Staff scheduling and rostering problems, with application in several application areas, from transportation systems to hospitals, have been widely addressed by researchers. This is not the case of hospitality services, which have been forgotten by the quantitative research literature. The purpose of this paper is to provide some insights on the application of staff scheduling and rostering prob...

.........................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEGEMENT............................................................................iv TABLE OF CONTENTS...........................................................................v LIST OF TABLES...................................................................................ix LIST OF FIGURES.....

Tourism is the most important industry in the world in terms of the numbers of employees and its effect on the social and economical development of a region or country. Holjevac (2003) believes that, by the year 2050, tourism will by far be the largest industry worldwide, with 2 billion tourists and US$24 billion in domestic and international receipts. Moreover, the major tourist destinations w...

One of the primary challenges for the tourism sector is to communicate with potential customers in a manner that is readily accessible to them. Tourism enterprises must ensure that the tourism product is presented and promoted in the most effective and efficient manner possible. Information and communication technology (ICT) applications play a critical role in overcoming this challenge. The li...

A patient's decision to recommend a health care organization and the patient's loyalty scores are largely determined by the interaction patients and their families have with the nurses. Hospitality is how the delivery of that product makes the person feel and is a dialogue that requires the server to be "on the guest's side" throughout the experience. The challenge for health care is to help ou...

28 6 Acknowledgements We thank Prof. K. Indermark (Lehrstuhl f ur Informatik II / RWTH-Aachen) for his support and kind hospitality. Thanks also to Paz for her help.

In this paper, we analyze and compare general development and individual behavior on two non-profit internet-based hospitality exchange services – bewelcome.org and warmshowers.org. We measure the effort needed to achieve a reallife interaction, whereby the advantages of mutual altruism arise. The effort needed is the communication quantified in units of time. Since the amount of effort is not ...