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The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether providing additional prompts in a visitor expenditure survey results in higher reported expenditure.

Respondents to a self‐completion survey of event visitors were randomly allocated either an aggregated or disaggregated expenditure format in a quasi‐experimental design. ANOVA is used to identify significant differences in mean reported expenditure to the alternative formats.

The research finds that provision of additional prompts in the expenditure module of a visitor survey results in higher reported expenditures in half the expenditure categories and, most importantly, in total expenditure.

Collection of accurate visitor expenditure data is critical to estimation of the economic benefits of tourism and special events. Over or under estimation of direct expenditures associated with an event may have implications for future investment in the event by public and/or private agencies.

Very few field tests of this fundamental issue in measurement error have been reported in the tourism literature. The few reported examples have tended to report results inconsistent with a priori expectations, although they have been based on very small sample size and therefore are limited by low power. This study is based on a large sample size and produces results consistent with a priori expectations.

This paper sets out to report on research that investigated hospitality managers' expectations of graduate skills and compared those expectations with student perceptions of what hospitality managers value.

The research adopted a generic skills framework and data were collected through a sample survey of 850 Australian hospitality managers and 211 undergraduate hospitality management students.

Managers rated skills associated with interpersonal, problem solving, and self‐management skill domains as most important while students appeared to have realistic perceptions of the skills that managers value when recruiting hospitality graduates. The most substantial areas of disagreement came in those skills associated with the conceptual and analytical domain. Industry managers tended to discount the skills in this domain relative to students.

The sample of managers used in this study were predominantly of Australian nationality and, in an increasingly global hospitality labor market, there may be some benefit in repeating this study with managers from different cultural backgrounds.

A number of strategies are proposed in the paper for bridging the expectation gaps and ensuring better learning outcomes for students and industry stakeholders.

In adopting the generic skills framework this research presents an alternative to previous studies that have used a management competencies framework. As such, it is of more immediate value to those responsible for designing undergraduate hospitality management curriculum who need to ensure that programs meet academic standards as well as industry and student expectations regarding the skill sets needed in the workplace.