Although there is considerable interest in the advance bookings model as a forecasting method in the hotel industry, there has been little research analyzing the use of an advance booking curve in forecasting hotel reservations. The mainstream of advance booking models reviewed in the literature uses only the bookings-on-hand data on a certain day and ignores the previous booking data. This emp...

On an e-commerce site, product blurbs (short promotional statements) and user reviews give us a lot of information about products. While a blurb should be appealing to encourage more users to click on a product link, sometimes sellers may miss or misunderstand which aspects of the product are important to their users. We therefore propose a novel task: suggesting aspects of products for an adve...

Using an Importance}Performance Analysis (IPA), this paper examined business and leisure travellers' perceived importance and performance of six hotel selection factors in the Hong Kong hotel industry. The six hotel selection factors identi"ed were: Service Quality, Business Facilities, Value, Room and Front Desk, Food and Recreation, and Security. Both business and leisure travellers held the ...

OBJECTIVES To determine the presence of legionellae and species composition of the genus Legionella in Sri Lankan hotel cooling towers, and to determine the previous exposure of hotel workers to Legionella pneumophila. DESIGN Collection of water samples from 16 cooling towers of air conditioning plants from 7 representative hotels, and blood samples from hotel workers. SETTING Department of...

As many travelers use online for their travel arrangement, hotels provide online reservation system, so as to take the benefits of internet marketing such as the cost reduction. However, there has been minimal research regarding a detailed examination of hotel booking Web sites and e-service performance on customers’ reuse intentions for online hotel reservation. This paper thus examines the ef...

With the proliferation of social media, consumers' cognitive costs during information-seeking can become non-trivial during an online shopping session. We propose a dynamic structural model of limited consumer search thatcombines an optimal stopping framework with an individual-level choice model. We estimate the parameters of the model using a dataset of approximately 1 million online search s...

Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) models make preference decisions over multiple attributes’ alternatives available, which in most of the cases conflict among themselves. On the other hand, the classic MCDM model assumes that the decision maker has a pre-defined fixed set of criteria, when taking a decision, and is presented with a clear picture of all available alternatives. This classi...

The outlook is that the bad times for the hotel industry may be coming to an end. Many experts during this economic decline have declared that the drop in aggregate demand and the Internet incursion has resulted in hotel brands ceasing to be important. Consequently, conventional wisdom viewed price discounting, as the most important factor in hotel selection by consumers. The current study anal...

It is essential for hotel companies to evaluate and improve website performance in order to keep and increase their online presence and competitiveness in the marketplace. This article proposes an evaluation framework for hotel websites, which categorizes web information services into six information dimensions and also uses managers’ and users’ views. Based on the relative literature, the mode...

The tourism industry is characterized by severe shifts in demand that play havoc with forecasting future investment. Within the tourism industry, the need for large-scale initial capital investment in the hotel sector, make the latter particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of the tourism market. Given an up-turn in demand, the hotel industry cannot always respond immediately and its' response ...