Editorial

Citation

Okumus, F. (2014), "Editorial", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 26 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM.04126baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Volume 26, Issue 2

The second issue of IJCHM in 2014 contains eight research articles and two book reviews. The first article by Pei-Jou Kuo and Valentini Kalargyrou investigates consumers’ perceptions, attitudes and purchase intention for restaurants that employ service staff with disabilities. The authors conducted a single-factor (dining occasion) experimental design on a total of 192 consumers. The study findings suggest a moderately positive purchase intention for a restaurant that employs service staff with disabilities. However, the purchase intention varied by dining occasions. This is one of the first studies to have empirically investigated consumers’ perspectives on restaurant service staff with disabilities in the US. The second paper by brahim Giritlioglu, Eleri Jones and Cevdet Avcikurt develops an instrument to evaluate food and beverage service quality in spa hotels in Turkey. This research addresses the paucity of research on customer perspectives of food and beverage provision in spa hotels and contributes to enhanced understanding of spa tourists and their expectations and perceptions of the service quality of food and beverage service quality.

Amrik Singh, Chekitan Dev and Robert Mandelbaum investigate the “flow-through” or relationship between top-line measures of hotel operating performance and bottom-line measures of profitability before and during the recent great recession. A total of 714 hotels from the data provided by PKF Hospitality Research for the period from 2007-2009 were analyzed and various top-line and bottom-line profitability measures were computed using both, levels and changes. This paper extends prior research on the relationship between top-line measures and bottom-line profitability and serves to inform lodging managers about flow-through ratios, and how these ratios impact hotels’ profitability. In the fourth article, Miyoung Kim and Hailin Qu propose a refined technology acceptance model (TAM) to examine the relationship between factors that affect travelers’ use of hotel self-service kiosks. A self-administered online questionnaire was developed and used to collect empirical data. The new refined model of factors affecting travelers’ use of hotel self-service kiosks comprises three new factors, including compatibility, perceived risks, and satisfaction.

In the fifth article, Cristian Morosan investigates air travelers’ adoption of mobile phones to purchase ancillary air travel services. A structural model was developed based on the Technology Acceptance Model and augmented with constructs like trust, privacy, security, innovativeness, and personalization. This study provides one of the first theoretical perspectives on the purchasing behavior of services that have not been studied so far, but carry a strong financial significance for the airline industry. In their article, Alessandro Inversini and Lorenzo Masiero focus on the reasons why hoteliers choose to be present in online travel agent (OTA) and social media websites for sales purposes. The empirical analysis involved the specification of two ordered logit models exploring the importance (in terms of online sales) of both social media and the online travel agent, Booking.com. The research findings highlight the constant tension between visibility and online sales in the web arena, as well as a clear distinction in social media and OTA website adoption between hospitality structures using online management tools and employing personnel with specific skills. The study findings highlight the need for the hospitality industry to maintain an effective presence on social media and OTAs in order to move towards the creation of a new form of social booking technologies to increase their visibility and sales.

In their article Milos Bujisic, Luorong Wu, Anna Mattila and Anil Bilgihan claim that although a layman’s theory supports the view that “a smile goes a long way,” “not all smiles are created equal” in the sense that the server’s smiles need to be genuine and authentic, in particular when the customer has a relationship with the server. A two (display authenticity: authentic vs inauthentic) by two (state of service relationship: existing service relationship vs no service relationship) experiment with 278 responses was used to test the proposed hypotheses by two-way ANOVA analyses. The findings reveal that authentic smiles have a direct positive impact on customers’ willingness to tip and such an effect is even stronger when the customer has an existing working relationship with the server. In the final article, Osman Karatepe and Eda Demir develop a research model that investigates work engagement as a mediator of the effect of core self-evaluations on work-family facilitation and family-work facilitation. The relationships were tested via structural equation modeling using data collected from a sample of full-time frontline hotel employees with a time lag of two weeks in Turkey. This study expands current knowledge by assessing work engagement as a mediator of the impact of core self-evaluations on work-family facilitation and family-work facilitation.

This issue includes two book reviews. Claudia Ribeiro de Almeida provides a review on Key Concepts in Event Management by Bernadette Quinn, UK, SAGE Publications. The second book review is provided by Robert O’Halloran on Key Concepts in Hospitality Management. This text is edited by R.C. Wood and published by Sage Publications.

We hope that our readers find all the articles published in this issue timely, relevant and useful.

Fevzi Okumus
Editor-in-Chief