Search results

The purpose of this paper is to link consumer use of technology to two very popular themes in the hospitality industry: boutique hotels and environmental responsibility.

The case study focuses on how boutique hotels legitimize their green practices through the use of technology – web sites, social media – to communicate their environmental recognitions to discerning eco‐conscious consumers seeking small lodgings. The authors analyze the type of environmental legitimacy practices used by the boutique hotel segment of the tourism industry, using a variety of international, regional, or trade recognized environmental evaluation assessments to legitimize their boutique hotel green practices. A diverse sample of boutique hotel accommodations in two attractive, but similar international destinations – Istanbul, Turkey and San Francisco, California – are used, through content analysis of hotel web sites.

San Francisco Bay Area hoteliers, in the majority of instances, used their web sites to illustrate one international standard, LEED certification, for building structure. However, these hoteliers generally reported use of varying regional standards for legitimizing their green practices. Istanbul hoteliers reported on maintaining international standards for legitimizing their green practices, but did not seek specific standards for building structures.

Future research surveys of specific consumer perceptions of their search and experience would prove valuable in terms of destination selection and experience of environmentally‐conscious boutique hotels. Social media and related web sites utilize consumer self‐reporting, which would add additional insight for future research in this area.

The authors' analysis studies the web promotion of two similar geographic tourism destination boutique hotels' use of international versus regional legitimacy of their environmental practices.

This paper aims to investigate the effects of vendor – client relationship on organizational success in the hospitality industry. The relationship between vendors and clients regarding information technology outsourcing does not always go in harmony. In the viewpoint of hospitality practitioners, information technology (IT) providers do not necessarily abide by the given promises stated on contracts, all the time. The service flows, which are mostly generated by the lack of quality relationship between vendors and clients directly affect hotels’ organizational performance.

Data were collected by an online survey and analyzed using multivariable statistics (path analysis) to determine the effects of service quality and relationship quality on outsourcing success, and its effect on organizational performance. Data from 102 valid responses received from ten different countries, representing 230 hotels in total were analyzed.

Service quality and relationship quality, which are two dimensions of outsourcing relationships, were found to be positively related to outsourcing success (r = 0.60 and 0.70, p < 0.01, respectively) and intangible organizational performance (r = 0.20, p < 0.05; 0.26 and 0.27, p < 0.01, respectively).

The research was designed to investigate the IT outsourcing service receiver’s (client) perspective. The IT service provider’s (vendor) perspective is disregarded. Disturbance results are very high (i.e. more than 0.95). This may well be the case that certain facets of the outsourcing success construct are not adequately represented by the chosen indicators. Research results may reveal an idea about the research subject, in general, but may not be generalized to the whole industry due to its sampling size. Finally, the survey was conducted online, and all online research restrictions were applicable to this research such as receiving very limited response rates.

The results of this research provide important information for practitioners in the hospitality industry and IT service providers. Relationship quality between vendor and client was observed to be the most determinant factor in IT outsourcing success.

The proposed model may well serve as a framework for further examining mediating and possible moderating variables.

There is limited research in the previous literature investigating the relationship between information technology vendor and client, in terms of service quality and relationship quality in hospitality industry. This paper may serve to fill in this gap.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relative influences of technical and functional quality levels of service quality and patient satisfaction. In this context, the healthcare service quality and the factors affecting customer satisfaction were evaluated using the grey relational analysis (GRA) method.

This is a survey-based study which involves 15 patients in a dialysis center, so the GRA is applied to clarify the uncertainty on service quality level with a limited number of patients without any statistical distribution. In order to reveal whether service quality and customer satisfaction are two different structures, a GRA model is built with ten different quality factors.

Results show that each quality factor has a different effect on the quality of service. Another important finding is that service quality and customer satisfaction are different structures for customers.

The results enable healthcare managers to understand the importance of patient care and the importance of service quality if they want to facilitate their use of their expectations in related factors.

The study is the first in terms of the application of GRA models in a private health institution operating in Turkey. Successful implementation of the GRA method allows a reasonable decision to be made with a limited number of data at hand. It is considered that the method can be used successfully in other health institutions in the Turkish Health System.