Search results for: hotel recommender system

Authors: Kourosh Modarresi

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The Netflix problem has brought the topic of “Recommendation Systems” into the mainstream of computer science, mathematics, and statistics. Though much progress has been made, the available algorithms do not obtain satisfactory results. The success of these algorithms is rarely above 5%. This work is based on the belief that the main challenge is to come up with “scalable personalization” models. This paper uses an adaptive regularization of inverse singular value decomposition (SVD) that applies adaptive penalization on the singular vectors. The results show far better matching for recommender systems when compared to the ones from the state of the art models in the industry.

Keywords: convex optimization, LASSO, regression, recommender systems, singular value decomposition, low rank approximation

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Authors: Katharina Schuck

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For a long time, luxury hotels devoted little effort to sustainability, and also scientists were fairly attracted to this subject. While some luxury hotels are now increasingly showing engagement in sustainability, the extent of their commitment varies greatly, which makes the whole industry quite intransparent when it comes to sustainable practices. In general, each hotel companyand each individual hotel can decide for themselves to what extent they commit to sustainability as long as there are no legally prescribed minimum requirements in the respective countries. Despite pleading and compelling calls from industry experts and representatives of relevant sustainability institutions, this is still reality – although climate change and environmental disasters as well as poor treatment of workers and the local population are also issues in progressive and hotel-dense European cities. This paper therefore deals with the question which sustainability activities (environmental and social) have been established by European luxury hotels so far and to what extent these activities are rather a way to differentiate in the market or are simply evaluated as part of a necessary adaptation of the luxury hotel industry. For this purpose, interviews were conducted with both industry experts and hotel representatives in order to obtain a diverse picture of the current status. The studyrevealed that a clear agenda is missing so far, which takes luxury hotels by the handand supports them in the process towards more sustainable hotel management. While a large part of the luxury hotels addressed have already established initiatives and activities regarding sustainability, they are extremely diverse, and range from recyclable toiletries use to comprehensive concepts for energy generation. The study's findings provide insights for both practitioners who seek to implement sustainability in a luxury hotel setting as well as offer an extension of the existing research base on sustainability in hospitality.

Keywords: luxury hospitality, qualitative research methods, sustainability, sustainable hotels

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Authors: Ho Yeon Park, Kyoung-Jae Kim

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Recently, user’s interests for location-based social network service increases according to the advances of social web and location-based technologies. It may be easy to recommend preferred items if we can use user’s preference, context and social network information simultaneously. In this study, we propose context-aware POI (point-of-interests) recommender systems using location-based network analysis and sentiment analysis which consider context, social network information and implicit user’s preference score. We propose a context-aware POI recommendation system consisting of three sub-modules and an integrated recommendation system of them. First, we will develop a recommendation module based on network analysis. This module combines social network analysis and cluster-indexing collaboration filtering. Next, this study develops a recommendation module using social singular value decomposition (SVD) and implicit SVD. In this research, we will develop a recommendation module that can recommend preference scores based on the frequency of POI visits of user in POI recommendation process by using social and implicit SVD which can reflect implicit feedback in collaborative filtering. We also develop a recommendation module using them that can estimate preference scores based on the recommendation. Finally, this study will propose a recommendation module using opinion mining and emotional analysis using data such as reviews of POIs extracted from location-based social networks. Finally, we will develop an integration algorithm that combines the results of the three recommendation modules proposed in this research. Experimental results show the usefulness of the proposed model in relation to the recommended performance.

Keywords: sentiment analysis, network analysis, recommender systems, point-of-interests, business analytics

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Authors: Maggie Shen

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Ever since the late 20th century, business giants have been competing to provide better experiences for their users. One way they strive to do so is through more efficiently connecting users with their goals, with recommendation systems that filter out unnecessary or less relevant information. Today’s top online platforms such as Amazon, Netflix, Airbnb, Tiktok, Facebook, and Google all utilize algorithmic recommender systems for different purposes—Product recommendation, movie recommendation, travel recommendation, relationship recommendation, etc. However, while bringing unprecedented convenience and efficiency, the prevalence of algorithmic recommendation systems also influences society in many ways. In using a variety of primary, secondary, and social media sources, this paper explores the impacts of algorithms, particularly algorithmic recommender systems, on different sectors of society. Four fields of interest will be specifically addressed in this paper: economy, international relations, political ideologies, and education.

Keywords: algorithms, economy, international relations, political ideologies, education

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Authors: Asma Ameur, Dhafer Malouche

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Nowadays, user comments on the Internet have an important impact on hotel bookings. This confirms that the e-reputation issue can influence the likelihood of customer loyalty to a hotel. In this way, e-reputation has become a real differentiator between hotels. For this reason, we have a unique opportunity in the opinion mining field to analyze the comments. In fact, this field provides the possibility of extracting information related to the polarity of user reviews. This sentimental study (Opinion Mining) represents a new line of research for analyzing the unstructured textual data. Knowing the score of e-reputation helps the hotelier to better manage his marketing strategy. The score we then obtain is translated into the image of hotels to differentiate between them. Therefore, this present research highlights the importance of hotel satisfaction ‘scoring. To calculate the satisfaction score, the sentimental analysis can be manipulated by several techniques of machine learning. In fact, this study treats the extracted textual data by using the Artificial Neural Networks Approach (ANNs). In this context, we adopt the aforementioned technique to extract information from the comments available in the ‘Trip Advisor’ website. This actual paper details the description and the modeling of the ANNs approach for the scoring of online hotel reviews. In summary, the validation of this used method provides a significant model for hotel sentiment analysis. So, it provides the possibility to determine precisely the polarity of the hotel users reviews. The empirical results show that the ANNs are an accurate approach for sentiment analysis. The obtained results show also that this proposed approach serves to the dimensionality reduction for textual data’ clustering. Thus, this study provides researchers with a useful exploration of this technique. Finally, we outline guidelines for future research in the hotel e-reputation field as comparing the ANNs with other technique.

Keywords: clustering, consumer behavior, data mining, e-reputation, machine learning, neural network, online hotel ‘reviews, opinion mining, scoring

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Authors: Nattapong Techarattanased

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This survey research aimed to study the influence of attitude in services, product, and marketing mix affected intention to revisit in boutique hotel of foreign travelers in Bangkok, Thailand. The total 400 sets of closed-ended questionnaires were utilized for conducting data from foreign tourists who come to boutique hotel and can communicate in English. The descriptive statistics and multiple regression analysis were used to analyze data. The research found that tourists’ attitude towards the service of check in and check out process, food and beverage, guest room and other facilities affected in opportunity of revisiting, recommending to others and possibility of revisiting in the future at 0.05 statistically significant levels. Tourists’ attitude towards service and marketing mix in term of people, physical evidence, price, process and channel of distribution could forecast intention to revisit in term of recommending to others and intention to revisit in the future at 0.05 statistically significant levels.

Keywords: boutique hotel, foreign tourists, intention to revisit, service marketing mix

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Authors: Zhang Tao, Si Tang, Zhang Yufeng, Jin Jiahua

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Work pressure is an emerging research of organizational behavior. Many factors associated with this study also attracted the interest of scholars. Macao is surrounding by open micro-capitalist economy which has a high internationalization level and Mature operation system. And there is no doubt that tourism and hotel service industry is the pillar of the Macao economy with the developing of the mainland individual tourist visa. More and more cities are willing to inclusive culture diversity which lead to the amount of inbound tourists present high-speed up trend cause the hotel industry has a strong customer base and development space. At the same time, the hotel staff is an important role in the service. However, affected by some adverse factors, the hotel staff face a variety of pressures. This study combs the concept and theory of pressures relevant influencing factors and puts forward the purpose of this research. The focus of this study will be organizational supported by work efficiency and work pressure, using qualitative and quantitative research methods. Through questionnaires and interviews, 10 hotels in Macao were selected and 500 questionnaires were distributed to the employees. Statistical analysis software SPSS was used for descriptive statistics. By exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, effect. And the relevant practitioners on behalf of the interview content analysis. The innovation of this research lies in the empirical study of the relationship between the working pressure, organizational support and working efficiency of Macau hotel practitioners, and constructs and validates the structural model of the relationship among them. This model will be helpful for people to use more research methods to study hotel practitioners pressure in the future. At the same time, we can draw the following conclusions: 1. There is a significant negative correlation between salary level and job stress; 2. There is a significant negative correlation between job stress and performance; 3. Different organizational support can interfere the relationship between job stress and performance; 4. Put forward the strategy of relevance adjustment, which provides a reference value for the hotel industry in human resource management. It would be helpful to improve their service standard by training their practitioners more scientifically and rationally.

Keywords: Macau, perceived organizational support, work stress, work efficiency

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Authors: Baba Mbaye

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In collaborative filtering recommendation systems, a user receives suggested items based on the opinions and evaluations of a community of users. This type of recommendation system uses only the information (notes in numerical values) contained in a usage matrix as input data. This matrix can be constructed based on users' behaviors or by offering users to declare their opinions on the items they know. The cold start problem leads to very poor performance for new users. It is a phenomenon that occurs at the beginning of use, in the situation where the system lacks data to make recommendations. There are three types of cold start problems: cold start for a new item, a new system, and a new user. We are interested in this article at the cold start for a new user. When the system welcomes a new user, the profile exists but does not have enough data, and its communities with other users profiles are still unknown. This leads to recommendations not adapted to the profile of the new user. In this paper, we propose an approach that improves cold start by using the notions of similarity and semantic proximity between users profiles during cold start. We will use the cold-metadata available (metadata extracted from the new user's data) useful in positioning the new user within a community. The aim is to look for similarities and semantic proximities with the old and current user profiles of the system. Proximity is represented by close concepts considered to belong to the same group, while similarity groups together elements that appear similar. Similarity and proximity are two close but not similar concepts. This similarity leads us to the construction of similarity which is based on: a) the concepts (properties, terms, instances) independent of ontology structure and, b) the simultaneous representation of the two concepts (relations, presence of terms in a document, simultaneous presence of the authorities). We propose an ontology, OIVCSRS (Ontology of Improvement Visitor Cold Start in Recommender Systems), in order to structure the terms and concepts representing the meaning of an information field, whether by the metadata of a namespace, or the elements of a knowledge domain. This approach allows us to automatically attach the new user to a user community, partially compensate for the data that was not initially provided and ultimately to associate a better first profile with the cold start. Thus, the aim of this paper is to propose an approach to improving cold start using semantic technologies.

Keywords: visitor cold start, recommender systems, collaborative filtering, semantic filtering

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Authors: Kashif Mahmood, Tehreem Fatima, Adeel Hassan

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Firms are always concerned with their performance which is directly linked to employees’ performance. In the thrive of this goal, number of researches have been conducted where Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) and Counterproductive Work Behavior (CPWB) is among those studies. This study is aimed at investigating the role OCB by considering altruism and conscientiousness in an employee’s job performance with the mediating role of CPWB by considering sabotage and withdraw among the employees of hotel industry in Pakistan. A quantitative method was used by following deductive approach in positivist paradigm where survey was conducted through self-administered questionnaires and data was collected from the employees working in hotel industry of Pakistan. Top 10 hotels from the region of Lahore, Punjab was selected as population, and 500 questionnaires were distributed among their employees by using stratified random sampling technique. There is a positive impact of OCB is found on job performance of an employee whereas full mediation of CPWB is also found between OCB and job performance. The study is important for the practitioners in a way that hotel industry is growing at an enormous rate where employee behavior is always a concern specifically in emerging markets due to the exploitation of employees at the workplace, so the findings of the study can be helpful for practitioners and policy makers.

Keywords: organizational citizenship behavior, counterproductive work behavior, employee performance, altruism, conscientiousness, sabotage, withdraw, hotel industry

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Authors: Siti Anis Nadia Abu Bakar, Vani Tanggamani

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Over recent years, the quality and environmental management practices are the necessary tasks in hospitality industry in order to provide high quality services, a comfortable and safe environment for occupants as well as innovative nature and shareholders' satisfaction, its environmental and social added value sustainable. Numerous studies have observed and measured quality management program (QMProg) and environmental management practices (EMPrac) independently. This paper analyzed the level of QMProg, and EMPrac in hospitality industry, particularly on hotel performance, specifically in the context of Malaysia as hotel industry in Malaysia has contributed tremendously to the development in the Malaysia tourism industry.The research objectives are; (1) to analyze how the level of QMProg influences on firm performance; (2) to investigate the level of EMPrac and its influence on firm performance. This paper contributes to the literature by providing added-value to the service industry strategic decision-making processes by helping to predict the varying impacts of positive and negative corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities on financial performance in their respective industries. Further, this paper also contributes to develop more applicable CSR strategies. As a matter of fact, the findings of this paper has contributed towards an integrated management system that will assist a firm in implementation of their environmental strategy by creating a higher level of accountability for environmental performance. The best results in environmental systems have instigated managers to explore more options when dealing with problems, especially problems involving the reputation of their hotel. In conclusion, the results of the study infer that the best CSR strategies of the quality and environmental management practices influences hotel performance.

Keywords: corporate social responsibility (CSR), environmental management practices (EMPrac), performance (PERF), quality management program (QMProg)

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Authors: Bandojo Paula Maria Noella, Bernardo Bea Samantha B., Del Rosario Hanassa Mae S., Gomez Marian Louise D., Gomez Rome Voltaire M., Reyes Alessa Anne Therese A.

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The purpose of this study is to determine if there is a significant difference between the training program of Pan Pacific Hotel to other Five Star Hotels in terms of the technical, professional and personal competencies before and after their training. The theoretical framework of this study is the practicum manual of the University of Santo Tomas College of Tourism and Hospitality Management, Hotel and Restaurant Management Program Practicum Manual. This study was conducted using survey questionnaires that were distributed to 50 respondents. The results showed that there is a significant difference with the level of competencies of the practicum trainee before and after the training regardless if the training is structured or unstructured. Results also showed that the structured training program of Pan Pacific Hotel significantly improved the Technical Competencies in the different departments of the hotel industry. On the other hand, the findings also showed that there is no difference between the structured and unstructured training program in terms of Professional Competencies and Personal Competencies. The proponents concluded the study by providing recommendations to the partner hotels of the University of Santo Tomas College of Tourism and Hospitality Management that there should be a structured training program for the practicum trainees.

Keywords: structured and structured training program, practicum trainees, competencies, tourism

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Authors: Noura Al-Ajmi, Mohammed A. Almulla

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With the increased utilization of technology devices around the world, healthcare and medical diagnosis are critical issues that people worry about these days. Doctors are doing their best to avoid any medical errors while diagnosing diseases and prescribing the wrong medication. Subsequently, artificial intelligence applications that can be installed on mobile devices such as rule-based expert systems facilitate the task of assisting doctors in several ways. Due to their many advantages, the usage of expert systems has increased recently in health sciences. This work presents a backward rule-based expert system that can be used for a headache diagnosis and medication recommendation system. The structure of the system consists of three main modules, namely the input unit, the processing unit, and the output unit.

Keywords: headache diagnosis system, prescription recommender system, expert system, backward rule-based system

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Authors: Y. Yılmaz, C. Ünal, A. Dursun

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Distribution channels play significant role for hotels. Direct and indirect selling options of hotel rooms have been increased especially with the help of new technologies, i.e. hotel’s own web sites and online booking sites. Although these options emerged as tools for diversifying the distribution channels, vast number of hotels -mostly resort hotels- is still heavily dependent upon international tour operators when selling their products. On the other hand, hotel sector is so vulnerable against crises. Economic, political or any other crisis can affect hotels very badly and so it is critical to have the right balance of distribution channel to avoid the adverse impacts of a crisis. In this study, it is aimed to search the impacts of a general crisis on the selling prices of hotels which have different weights of distribution channels. The study was done in Turkey where various crises occurred in 2015 and 2016 which had great negative impacts on Turkish tourism and led enormous occupancy rate and selling price reductions. 112 upscale resort hotel in Antalya, which is the most popular tourism destination of Turkey, joined to the research. According to the results, hotels with high dependency to international tour operators are more forced to reduce their room prices in crisis time compared to the ones which use their own web sites more. It was also found that the decline in room prices is limited for hotels which are working with national tour operators and travel agencies in crisis time.

Keywords: marketing channels, crisis, hotel, international tour operators, online travel agencies

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Authors: Feyi Olorunshola

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Over the last few years, the senior travel market has been noted for its potential in the wider tourism industry. The tourism sector includes the hotel and hospitality, travel, transportation, and several other subdivisions to make it economically viable. In particular, the hotel attracts a substantial part of the expenditure in tourism activities as when people plan to travel, suitable accommodation for relaxation, dining, entertainment and so on is paramount to their decision-making. The global retail value of the hotel as of 2018 was significant for tourism. But, despite indications of the hotel to the tourism industry at large, very few empirical studies are available to establish how this sector can leverage on the senior demographic to achieve competitive advantage. Predominantly, studies on the mature market have focused on destination tourism, with a limited investigation on the hotel which makes a significant contribution to tourism. Also, several scholarly studies have demonstrated the importance of the senior travel market to the hotel, yet there is very little empirical research in the field which has explored the driving factors that will become the accepted new normal for this niche segment post-pandemic. Giving that the hotel already operates in a highly saturated business environment, and on top of this pre-existing challenge, the ongoing global health outbreak has further put the sector in a vulnerable position. Therefore, the hotel especially the full-service luxury category must evolve rapidly for it to survive in the current business environment. The hotel can no longer rely on corporate travelers to generate higher revenue since the unprecedented wake of the pandemic in 2020 many organizations have invented a different approach of conducting their businesses online, therefore, the hotel needs to anticipate a significant drop in business travellers. However, the rooms and the rest of the facilities must be occupied to keep their business operating. The way forward for the hotel lies in the leisure sector, but the question now is to focus on the potential demographics of travelers, in this case, the seniors who have been repeatedly recognized as the lucrative market because of increase discretionary income, availability of time and the global population trends. To achieve the study objectives, a mixed-method approach will be utilized drawing on both qualitative (netnography) and quantitative (survey) methods, cognitive and decision-making theories (means-end chain) and competitive theories to identify the salient drivers explaining senior hotel choice and its influence on their decision-making. The target population are repeated seniors’ age 65 years and over who are UK resident, and from the top tourist market to the UK (USA, Germany, and France). Structural equation modelling will be employed to analyze the datasets. The theoretical implication is the development of new concepts using a robust research design, and as well as advancing existing framework to hotel study. Practically, it will provide the hotel management with the latest information to design a competitive marketing strategy and activities to target the mature market post-pandemic and over a long period.

Keywords: competitive advantage, covid-19, full-service hotel, five-star, luxury hotels

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Authors: Miguel Llorens-Marin, Adolfo Hernandez, Maria Puelles-Gallo

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The increasing influence of Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) on hotel bookings and the electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) contained in them has been featured by many scientific studies as a major factor in the booking decision. The main reason is that nowadays, in the hotel sector, consumers first come into contact with the offer through the web and the online environment. Due to the nature of the hotel product and the fact that it is booked in advance to actually seeing it, there is a lack of knowledge about its actual features. This makes eWOM a major channel to help consumers to reduce their perception of risk when making their booking decisions. This research studies the relationship between aspects of customer influenceability by reading eWOM communications, at the time of booking a hotel, with the propensity to write a review. In other words, to test relationships between the reading and the writing of eWOM. Also investigates the importance of different underlying motivations for writing eWOM. Online surveys were used to obtain the data from a sample of hotel customers, with 739 valid questionnaires. A measurement model and Path analysis were carried out to analyze the chain of relationships among the independent variable (influenceability from reading reviews) and the dependent variable (propensity to write a review) with the mediating effects of additional variables, which help to explain the relationship. The authors also tested the moderating effects of age and gender in the model. The study considered three different underlying motivations for writing a review on a hotel experience, namely hedonic, altruistic and conflicted. Results indicate that the level of influenceability by reading reviews has a positive effect on the propensity to write reviews; therefore, we manage to link the reading and the writing of reviews. Authors also discover that the main underlying motivation to write a hotel review is the altruistic motivation, being the one with the higher Standard regression coefficient above the hedonic motivation. The authors suggest that the propensity to write reviews is not related to sociodemographic factors (age and gender) but to attitudinal factors such as ‘the most influential factor when reading’ and ‘underlying motivations to write. This gives light on the customer engagement motivations to write reviews. The implications are that managers should encourage their customers to write eWOM reviews on altruistic grounds to help other customers to make a decision. The most important contribution of this work is to link the effect of reading hotel reviews with the propensity to write reviews.

Keywords: hotel reviews, electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), online consumer reviews, digital marketing, social media

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Authors: Giuseppina Settanni, Antonio Panarese, Raffaele Vaira, Maurizio Galiano

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Nowdays, artificial intelligence is used successfully in academia and industry for its ability to learn from a large amount of data. In particular, in recent years the use of machine learning algorithms in the field of e-commerce has spread worldwide. In this research study, a prototype software platform was designed and implemented in order to suggest to users the most suitable products for their needs. The platform includes a chatbot and a recommender system based on artificial intelligence algorithms that provide suggestions and decision support to the customer. The recommendation systems perform the important function of automatically filtering and personalizing information, thus allowing to manage with the IT overload to which the user is exposed on a daily basis. Recently, international research has experimented with the use of machine learning technologies with the aim to increase the potential of traditional recommendation systems. Specifically, support vector machine algorithms have been implemented combined with natural language processing techniques that allow the user to interact with the system, express their requests and receive suggestions. The interested user can access the web platform on the internet using a computer, tablet or mobile phone, register, provide the necessary information and view the products that the system deems them most appropriate. The platform also integrates a dashboard that allows the use of the various functions, which the platform is equipped with, in an intuitive and simple way. Artificial intelligence algorithms have been implemented and trained on historical data collected from user browsing. Finally, the testing phase allowed to validate the implemented model, which will be further tested by letting customers use it.

Keywords: machine learning, recommender system, software platform, support vector machine

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Authors: Benjaporn Yaemjamuang, Sasitorn Jetanont

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The three star hotels in Sukhumvit area of Bangkok and the potential to be in the tourism industry joining the ASEAN Community were studied. The findings revealed that the representative samples satisfy the potential of hotel services at a high level in all aspects. The level of service satisfaction by gender is not different. On the other hand, for different ethnic origins, ages, occupations, levels of education, the satisfaction on the services varies in significance level of 0.05. Factors associated with satisfaction in the services of the hotel include a potential location and environment. It was also found that satisfaction with the service aspects are related as follows: services (r = .810), food (r = .807), booking service (r = .768), room condition (r = .762) and security (r =.756) which is aligned with the coefficient .826.

Keywords: three star hotel, ASEAN community, potential in tourism industry, Bangkok

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Authors: Lucila T. Magalong

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The hotel industry has been using their corporate image and reputation to maintain service quality, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty and to leverage themselves against competitors and facilitate their growth strategies. With the increasing pressure to perform, hotels have even created hybrid service strategy to fight in the niche markets across pricing and level-off service parameters.

Keywords: corporate image, hotel industry, service quality, customer expectations

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Authors: Ruey-Yu Chen, Yao-Tsung Chang, Ching-Ying Yeh, Yu-Ting Huang

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Musculoskeletal problems in the hotel sector have been little studied. The aim of this study was to examine relationships of musculoskeletal pain and work characteristics with presenteeism, i.e., feeling sick but going to work anyway. Data of a self-reported questionnaire were collected from 1,101 employees, who joined the study on a voluntary basis from four hotels in northern Taiwan. The results showed that respondents who were female, were younger, had a higher educational level, and worked in the real-service department had higher presenteeism. There were significant positive associations between presenteeism and heavy loads, frequent beatings or hits of hard objects, improper bench height, employees’ lower limb and lower back pain. Our study results imply that knowledge of work characteristics and employees' musculoskeletal problems could be advantageously used to reduce presenteeism in the workplace.

Keywords: musculoskeletal pain, absenteeism, presenteeism, hotel employees

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Authors: Jiao Sun, Li Pan, Shijun Liu

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Recommender systems have been widely used in contemporary industry, and plenty of work has been done in this field to help users to identify items of interest. Collaborative Filtering (CF, for short) algorithm is an important technology in recommender systems. However, less work has been done in automobile recommendation system with the sharp increase of the amount of automobiles. What’s more, the computational speed is a major weakness for collaborative filtering technology. Therefore, using MapReduce framework to optimize the CF algorithm is a vital solution to this performance problem. In this paper, we present a recommendation of the users’ comment on industrial automobiles with various properties based on real world industrial datasets of user-automobile comment data collection, and provide recommendation for automobile providers and help them predict users’ comment on automobiles with new-coming property. Firstly, we solve the sparseness of matrix using previous construction of score matrix. Secondly, we solve the data normalization problem by removing dimensional effects from the raw data of automobiles, where different dimensions of automobile properties bring great error to the calculation of CF. Finally, we use the MapReduce framework to optimize the CF algorithm, and the computational speed has been improved times. UV decomposition used in this paper is an often used matrix factorization technology in CF algorithm, without calculating the interpolation weight of neighbors, which will be more convenient in industry.

Keywords: collaborative filtering, recommendation, data normalization, mapreduce

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Authors: Audu Aly Fada, Adejoh Apeh Matthew

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This research assesses the effects of social conflicts on tourism products in Plateau State. It was specifically set out to find out the major causes of social conflicts in Jos, evaluate the effects of social conflicts on the influx of tourists to Hill station hotel Jos, and the impact on revenue generation of the hotel. To achieve these objectives research questions were formulated and a sample of 30 hotel staff was selected as the respondents. Data collected were organized and analyzed using tables, percentages and mean statistics. It was found that the hospitality and tourism industry was adversely affected. The crisis brought about a decline in the number of tourist arrivals, increase in cancelled bookings, a decrease in the average length of stay of tourists and the average room occupancy. Peace is the best friend of travel and tourism, while war and insecurity are among its worst enemies. It is recommended that all stakeholders involved in tourism administration should device safer environment that supports continued patronage by providing modern security apparatus. In the same spirit, government as the main stake-holder in security provision should do more than paying lip service to guarantee security and safety of lives and properties.

Keywords: social conflict, crisis, security, tourism development

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Authors: Mohammed Aman Kassim

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This study explored the attitudes of hotel managers toward climate change adaption and mitigation practices in resort hotels located in Bishoftu town, Ethiopia. Weak resource management in the area causes serious environmental problems. So sustainable way forward is needed for the destination in order to reduce environmental damage. Six resorts were selected out of twelve resort hotels in Bishoftu City by using the systematic sampling method, and a total of fifty-six managers were taken for the study. The data analyzed came from self-administered questionnaires, site observation, and a short face-to-face interview with general managers. The results showed that 99% of hotel managers possess positive attitudes toward climate change adaptation and mitigation practices. But they did not show a high commitment to adopting all adaptation and mitigation practices in their hotel’s actions and day-to-day operation. Key adoption influencing factors identified were: owners' commitment toward sustainability, the applicability of government rules and regulations, and incentives for good achievement. The findings also revealed that the attitudes of resort hotel managers toward climate change adaption and mitigation practices are more significantly influenced by their social factors, such as level of education and age, in this study. The study demonstrated that in order to increase managers' commitment and hotels become green: government led-education and training programs, green certification actions, and application of government environmental regulation are important.

Keywords: climate change, climate change adaptation and mitigation practices, environmental attitude, resort hotels

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Authors: Marina Laškarin, Vlado Galičić

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Quick adoption of e-business and emerging influence of “Electronic Word of Mouth e-WOM” communication on guests made leading hotel brands successful examples of electronic guest relationship management. Main reasons behind such success are well established procedures in collection, analysis and usage of highly valuable data available on the Internet, generated through some form of e-GRM programme. E-GRM is more than just a technology solution. It’s a system which balance respective guest demands, hotel technological capabilities and organizational culture of employees, discharging the universal approach in guest relations “same for all”. The purpose of this research derives from the necessity of determining the importance of monitoring and applying e-WOM communication as one of the methods used in managing guest relations. This paper analyses and compares different hotelier’s opinions on e-WOM communication.

Keywords: brand loyalty, e-WOM communication, GRM programmes, organizational culture

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Authors: Masooma Al-Balushi, Tamer Mohamed Atef

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The Sultanate of Oman is located on the South-eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea and has borders with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Arabic is the official language. Islam is the official religion. Islam has a great impact on most Omanis, Shari’a law is the law of Oman. The tribal structure plays an essential role in the lives of Omanis. Most people in the Gulf States bear a tribal name rather than a family name. Religion, tribe, and family are highly influential in shaping individuals’ values and behaviors, and have a very noticeable influence on a person’s career choices. Tourism development has been given special attention by the Sultanate of Oman’s government aspiring that the industry would assist in creating direct job opportunities as well as boost the economy through provision of hard currency to improve the balance of payments. This study aims to assess the impact of socio-cultural and religious factors on Omanis employment in the hotel sector. The socio-cultural and religious factors have serious impacts on Omani employment in the hotel sector. Some employees are concerned about the source of income because of the idea that since the hotel business is based on activities such as serving alcohol and pork, gambling, and accommodating unmarried couples, their source of income would be questionable religion wise. For females, the designated job uniform and the interaction with males are major concerns. Ability to fulfil family obligations for married Omanis, and marriage opportunity for singles were other raised concerns. Whilst the future prosperity of the hotel industry depends on the quality of its people, in Oman, the hospitality industry has failed, for a number of reasons, to project an image that could generate interest amongst Omanis. Furthermore, the characteristics and the very nature of the hotel sector are in direct conflict with Islamic doctrines which are embedded in Omani life and society.

Keywords: culture, society, hotel, hospitality, Islam, Oman

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Authors: Sacha Joseph-Mathews, Leili Javadpour

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In the tourism industry, hoteliers spend millions annually on marketing and positioning efforts for their respective hotels, all in an effort to create a specific image in the minds of the consumer. Yet despite extensive efforts to seduce potential hotel guests with sophisticated advertising messages generated by hotel entities, consumers continue to mistrust corporate branding, preferring instead to place their trust in the reviews of their consumer peers. In today’s complex and cluttered marketplace, online reviews can serve as a mediator for consumers who do not have actual knowledge and experiences with the brand, but are in the process of deciding whether or not to engage in a consumption exercise. Traditionally, consumers have used online reviews as a source of comfort and confirmation of a product/service’s positioning. But today, very few customers make any purchase decisions without first researching existing user reviews, making reviews more of a necessity, rather than a luxury in the purchase decision process. The influence of user generated content (UGC) is amplified in the tourism industry; as more than a third of potential hotel guests will not book a room without first reading a review. As corporate branding becomes less relevant and online reviews become more important, how much of the consumer’s stay expectations are being dictated by existing UGC? Moreover, as hotel guest experience a hotel through the lens of an existing review, how much of their stay and in turn their review, would have been influenced by those reviews that they read? Ultimately, there is the potential for UGC to dictate what potential guests will be most critical about, and or most focused on during their stay. If UGC is a stronger influencer in the purchase decision process than corporate branding, doesn’t it have the potential to dictate, the entire stay experience by influencing the expectations of the guest prior to them arriving on the property? For example, if a hotel is an eco-destination and they focus their branding on their website around sustainability and the retreat nature of the hotel. Yet, guest reviews constantly discuss how dissatisfactory the service and food was with no mention of nature or sustainability, will future reviews then focus primarily on the food? Using text analysis software to examine over 25,000 online reviews, we explore the extent to which new reviews are influenced by wording used in previous reviews for a hotel property, versus content generated by corporate positioning. Additionally, we investigate how distinct hotel related UGC is across different types of tourism destinations. Our findings suggest that UGC can have a greater impact on future reviews, than corporate branding and there is more cohesiveness across UGC of different types of hotel properties than anticipated. A model of User Generated Content Influence is presented and the managerial impact of the power of online reviews to trump corporate branding and shape future user experiences is discussed.

Keywords: user generated content, UGC, corporate branding, online reviews, hotels and tourism

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Authors: Raymond Chi Fai Si Tou, Jacey Ja Young Choe, Amy Siu Ian So

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Smart hotels can be defined as the hotel which has an intelligent system, through digitalization and networking which achieve hotel management and service information. In addition, smart hotels include high-end designs that integrate information and communication technology with hotel management fulfilling the guests’ needs and improving the quality, efficiency and satisfaction of hotel management. The purpose of this study is to identify appropriate factors that may influence guests’ satisfaction and intention to revisit Smart Hotels based on service quality measurement of lodging quality index and extended UTAUT theory. Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) is adopted as a framework to explain technology acceptance and use. Since smart hotels are technology-based infrastructure hotels, UTATU theory could be as the theoretical background to examine the guests’ acceptance and use after staying in smart hotels. The UTAUT identifies four key drivers of the adoption of information systems: performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions. The extended UTAUT modifies the definitions of the seven constructs for consideration; the four previously cited constructs of the UTAUT model together with three new additional constructs, which including hedonic motivation, price value and habit. Thus, the seven constructs from the extended UTAUT theory could be adopted to understand their intention to revisit smart hotels. The service quality model will also be adopted and integrated into the framework to understand the guests’ intention of smart hotels. There are rare studies to examine the service quality on guests’ satisfaction and intention to revisit in smart hotels. In this study, Lodging Quality Index (LQI) will be adopted to measure the service quality in smart hotels. Using integrated UTAUT theory and service quality model because technological applications and services require using more than one model to understand the complicated situation for customers’ acceptance of new technology. Moreover, an integrated model could provide more perspective insights to explain the relationships of the constructs that could not be obtained from only one model. For this research, ten in-depth interviews are planned to recruit this study. In order to confirm the applicability of the proposed framework and gain an overview of the guest experience of smart hotels from the hospitality industry, in-depth interviews with the hotel guests and industry practitioners will be accomplished. In terms of the theoretical contribution, it predicts that the integrated models from the UTAUT theory and the service quality will provide new insights to understand factors that influence the guests’ satisfaction and intention to revisit smart hotels. After this study identifies influential factors, smart hotel practitioners could understand which factors may significantly influence smart hotel guests’ satisfaction and intention to revisit. In addition, smart hotel practitioners could also provide outstanding guests experience by improving their service quality based on the identified dimensions from the service quality measurement. Thus, it will be beneficial to the sustainability of the smart hotels business.

Keywords: intention to revisit, guest satisfaction, qualitative interviews, smart hotels

Procedia PDF Downloads 172

Authors: Thanasit Suksutdhi

Abstract:

This survey research aims to study the standard of service quality of food and beverage service staffs in hotel business by studying the service standard of three sample hotels, Siam Kempinski Hotel Bangkok, Four Seasons Resort Chiang Mai, and Banyan Tree Phuket. In order to find the international service standard of food and beverage service, triangular research, i.e. quantitative, qualitative, and survey were employed. In this research, questionnaires and in-depth interview were used for getting the information on the sequences and method of services. There were three parts of modified questionnaires to measure service quality and guest’s satisfaction including service facilities, attentiveness, responsibility, reliability, and circumspection. This study used sample random sampling to derive subjects with the return rate of the questionnaires was 70% or 280. Data were analyzed by SPSS to find arithmetic mean, SD, percentage, and comparison by t-test and One-way ANOVA. The results revealed that the service quality of the three hotels were in the international level which could create high satisfaction to the international customers. Recommendations for research implementations were to maintain the area of good service quality, and to improve some dimensions of service quality such as reliability. Training in service standard, product knowledge, and new technology for employees should be provided. Furthermore, in order to develop the service quality of the industry, training collaboration between hotel organization and educational institutions in food and beverage service should be considered.

Keywords: service standard, food and beverage department, sequence of service, service method

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Authors: Ni Wayan Sinthia Widiastuti, Komang Rahayu Indrawati

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The increasing number of tourists coming to Bali, causing accommodation facilities, such as hotels have increased. The existence of hotel needs will be the source of labor and cost efficiency, so that hotel management employs employees with different working status. The hospitality industry is one of the sectors that require organizational citizenship behavior because, the main goal of every hotel, in general, was to provide the best service and quality to tourists. The purpose of this study was to determine the differences in organizational citizenship behavior based on work status of employees at the Hotel in Bali in terms of quality of work life. Research sample was chosen randomly through two-stage cluster sampling which succeeds to obtain 126 samples from 11 hotels in Denpasar, Bali. The subjects consisted of 64 employees with Employment Agreement of Uncertain Time or who is often called a permanent employee and 62 employees with Employment Agreement of Certain Time or better known as contract employees, outsourcing, and daily workers. Instruments in this study were the scale of organizational citizenship behavior and the scale of quality of work life. The results of ANCOVA analysis showed there were differences in organizational citizenship behavior based on employee work status in terms of quality of work life. Differences in organizational citizenship behavior and quality of work life based on work status of employees using comparative test was analysis by independent sample t-test shows there were differences in organizational citizenship behavior and quality of work life between employees with different working status in hotels in Bali. The result of the regression analysis showed the functional relationship between quality of work life and organizational citizenship behavior.

Keywords: hotel in Bali, organizational citizenship behavior, quality of work life, work status of employees

Procedia PDF Downloads 259

Authors: Majid Alizadeh, Sina Nematizadeh, Hassan Esmailpour

Abstract:

The mutual effects of hospitality and the environment are undeniable, so that the tourism industry has major harmful effects on the environment. Hotels, as one of the most important pillars of the hospitality industry, have significant effects on the environment. Green marketing is a promising strategy in response to the growing concerns about the environment. A green hotel marketing model was proposed using a grounded theory approach in the hotel industry. The study was carried out as a mixed method study. Data gathering in the qualitative phase was done through literature review and In-depth, semi-structured interviews with 10 experts in green marketing using snowball technique. Following primary analysis, open, axial, and selective coding was done on the data, which yielded 69 concepts, 18 categories and six dimensions. Green hotel (green product) was adopted as the core phenomenon. In the quantitative phase, data were gleaned using 384 questionnaires filled-out by hotel guests and descriptive statistics and Structural equation modeling (SEM) were used for data analysis. The results indicated that the mediating role of behavioral response between the ecological literacy, trust, marketing mix and performance was significant. The green marketing mix, as a strategy, had a significant and positive effect on guests’ behavioral response, corporate green image, and financial and environmental performance of hotels.

Keywords: green marketing, sustainable development, hospitality, grounded theory, structural equations model

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Authors: Denis Özdemir, Max Senges

Abstract:

There are many examples of AI-supported apps for better health and wellbeing. Generally, these applications help people to achieve their goals based on scientific research and input data. Still, they do not always explain how those three are related, e.g. by making implicit assumptions about goals that hold for many but not for all. We present a seven-step method for designing health and wellbeing AIs considering goal setting, measurable results, real-time indicators, analytics, visual representations, communication, and feedback. It can help engineers as guidance in developing apps, recommendation algorithms, and interfaces that support humans in their decision-making without patronization. To illustrate the method, we create a recommender AI for tiny wellbeing habits and run a small case study, including a survey. From the results, we infer how people perceive the relationship between them and the AI and to what extent it helps them to achieve their goals. We review our seven-step engineering method and suggest modifications for the next iteration.

Keywords: recommender systems, natural language processing, health apps, engineering methods

Procedia PDF Downloads 128