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The purpose of this paper is to report on how the University of Central Florida's (UCF's) Rosen College of Hospitality Management (RCHM) has established a long‐term and successful partnership with the hospitality and tourism industry in Central Florida.

A case study approach was followed and the findings and examples reported in this paper were drawn from official documents and the authors' personal experiences.

The RCHM, one of the leading hospitality and tourism colleges in the world, has established and maintained successful partnerships with hospitality and tourism organizations in the Central Florida region. Over the years, industry partners have committed significant resources to the RCHM. In return, the RCHM has supported the industry by providing trained students and graduates, along with numerous research and consultancy projects. These successful partnerships were accomplished through mutual trust, an understanding of each other's needs and expectations, and successful collaboration between key industry owners/executives and senior administrators of the RCHM and UCF.

This study implies that the establishment of strong partnerships between hospitality and tourism organizations and hospitality colleges requires college administrators to work closely with industry owners/executives to build mutual trust, personal friendships, and a common understanding of industry needs and expectations. Future studies may investigate similar successful industry‐university partnerships.

This study provides examples on how a hospitality college can form long‐term and successful partnerships with hospitality and tourism organizations.

There are few studies that provide evidence of successful partnerships between hospitality colleges and hospitality and tourism organizations.

While netnography was established to study virtual communities from the traditional ethnography methodology, over time it has evolved and moved away from standard ethnographic practices. The modifications are especially prevalent in hospitality and tourism research because of the nature of experiential and service-based goods. This gap has created exciting new opportunities for researchers. As netnography has matured into its own methodology, it has provided the opportunity for researchers to use netnography techniques or more traditional techniques by following ethnography methodologies. This paper aims to analyze the differences between these two methodologies within hospitality and tourism literature enabling researchers to choose the methodology that is most suited for their project.

This study reviews netnographic research in hospitality and tourism and compares current uses of netnography against traditional ethnographic methodologies.

There are four major differentiating points between netnography and ethnography: online community definitions, data collection methodologies, ethics in research and data analysis techniques.

In comparing ethnography and netnography in hospitality and tourism research, this analysis provides a foundation to evaluate the best use and best practices for these two distinct qualitative methodologies in the field. The study also provides references to how other hospitality and tourism researchers have used netnography.

Ethnographic principles grounded in the foundation of anthropological doctrines are important and distinct from netnography. The ability to use the diverse tools in the qualitative methods toolbox will help hospitality and tourism researchers understand the transforming marketplace.

A British Airways flight crew arrives after a long flight from London to Chicago to find their hotel rooms are not ready for check-in. The front-desk agents tell them that the hotel is overbooked. The flight crew is asked to wait in the hotel lobby for more than one and a half hours while housekeepers prepare their rooms. Upon returning to London, the pilot complains to British Airways. What should the hotel have done differently to avoid complaints?

Grinstead Inns, a low‐priced motel chain, is a recent addition to the lodging product line of the Columbia Corporation (a fictional firm). Grinstead Inns is targeted toward the $30 to $40 per night economy segment of the lodging market. This case study describes the process of competitor assessment Columbia used to position Grinstead Inns in the economy lodging segment and why Columbia considered it worth the investment. This case is designed to show how a service business performs the competitor analysis process, and how strategy guides data collection. The Grinstead Inns “product” was based on market opportunities uncovered during the competitive assessment.

Drawing on protection motivation theory (PMT) and expectancy theory, this study aims to investigate consumers’ lodging consumption intentions during a pandemic crisis.

The research survey was conducted during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (August, 2020) in the USA to investigate consumers’ lodging intentions amidst the pandemic crisis. PLS-SEM and multiple regression were conducted to explore answers to proposed research questions.

The research finds that, during the pandemic crisis, consumers’ lodging consumption intentions are subject to both their internal protection motivation evaluations and the external prevention practices implemented by the lodging facilities regardless of property types and travel purposes. Notably, the research finds that consumers are willing to make efforts and pay extra for a safe stay at lodging facilities.

This research contributes to the literature regarding the applications of PMT and expectancy theory from a crisis management perspective, and it provides implications and guidelines to the crisis management practices in the lodging industry.

The current research examines the specific protection motivation appraisal factors and prevention practices significantly impacting consumers’ decisions in terms of willingness to stay at various lodging facilities (hotels and non-hotel homestay/short-term rental properties) for different purposes (business and leisure) and to pay premiums for a safe stay.

This study aims to examine determinants of perceived website quality and associations among consequences of perceived website quality. Adopting the framework of loyalty development, causal links are investigated among the website quality, customers’ perceived service quality, their satisfaction, return intention and loyalty in the context of the lodging industry.

An online field survey is conducted with internet bookers. A confirmatory factor analysis and a parameter estimate analysis using structural equation modeling are adopted to analyze the data.

The progression of the phases of loyalty proceeds in a linear fashion on a lodging website. Mediation effects of customer satisfaction and return intention are detected. Moderation effects of gender were also detected in the relationships among website service quality and consequences of website service quality.

Caution is advised in generalizing findings of this study due to convenience sampling, although findings of the study do confirm results of previously conducted studies.

This study provides practical tips for website development for hospitality management to understand the e-loyalty formation process so that appropriate marketing strategies can be established to accommodate the type and degree of individual customer’s loyalty as well as gender-specific expectations from prospective customers.

This study demonstrates that customer loyalty formation in both physical and online environments has identical processes in the context of the lodging industry. The male group, compared to the female group, appears to be more sensitive in perceiving the effects of functionality of a lodging website, tends to develop customer satisfaction when perceiving website service quality and inclines to develop customer loyalty when having return intention.

The purpose of this paper is to understand several key issues regarding technology strategies for the lodging industry, including the use and impact of technology, technology adoption and implementation, the role of organization technology environment in technology use, channel management strategies, as well as future trends of technology development.

Qualitative interviews are conducted with hotel practitioners to gain knowledge in order to help explore issues and generate hypotheses for future research regarding information and communications technology (ICT) applications in the lodging industry.

The research finds that technology will continue to impact guest service and customer relationship management in the lodging industry, and that companies vary in their implementation and use of the technology applications.

Using qualitative research limited the number of hotels that could be interviewed; as a result, the findings cannot be generalized to every hotel.

Hotel owners and managers can look at the various trends and determine which can help their guest service, focusing on providing added value to guests.

The paper provides insight from the viewpoints of practitioners rather than just from technology experts.

Grounded in ethical decision-making theory, this paper aims to develop and empirically tests a model that examines the relationships between ethical leadership, customer orientation, ethical values person-organization fit, commitment to service quality and service sabotage among customer-contact service employees in the lodging industry.

Data were electronically collected from a national survey of 316 hotel/motel customer-contact employees.

Results revealed that perceived ethical leadership behavior is positively related to customer orientation, ethical values person-organization fit and commitment to service quality. Customer orientation is positively related to commitment to service quality and mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and service sabotage. Ethical values person-organization fit mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and service sabotage.

The study is cross-sectional, limited to customer-contact employees in lodging settings and examines merely the employee perspective.

Lodging leaders can benefit significantly in many areas by practicing ethical leadership. For example, service sabotage behaviors can be reduced indirectly by aligning the customer-contact employees’ ethical values with those of the organization, as well as when this employee is customer-oriented. An ethical leadership style also can positively influence customer-contact employees’ customer orientation and increase their commitment to service quality. Lodging properties must hire and cultivate managers and supervisors with ethical values.

This research helps to better understand leadership behaviors useful for improving the ethical conduct and performance of customer-contact employees in the lodging industry, while simultaneously improving their commitment to service quality and guest-oriented behavior.

The aim of the study is to assess customer perceptions of service quality delivered by front office, room service and an in house restaurant/café in the lodgings of Hamilton, New Zealand.

The study uses a survey and interview technique. A survey questionnaire with the help of local managers in the lodging industry was structured for this study. The study was undertaken at different lodgings in Hamilton involving face‐to‐face administration of the survey instrument. A useable sample of 645 participants resulted.

The importance–performance analysis showed that responses related to front office, room service and in‐house café/restaurant, the importance is statistically significant, higher than the performance. Gender also reflected statistical significance. Overall, the results indicate that most responses show gaps in importance and evaluations and this suggests managerial implications.

From a practitioners perspective the study provides an opportunity to recognize in ranking order general features that are considered important by the guest staying in lodgings in Hamilton in New Zealand. Additionally, the study also points out the evaluation of those guests, thereby identifying the areas of gaps in service and product quality.

The study has been the first attempt to gauge the importance and experience from the stay of lodging guests in Hamilton, New Zealand. The research also provides an opportunity for a comparative study of service quality offered by lodgings in New Zealand with other parts of the world.

This paper's aim is to examine the risk‐adjusted market performance of an overall franchise and three sub‐sector franchise common stock portfolios from 1990 through 2008.

Four sets of franchise sector portfolios are constructed, their returns are calculated, and their performances relative to three market benchmarks are evaluated using the Sharpe ratio and Jensen's α.

The all franchise portfolio significantly outperformed the three market benchmarks. Among the sector portfolios, the services and restaurant portfolios also outperformed the market benchmarks, but not the lodging portfolio. Results support the theoretical hypothesis that franchising may provide superior advantages to investors and point to a possible “franchising anomaly”. Investors consider franchise firms to be less risky than the average publicly traded firms and therefore require a lower rate of return.

The results of the study suggest that in the past, franchise managers may have paid a much higher cost of capital than warranted by their firms' risk characteristics. Study results also have positive implications for franchise firms' access to capital and for evaluating franchise managers' compensation arrangements. Investors should consider allocating a portion of their investible funds to franchise stocks. Many lodging firms may not have taken full advantage of the benefits of franchising to reduce their financial risks. Restaurant firms may further improve their financial performance by selling their riskier units.

This is the first comprehensive study of the risk‐adjusted market performance of franchise firms over an extended period of time covering a variety of economic conditions that also analyzes the risk‐adjusted performance of the main business subcategories in franchising.