence of conclusions of seven papers written by 23 experts on aspects related to the hotel industry of Canada for the Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes (WHATT) issue on Canada in 2013.

The approach of this paper is to integrate all solutions suggested in these seven papers and to seek a succinct response to the strategic question.

While providing a helicopter view of the key trends and challenges of the hotel industry of Canada, this paper proposes implementable and practical solutions to those challenges. Using the 2012 WHATT Roundtable discussion in Ottawa, Canada as the foundation, this paper addresses some of the most significant issues affecting the hotel industry of Canada today. In conclusion, 12 key suggestions are made.

The paper reviews past concepts and industry practices as well as current practices to identify practical, effective and innovative approaches for the future.

This paper provides fresh perspectives on many relevant issues by analysing inputs, viewpoints, comments, and suggestions of many subject experts. Readers with interests in the hotel industry in Canada or similar tourism destinations around the world would benefit from reading this paper.

This paper aims to investigate efficiency in the UK hotel industry and further evaluate the impacts of hotel characteristics and industry environment on efficiency.

The network data envelopment (DEA) weak link approach is used for the efficiency analysis, while the determinants of efficiency are evaluated by bootstrapped truncated regression.

The findings show that the UK hotel industry is very inefficient. The results of overall efficiency deconstruction show that the second-stage production process experiences an even lower level of efficiency than that of the first stage. The second-phase analysis shows that both the hotel-specific characteristics and the industry-specific characteristics are significantly related to UK hotel efficiency.

The robustness of the results is affected because a single set of input-intermediate product-outputs and a single DEA method were used. Therefore, further studies can use alternate inputs, intermediate measures and outputs in the efficiency analysis. In addition, the robustness of the efficiency score can be checked using alternate parametric or non-parametric methods.

Hotels in the UK should focus on cost reduction, business diversification, improvement in the capital level and labor productivity, while at industry and macroeconomic level, discounts are recommended to be provided to international tourism and the tourism industry should be further opened.

The weak-link approach has been applied to estimate the efficiency level, as this provides more robust and accurate results compared to other non-parametric methods in the existing empirical studies and unique hotel-specific and industry-specific determinants of efficiency are considered in the second-stage analysis.