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The purpose of this paper, unprecedented in Cyprus in its scope and approach, is to investigate the importance level of the courses currently taught in hospitality programs of the country, as perceived by industry professionals.

The research population included individuals currently holding full-time managerial positions in hotel establishments of Cyprus. In total, 500 questionnaires were administered to individuals working in 158 hotel establishments currently operating in the country. The surveys were personalized and addressed to each hotel’s general manager and two departmental heads. Descriptive and inferential statistics, namely frequencies, one-way analysis of variance with post-hoc multiple comparison test (Tukey honesty significant difference) and multiple regression analysis, were utilized to analyze the data and answer the formulated research questions.

For the purposes of the study, modules offered by local tertiary institutions fall into four broad categories: general education, languages, professional modules and business modules. Findings revealed that professional modules were ranked first, followed by business modules, languages and general education modules. The respondents’ gender, age, years of employment and functional area are the demographic characteristics that most significantly influence their perception regarding the importance of required competencies. Moreover, findings suggest that professional modules and languages are perceived by industry professionals as very important elements for career success in the hotel industry.

Findings of this study may assist industry stakeholders in re-structuring the hospitality management curriculum, in an attempt to provide a more realistic and pedagogically sound learning experience to students which reflects the modern realities of the profession. Moreover, new knowledge created may inspire academic scholars to further investigate this topic from an array of different perspectives.

This paper aims to provide a valid insight into consumers' minds while considering word of mouth (WOM), brand image and uniqueness as independent variables while considering the tourism industry as the primary stakeholder.

The study adopts qualitative research methods and data collected from 1,033 respondents using convenience sampling methodology. The data are collected from different tourists spots in China and Pakistan. The PROCESS macro was utilized in this study using SPSS version 25.0 to inspect the impacts by using Model 4 and the conditional effects indirectly by utilizing Model 14.

Customer's intimacy, search for novel and unexplored destinations highlight WOM interactions and perceived service value. Service value, interactional justice and professional attitude of hotel management mediated all the given relationships significantly. The brand image does not mediate any significant associations. Perceived service value and brand image predict customer's loyalty, and WOM is the direct measure of their intentions, and these variables are market trend indicators. A tourist's response toward different destinations is described in this study with comparative analysis of Chinese and Pakistani tourists. The study results showed a significantly positive relationship between hotel management professional behavior, customer's loyalty, customer's intimacy and WOM.

The recruited population might not be represented as the broader and larger visitor population, resulting in restricting establishing tactics. Moreover, this study's results provide significant insight into a tourism industry, hence providing a chance to manage customer loyalty better.

This study contributes significantly to the body of knowledge and provides remarkable insight from the managerial perspective. Interactional justice results in significant value for hotel management directors and top management, front desk staff and operatives and front level employees and managers. Consumer sensitivity of fairness in interpersonal dealings calls for behavioral changes in frontline employees, especially those directly dealing with hotel visitors. Hotel staff and management should formulate a system to deal with the demands and needs of visitors. It should describe the rights and obligations of visitors and ensure that each customer is treated equally and with respect. Customers should be motivated to read the survey questionnaires kept in their rooms and offer their views on the services provided. This strategy might increase the customers' sense of empowerment and leading to notions of fairness in individual encounters.

This study provides an insight into the customer's minds while considering essential variables that include WOM, brand image, perceived service value and uniqueness.

This purpose of this paper is to enhance the level, scope, and detail of management information under the current accounting format in hotels in China, and suggests a preliminary research framework on development of China‐based uniform hotel accounts.

Focus group interviews with industrial executives were carried out to give a deeper insight of the issue and to gather more information for a better understanding of the up‐to‐date situation.

The preliminary findings of this paper reveal that there are nine new hotel business drivers that are currently not fully reported in the financial statements.

The limitation of the paper is that the number of accounting professionals interviewed was of smaller proportion among the interviewees.

The findings in this paper provide informative details on the existing financial performance reporting in Mainland hotels from a managerial perspective, and point out limitations of adopting the Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry in China.

The paper shows that identifying the current financial reporting system in Mainland hotels is important to some new expatriate managers who are unfamiliar with local business conditions. A comprehensive and meaningful accounting framework could provide enriched managerial information to managers to make decisions and reduce dispute between hotel owning company and hotel operating company arising from different views on the typical way of calculating management fee that is based on the definition of revenue stipulated in the management agreement.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the perceptions that managers have of the value and reliability of using big data to make hotel revenue management and pricing decisions.

A three-stage iterative thematic analysis technique based on the approaches of Braun and Clarke (2006) and Nowell et al. (2017) and using different research instruments to collect and analyse qualitative data at each stage was used to develop an explanatory framework.

Whilst big data-driven automated revenue systems are technically capable of making pricing and inventory decisions without user input, the findings here show that the reality is that managers still interact with every stage of the revenue and pricing process from data collection to the implementation of price changes. They believe that their personal insights are as valid as big data in increasing the reliability of the decision-making process. This is driven primarily by a lack of trust on the behalf of managers in the ability of the big data systems to understand and interpret local market and customer dynamics.

The less a manager believes in the ability of those systems to interpret these data, the more they perceive gut instinct to increase the reliability of their decision making and the less they conduct an analysis of the statistical data provided by the systems. This provides a clear message that there appears to be a need for automated revenue systems to be flexible enough for managers to import the local data, information and knowledge that they believe leads to revenue growth.

There is currently little research explicitly investigating the role of big data in decision making within hotel revenue management and certainly even less focussing on decision making at property level and the perceptions of managers of the value of big data in increasing the reliability of revenue and pricing decision making.

Photos are powerful tools to attract individuals’ attention and convey service experiences. Yet exactly how visual cues in a photo contribute to the perceptions of the staged servicescape, and how these perceptions inspire online booking/reservation behaviors, remains underexplored. Addressing the gap, this study aims to uncover (1) how perceptual information mediated by an online photo contributes to the formation of consumers' holistic perceptions of the service environment and (2) how such consumers' holistic perceptions further influence customers' online purchasing behaviors.

This research adopts an innovative crowdsourcing approach and refers to field data on consumers' online hotel booking behaviors to examine relationships among inferred servicescape dimensions, consumers' holistic perceptions of the mediated servicescape and their actual online booking/reservation behaviors (e.g. page-view and meta-click behaviors).

Confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis indicated that five mediated servicescape dimensions (i.e. color, lighting, furnishings, layout and style) contribute significantly to consumers' perceptions of the mediated servicescape (CPMS) and exert different impacts on CPMS. Connecting the crowdsourced rating and consumer behavioral data, CPMS is found to influence consumers' aggregated page-view and meta-click behavior, especially in the US market.

Building upon servicescape theory, the medium theory and the online booking literature, this research proposes a novel conceptual framework of CPMS to theorize the process by which visual cues in online photos contribute to CPMS and subsequent online purchase behaviors. Findings from this research extend Bitner's servicescape framework to mediated service contexts and provide practical implications for promoting service businesses.

The purpose of this research is to investigate general managers' (GM) demographic characteristics and career paths in China's indigenous economy and budget hotels.

A questionnaire was chosen as the most appropriate means of obtaining information from 104 general managers in Guangdong Province, China.

The data from this study indicate that the majority of general managers are between ages of 31‐51, predominantly males with three‐year vocational college educations, and trained in either a hospitality/business‐related major or totally non‐business‐related major. The career paths of younger general managers show more similarities with their counterparts on the international market. However, some unique differences are identified. General managers in China have more years of non‐hotel experiences and pursue more diversified experiences. Experience in marketing and sales and human resources are considered particularly important in qualifying them for the GM position.

Non‐random sampling was used, and it only focused on GMs in one region of China.

The study shed some light on the demographic characteristics of GMs and the change of career paths over the past 20 years in China. The knowledge obtained from this study will help foreign hotels operating in China effectively select the right leaders and partners. Most importantly, the results will offer useful information to the Chinese hospitality industry as it expands its role in China.

While an updated career development research of hotel GMs is needed, the findings have an incremental contribution to the body of knowledge on career development and a better understanding of hotel GMs in China.

This study aims to explore the challenges faced by the tourism and hospitality industry following the COVID-19 pandemic and to propose effective strategies for recovery and resilience of this sector.

The study analysed the challenges encountered by the tourism and hospitality industry post-pandemic and identified key strategies for overcoming these challenges. The study utilised the modified Delphi method to finalise the challenges and employed the Best-Worst Method (BWM) to rank these challenges. Additionally, solution strategies are ranked using the Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) method.

The study identified significant challenges faced by the tourism and hospitality industry, highlighting the lack of health and hygiene facilities as the foremost concern, followed by increased operational costs. Moreover, it revealed that attracting millennial travellers emerged as the top priority strategy to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on this industry.

This research contributes to understanding the challenges faced by the tourism and hospitality industry in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It offers valuable insights into practical strategies for recovery. The findings provide beneficial recommendations for policymakers aiming to revive and support these industries.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight some inadequacies of the position of lecturers’ qualifications to design assessments within hospitality curricula while meeting the requirements of international and national quality frameworks.The Framework for Qualifications of the European Higher Education Area leaves the responsibility for designing appropriate teaching and assessment strategies in the hands of educators without fully recognizing the complexity of formulating the desired learning outcomes. Additionally, the subject-oriented background of the majority of educators within universities of applied sciences seems to be ignored in respect of its influence on assessment design.

This paper reflects on the author’s experience in designing courses, teaching and assessment strategies at the NHTV University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands, as well as observations of processes at other universities of applied sciences.

The author argues for a uniform delineation of hospitality professional qualifications which integrates learning outcomes from international, national and industry profiles. It is proposed that course design should start with assessment design to achieve alignment with learning outcomes and instructional strategies. Universities of applied sciences will have to train course designers in advanced assessment methods and encourage all faculty to acquire appropriate didactical training in assessing students.

This paper offers a view on the strategy necessary to ensuring adequate preparation of lecturers in the areas of writing–learning outcomes and preparing assessment.

The value of the paper lies in the fact that it is a unique critique of pedagogy in Dutch universities of applied sciences.

Organizations face formidable obstacles to the institutionalization of environmental management programmes. Longitudinal studies show that companies face two major types of barriers to change: industry‐specific barriers, which affect all organizations in a line of business; and organizational barriers, which are not specific to environmental problems, but may impede a company′s capacity to deal with any form of change. Evidence shows that these barriers can be overcome through effective environmental management programmes. Argues that by overcoming these barriers, organizations can move along an environmental performance curve, consisting of phases involving adjustment to regulatory and market realities; adaptation and anticipation of emerging issues; and innovation in achieving economically and environmentally sustainable performance through change programmes involving internal and external elements.

Employment transitions are an integral part of an individual’s career path. However, not every individual can cope with these changes. Some may not know how to mobilise their capacities in order to return to work. Consequently, various countries have devised policies aimed at supporting the unemployed, in programmes that are led by consultants. The purpose of this paper is to present a case study of career transition consultants who work for a private consulting firm. It examines how consultants perceive their role and how these perceptions influence the support they provide to beneficiaries.

In total, 20 French career transition consultants took part in the interviews. Qualitative data were gathered through semi-structured interviews.

Ideal types of career consultants were drawn up, based on the distinction between the agent model and the community model. Depending on their perceived role, consultants set up different career transition strategies and develop different capacities among their beneficiaries.

Consultants advocate for flexible support for people seeking employment. This research aims to question the policy of distributing beneficiaries among consultants’ portfolios. In France, the approach is made without considering the beneficiary’s profile. A better approach would be to find common ground between the consultant’s profile and the beneficiary’s expectations (e.g. help with business start-up, a career plan, or psychological support). Further, the differentiation of profiles and practices opens up other research opportunities (in corporate coaching, tutoring, and vocational guidance).

From a managerial point of view, this research questions the policy of distribution of the beneficiaries in consultants’ portfolios. Indeed, in France, the approach is made a priori (without exact knowledge of the beneficiary’s profile). Yet, it seems that the approach would be more effective if consulting firms looked for common ground between the consultant’s profile and the beneficiary’s specific expectation (e.g. help with a new business start-up, the creation of a career plan, or a specific need for psychological support).

This research investigates a little known and important fact in career transition management: the heterogeneous nature of consultancy service and the capacities consultants highlight as being helpful to beneficiaries in career transition.