The St. Regis ShenZhen, a gorgeous luxury hotel occupying the top 28 floors of a 100 story skyscraper, o↵ers guests a unique feature: a room remote control in the form of an iPad2. The iPad2 controls the lighting, temperature, music, do not disturb light, TV, even the blinds and other miscellaneous room actions. However, the deployment of the home automation protocol contained several fatal fla...

The explosive development of Web 2.0 and online word-of-mouth (WOM) communications have facilitated the transaction of experience goods from offline to online. However, most of the online WOM merely consist of words which make it hard to convey the subtle feelings and experiences of consuming such products or services. In order to form more precise perceptions and reduce uncertainty, search eng...

INTRODUCTION With the number of tourists coming to Taiwan growing by 10-20 % since 2010, the number has increased due to an increasing number of foreign tourists, particularly after deregulation allowed admitting tourist groups, followed later on by foreign individual tourists, from mainland China. The purpose of this study is to propose a revised gap model to evaluate and improve service quali...

In many real-life situations, there are “package deals”, when customers who buy two or more different items get a special discount. For example, when planning a trip, a deal including airfare and hotel costs less than the airfare and hotel on their own; there are often also special deals when we combine airfare with car rental, and deals that cover all three items plus tickets to local tourist ...

Platforms such as Yelp and TripAdvisor aggregate crowd-sourced information about users’ experiences with products and services. We analyze their impact on the hotel industry using a panel of hotel prices, sales and reviews from five US states over a 10-year period from 2005-2014. Both hotel demand and prices are positively correlated with their average ratings on TripAdvisor, Expedia and Hotels...

CONTEXT Little is known about the sexual and reproductive health care needs of female sex workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. METHODS Survey data were collected from 354 hotel-based and 323 street-based female sex workers using a venue-based stratified cluster sampling approach. In addition, in-depth interviews were conducted with 20 female sex workers recruited from drop-in centers. We calculated ...

Mihir Rajopadhye, Mounir Ben Ghaliay and Paul P. Wang Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Duke University Durham, North Carolina 27708-0291 Timothy Baker and Craig V. Eister Bass Hotels and Resorts Atlanta, Georgia 30346-2149 Abstract Economic systems are characterized by increasing uncertainty in their dynamics. This increasing uncertainty is likely to incur bad decisions that ca...

Background Most states in the U.S. permit hotels to allow smoking in some guest rooms, and only five (Indiana, Michigan, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin) require that all hotel and motel rooms be 100% smoke-free (State and local 100% smokefree hotel and motel guest room laws enacted as of July 3, 2017). Little is known, however, about how hotels' smoking policies have been implemented. Thi...

Affected by the factors like population, economic and geographic conditions, accommodation offerings are inherently different at different cities and characterized with their specific features. This heterogeneity is not limited to the supply-side but covers the demand-side as well. For instance, business and leisure tourists may favor different travel destinations. Therefore, the development of...

13 SNIP CONFERENCE – April 11-14, 2007 Marriott City Center Hotel – Salt Lake City, Utah