Gentlemen Prefer Red?

Flickr / ibm4381

Nicolas Guéguen and Céline Jacob, both of the Université de Bretagne-Sud, published “Clothing Color and Tipping: Gentlemen Patrons Give More Tips to Waitresses With Red Clothes” on April 18, 2012 in the Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research. To view other OnlineFirst articles, please click here.

The abstract:

Recent research conducted with humans demonstrated that red, relative to other achromatic or chromatic colors, led men to view women presented on a photograph as more attractive. The effect of color on behavior was tested in a tipping context. Eleven waitresses in five restaurants were instructed to wear the same tee shirt with different colors (black, white, red, blue, green, or yellow). The effect of color on tipping according to patron’s gender was measured. It was found that waitresses wearing red received more tips but only with male patrons. Waitresses color had no effect on female patrons’ tipping behavior. The relation between red and sexual attractiveness are used to explain the results. Managerial interests related with clothing appearance were discussed.

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Location, Location, Location…and Competition

kevin dooley (CC BY 2.0)

Seul Ki Lee and SooCheong (Shawn) Jang, both of Purdue University, published “Premium or Discount in Hotel Room Rates? The Dual Effects of a Central Downtown Location” in the May 2012 issue of Cornell Hospitality Quarterly. To see the Table of Contents for this issue, please click here. Seul Ki Lee kindly provided the following insights about the article.

Who is the target audience for this article?
The study has significant relevance to hotel developers, real estate analysts, and hospitality researchers whose interest include the location of hotels and its implications.

What inspired you to be interested in this topic?
Location is arguably the most important product dimension of a hotel. Consequently, location can govern the substitutability among hotel rooms and the shape of competition among hotels in a market. We attempted to develop a way to explicitly model the effect of competition as a function of hotel location.

Were there findings that were surprising to you?
Although the direction of effect was as expected, the effect of competition on individual hotels’ pricing ability was somewhat larger than expected. This highlights the existing competition that a new developer should take into consideration when entering a saturated market.

How do you see this study influencing future research and/or practice?
We hope that future studies and practice will consider the incorporation of spatial effects when applicable. In some cases, allowing for spatial correlation may provide more precise and efficient models. In other cases, estimation of the spatial interaction itself may be meaningful, as in our study.

How does this study fit into your body of work/line of research?
This study is a part of our efforts to take into greater consideration the effect of location in hospitality research. Hospitality business is distinct in that consumption cannot be separated from production. Location naturally becomes a part of the product – modeled through travel cost, neighborhood quality, and presence of other resources. We plan to investigate further into the different types of spatial interactions pervasive in the hospitality industry and develop appropriate strategic implications.

How did your paper change during the review process?
The most pronounced changes were regarding clarity of expressions and development of the logical structure when presenting core problem of the study.

What, if anything, would you do differently if you could go back and do this study again?
If data were available, we would look at different cross-sections of the competition structure between economic booms/recessions, potential and oversupply/undersupply cycles. Such analysis would allow better understanding of the Chicago lodging market.

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Casinos Get Strategic: Revenue Management for Table Games

Michael Chen of the Ontario Lottery & Gaming Corporation, Henry Tsai of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Shiang-Lih Chen McCain of Widener University published “A Revenue Management Model for Casino Table Games” on February 28, 2012 in Cornell Hospitality Quarterly. To view other OnlineFirst articles, please click here. Dr. Tsai kindly provided the following responses to the article.

Who Is The Target Audience For This Article?

The target audience is casino managers, management consultants, operations analysts, casino management system developers, researcher / academia in casino management field.

What Inspired You To Be Interested In This Topic?

The application of yield management theory on hotel industry has been well researched. As a matter of fact, many hotel operators have put yield management theory into practice to improve profitability. On the other hand, very little research literature is available on how to apply yield management theory on table games operations.

Essentially, hotel operations and table game operations are very similar. Both sell rights to use the facility for a given period of time – hotel operators sell rights to use the hotel room whereas table game operators sell rights to occupy a table game seat. Both have a perishable inventory –the value of a hotel room for today is gone forever if it cannot be sold by today while the value of a table game seat for this hour is gone forever if it isn’t occupied by a table games player by this hour.

The difficulty of applying yield management theory on table game operations is the pricing, a critical component of the yield management theory. One subtle difference between hotel operations and table game operations is how they price their products. Most hotel clients, other than those who purchase through priceline.com, know the exact price before their purchasing decision. On the other hand, neither the table game operators nor the table game players know the exact price of playing table games before the consumption is over. It could be $5,000 an hour – the table game player lost $5,000 to the casino after one hour of play. It could also be $50 an hour. Sometimes it could even be a negative price – the table game player wins from the casino after one hour of play. Though casino operators don’t know for sure how much revenue they can get by selling table games seats for any given hour, casino operators do know, in the long run, the expected value of price for selling table games seats. The measurement used by casino operator to gauge the expected value of table game price is called theoretical win.

All three authors, two professors in hotel management field and one practitioner in the casino industry, have a thorough understanding of hotel yield management theory as well as table games pricing , thanks to the casino management courses they took when studying at UNLV. Knowing few researches have been done on this field, few table games operators have actually applied yield management on daily operations, and the potential profitability improvement yield management approach can bring to the casino industry, the authors decided to conduct a research on this topic to develop a pragmatic approach that can be easily adopted by table game operators.

Were There Findings That Were Surprising To You?

Yes and no. While we expected that, generally speaking, the application of our revenue management model would yield better results for table game operations, we thought that our approach might be less effective during the off-peak hours – measured by the percentage of incremental theoretical win (revenue). The results show otherwise. This approach is effective both during the peak hours and during the off-peak hours.

How Do You See This Study Influencing Future Research And/Or Practice?

One obstacle prevents casino operators from applying analytics to improve profit margin of table game operations is the table games data accuracy. Most data used in this study, such as average wager, spots (seats) occupied, was based on table games supervisors’ observations, which is subject to human errors. However, the advancement in technology, such as RFID-enabled casino chips, or sensors embedded in casino tables to track cards movement, may enable casino operators to capture all the required data electronically in a more reliable way. Just like slots analytics are widely applied to improve the profit margin of slots operations, once casino operators are assured that they are getting reliable table game data, they are more likely to apply table game analytics to improve the profit margin of table game operations. The results of this research may support practitioners to justify why adopting new table games technology is necessary for the casinos when writing capital budget business cases.

Once casino operators can acquire reliable table games data efficiently, we may see more casino operators apply revenue management on their table game operations. Some table games management system may even have a built-in revenue management module. On the other hand, as more researchers are interested in this topic, we may see future researches that focus on increasing forecasting accuracy to increase the revenue management effectiveness.

How Does This Study Fit Into Your Body Of Work/Line Of Research?

This study represents our first joint effort in looking into table game revenue enhancement, which could lead to future research in revenue management in other game types or in conjunction with hotel revenue management for casino hotels.

How Did Your Paper Change During The Review Process?

We appreciated the constructive comments given by the three reviewers, which helped us better the quality of our paper. We revised majority of the paper including introduction, literature review, results and discussions and the conclusion. Especially, we focused our literature review on the applications of revenue management in the casino industry. We also expanded the test period — from one hour to 24 consecutive hours – to test the effectiveness of the proposed yield management approach.

What, If Anything, Would You Do Differently If You Could Go Back And Do This Study Again?

While our proposed model could be applied to other table games, we could collect more data on more types of games and compare the results to further validate our model.

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The Effects of Perceptual and Conceptual Training on Novice Wine Drinkers’ Development

Kathryn A. LaTour, Las Vegas, Michael S. LaTour, University of Nevada, and Andrew H. Feinstein, California Polytechnic University, published “The Effects of Perceptual and Conceptual Training on Novice Wine Drinkers’ Development” in the November 2011 issue of Cornell Hospitality Quarterly. To see the other articles available in this issue, click here.

The abstract:

Wine marketers and restaurateurs have a vested interest in helping novice wine drinkers to learn more about wine, with the goal of encouraging them to purchase more wine and higher quality wine (with its higher price tag). The question posed here is how best to conduct that educational effort, using a perceptual approach or a conceptual approach. Most wine promotions tend to be perceptual, in the form of tastings and printed tasting notes. However, the two experiments described in this article demonstrate the greater benefit of conceptual learning, which involves explaining how the wine is produced generally and discussions of wine varietals in particular. In the first experiment, three groups of participants (novices, intermediates, and experts) were served a sample of zinfandel and then asked to identify that exact wine from a group of five, four of which had been adulterated with sweetener. Some participants were allowed to write down a description of the wine, and all were subjected to a fictitious advertising campaign designed to sway their choice on the matching test. In general, novices relied more on the terms offered by the advertising, and intermediates who have more perceptual learning than conceptual learning were also swayed when they were not given an opportunity to activate their conceptual knowledge (but not swayed as much when conceptual knowledge was activated). Experts paid no attention to the advertising whatsoever. The second experiment compared the educational experience of novices only, with a similar testing procedure, except this time the test groups were given either conceptual or perceptual educational sessions. The conceptual training was a twenty-five-minute tutorial in wines, while the perceptual training involved sensory aspects of wine (i.e., color, smell, and taste). Once again, all groups saw a fictitious advertisement for the “X” zinfandel. Those with conceptual learning were more likely to match the original sample and were less swayed by the fictitious advertising than those who had perceptual training. These respondents were also likely to rate the wine as being higher quality and willing to pay a higher price for it. One conclusion for wine marketers is that perceptual learning (as in tastings) is just the beginning of the process of developing wine consumers. Conceptual learning, where people learn about the process and details of wine production, is also essential.

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Using Dissatisfied Customers as a Source for Innovative Service Ideas

Philippe Duverger, Towson University, published “Using Dissatisfied Customers as a Source for Innovative Service Ideas” in the Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research. His article appeared on OnlineFirst on July 18, 2011. Dr. Duverger kindly provided the following responses to his article.

Who is the target audience for this article?

The target audience is both academics interested in service innovation and practitioners involved with brand rejuvenation and brand management in a service context.

What inspired you to be interested in this topic?

I spent a long time managing service operations such as hotels and restaurants before I became a researcher and an academic. During that time I was puzzled by the duality of strict standardized operating procedures allowing franchises to flourish, and the need for innovation to keep the brand fresh, penetrate other markets, and fence potential contenders. Innovation is messy, and does not go well with the smooth running of everyday service interactions or worst franchising expansion.

That duality creates R&D departments working in silos disconnected from the operation and the customer. Even if marketers within the service firm do listen to customer feedback, the mantra “the customer is king” is sometime taken to mean that all customers are right. Yet, at the same time, research on customer relationship management and customer lifetime value tends to tell us that some customers are more valuable than others. Some even advocate “firing your worst customers”.

I ask myself “what if the most dissatisfied customer holds the key to the next innovation?”

Were there findings that were surprising to you?

I was surprised that defectors, customers that decided after long disappointing service encounters to patronize other providers, would be willing to participate in a creativity exercise with the service provider they defected from.

Even more surprised that the ideas given, more likely stemming from their unmet needs, where well received by the same executives that would have more likely disregarded their complaints before.

How do you see this study influencing future research and/or practice?

I wish service companies will recognize the need to have a different conversation with dissatisfied customers than they have currently. Service providers need to listen differently to the most dissatisfied customers in order to capture innovative ideas.

From a research stand point there is much to be done in the service area with respect to innovation research. Particularly with the advent of the Internet and the user-generated content (customer postings and the like) that might be harvested and leveraged by the firm in search of the next big service idea.

How does this study fit into your body of work/line of research?

I love services for their complexity in dealing with processes that have one chance to be perfect, and I want to help by continuing the stream of research that focuses on service innovation leveraging all possible angles of research including Internet-based idea generation, innovative idea implementation, and innovation diffusion to give a few examples.

How did your paper change during the review process?

The editor and reviewers were a great help in the focus of the paper, as well as forcing me to clarify certain concepts or data descriptions that helped make a paper than I am proud of.

What, if anything, would you do differently if you could go back and do this study again?

I would more likely capture more information about the customers in an attempt to explain their innovative behaviors and results with underlying personality traits.

Pictorial Information Roles

Soo Hyun Jun, Bournemouth University, and Stephen Holland, University of Florida, published “Information-Processing Strategies: A Focus on Pictorial Information Roles” in the March online first issue of Journal of Travel Research. Professor Jun shared some background information about the article.

Who is the target audience for this article?

Scholars and practitioners interested in consumer decision-making, mobile marketing, and experimental research methods in tourism and hospitality contexts.

What inspired you to be interested in this topic?

This study started with a question of why elaboration likelihood model of persuasion (ELM; Petty, Cacioppo, and Schumann 1983) has hardly been tested with hedonic and/or experiential products. Petty and Cacioppo (1980) once tested ELM with a beauty product and the study results did not support their assumptions because the peripheral-cue manipulation was perceived as product merits by high-involved participants. We conjectured if researchers pretested ELM with various types of products in pilot experiments and constantly found statistically-not-significant-results with hedonic/experiential products, these products would be overlooked for primary studies. This study attempted to show that the insignificant results with hedonic/experiential products were due to the multiple roles of pictorial information, rather than misled research designs.

Were there findings that were surprising to you?

Three rules were revealed for high-involved individuals’ interactive processing because of offsetting, redundancy and negative-valence effects. Additionally, this study found that low-involved individuals were more likely to focus on an attractive picture and high-involved individuals were more likely to focus on an unattractive picture.

How do you see this study influencing future research and/or practice?

This study investigated the information-processing strategies that travellers utilized in information judgment and decision-making through an experimental research method. The method and results utilized in this study should inspire academic and applied researchers to adopt new ways of conceptualizing information-processing behaviors and to utilize experimental research methods to expand our understanding of travellers’ decision making.

How does this study fit into your body of work/line of research?

I have studied information-processing strategies that travellers utilize for their decision-making.

How did your paper change during the review process?

I sincerely appreciate the insightful and helpful comments from the editor and reviewers. The paper became more succinct and focused.

What, if anything, would you do differently if you could go back and go this study again?

An unintended instrumentation effect was suspected in this study related to the length of text argument statements. Future studies should use longer sentences which require more effort in processing.

Hotel Trademarks in Organic Search

Srikanth Beldona, Kunwei Lin, and Mingzhu Chen, all of the University of Delaware, Newark, recently published “Hotel Trademarks in Organic Search: A Longitudinal Cross-National Study” online in Journal of Travel Research.

Professor Beldona kindly shared background information about the article.

 

Who is the target audience for this article?

Hotel companies, tourism marketers, policy makers in tourism and online commerce at regional and national levels.

What inspired you to be interested in this topic?

Hotel-intermediary relationships have gained the attention of researchers ever since the Internet became a force to reckon with in travel distribution. How hotels navigate this complex environment will determine their success in negating the forces of commoditization that have already reached their doorsteps.

Were there findings that were surprising to you?

While differences between the US and other countries were understandable, differences between search engines in UK, China and India were insightful and to some extent surprising. Also surprising was that the Web (despite its universally acceptable technological standards) can have cultural differences in the way its architecture. For example, the structural context of the Web in China is so different when compared with the US, which in turn can have a significant impact on searchability.

How do you see this study influencing future research and/or practice?

Future research can spawn to include searchability of all small and medium operators in the travel distribution network such as local tour operators, museums, attractions etc. This will be imperative as the forces of intermediation seek to consolidate services at the local level. Hopefully practitioners (especially hotels and small and medium operators) will enhance their SEO practices, while policy makers review the extent of noise and confusion created in online search results, which in turn hurts customer choice.

How does this study fit into your body of work/line of research?

Online search from a process based perspective has been an area of research focus for many years now. This study helped me contextualize my overall research stream by providing perspective in the area of search engines and the nuances over how they work.

How did your paper change during the review process?

The differences between web structure and organization in China and other countries became more emphatic as a result of the review process. The paper developed stronger arguments to validate differences across countries when it came to searchability.

What, if anything, would you do differently if you could go back and do this study again?

I wish we included other countries where English is not the native language such as such as Germany, Russia, Brazil etc. Future research can work towards this.

A Prevailing Myth in the Tourism Industry

“Evaluation of Segment Attractiveness by Risk-Adjusted Market Potential: First Time vs. Repeat Visitors” by Amir Shani, and Arie Reichel, both of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and Robertico Croes of the University of Central Florida, was recently published in the January 2011 issue of “Journal of Travel Research.” Professor Shani has kindly shared a reflection on the article.

Who is the target audience for this article?

 Any researcher or practitioner, who is interested in market segmentation and techniques for selecting the most attractive market segment, is likely to find this article useful and stimulating. In addition, the article can also be of interest to scholars and industry professionals who are debating regarding the profitability of repeat visitors versus first time visitors to tourism destinations.

What inspired you to be interested in this topic?

 In my view, one of the fundamental functions of academia is to challenge common – but untested perceptions – and examine them empirically. In this paper we investigated the prevailing myth in the tourism industry, according to which repeat (or loyal) visitors are always preferable to first time visitors (mainly since they presumably spend more and constitute a more stable source of revenue). Nevertheless, in the current research, we found that caution should be exerted when associating high profitability with repeat visitors, as it depends on several criteria such as the unit of analysis (whether the entire destination or individual tourism sub-sectors are concerned), as well as considerations of per-trip vs. per-day expenditures.

Were you surprised by some of the findings?

It was quite interesting to discover – in contrast to the common perception – that under certain circumstances, first-time visitors actually constitute a more attractive market segment, in comparison to the segment of repeat visitors.

How do you see this study influencing future research and/or practice?

In the article we mentioned a few potential directions for future studies that we hope will be taken into consideration by destination marketing researchers. For example, despite the comprehensive approach to assess segment attractiveness that was adopted, additional indicators (such as sales promotion, and operational and service costs for first-time vs. repeat visitors) should be obtained and utilized to determine more accurately the most attractive target market.

How does this study fit into your body of work/area of research?

 One of my main fields of focus as a tourism researcher is contemporary issues in tourism marketing, such as destination loyalty. This paper, which applies innovative technique to evaluate the value of repeat visitors, is one of a number of studies that I have written on destination loyalty.

How did your paper change during the review process?

Fortunately, we had excellent reviewers for this paper, who made some very useful and constructive comments, which greatly helped improve the earlier version of the manuscript. For example, thanks to the reviewers we made the description of the research process much clearer and added graphic illustrations to guide the readers throughout the process.

What, if anything, would you do differently if you could go back and do this study again?

More information regarding several variables could have helped us in the analysis, as well as obtaining more accurate estimations as to the attractiveness of the segments. We clearly mentioned in the paper future steps that should be taken to further advance this subject.

Service Marketing

In 2009, Robert J Kwortnik Jr. and Gary M. Thompson, both of Cornell University, wrote an article entitled “Unifying Service Marketing and Operations With Service Experience Management,” which was published in the Journal of Service Research.  This article became one of the top downloaded articles of the year.  Today, Dr. Kwortnik shares the story behind the article:

 

The catalyst for this article was a call for help I received from a manager of quality assurance at the cruise line that is the focus of the research. I didn’t know this person before her call; she had read on the Web about other studies I’ve done in the cruise industry context and reached out to me. She astutely believed that a problem facing the cruise line—guest dissatisfaction with dining processes onboard the company’s ships—masked more fundamental operational and/or human resources issues. However, she wanted an objective look at the problem, one that would rise above potential organizational politics. Because the obvious problem involved service processes and systems, I teamed up with one of my colleagues at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, Dr. Gary Thompson, a professor of service operations management and an expert in simulation modeling of service processes. Gary and I weren’t quite sure what we were facing in terms of a research problem, so we opted for a grounded, inductive approach. That involved experiencing the product (yes, a warm-weather cruise in the middle of the winter—a tough research assignment), as well as sending a team of my graduate students to do the same. Data collection began with participant observation, mystery shopping, and interviews with management onboard the ships. Over time and after collecting different data, we began to see the research (and service) problem as involving more than just a failing process, but instead a misaligned service system, one where marketing was making promises to customers that operations found it nearly impossible to keep. There were many “a ha” moments we had during the data collection and analysis phases as we began to develop mental models of the service system.

Interestingly, too, we weren’t sure what we were going to do with this project in terms of publication. That is, we committed to providing management a report of our findings in exchange for the professional development opportunity—to see the service systems of a cruise line from the inside. But then we saw a call for papers from a journal on the topic of Service Science. We began to translate our research for that journal, though the nature of the project didn’t readily conform to the traditional empirical paper. Rather than start with a theory, our research started with a practical problem in a case-type structure. Indeed, our paper was less about theory and more about building a conceptual framework to help guide problem solving. We were advocating a new way of thinking about service in terms of experience management and how that would require a new organizational structure that broke down silos and fostered better communication between marketing and operations. Because the style of the paper differed considerably from that found in most academic business journals, we needed a journal, editor, and reviewers who were open minded. The editor of the first journal to which we submitted the paper desk rejected it. However, the Journal of Service Research proved to be the perfect home for the paper. We were especially encouraged when one of the reviewers stated after a revision of the paper that it might become, in time, a classic study of service marketing/operations discontinuity.

As the author of the most read article in 2009, why do you think this research is important? Why are people reading it and who else should be exposed to it?

 We’d like to think that the article is receiving attention because it breaks new ground. Scholars and practitioners often talk about the need to better align marketing and operations in service firms, but our paper is one of the few that documents the problems that occur when marketing and ops are misaligned, and that also offers innovative solutions for bridging the gap with a way to think about services as systems. Plus, the research looks at the cruise industry, which is inherently interesting, and the study is presented in a story-like structure, which is unusual for academic journals.

 We find it interesting that the article has been widely read, but has yet to be cited.  We hope this means that others are using it in classes, as we do.  It begs the question, though, of using only citation counts as a metric of an article’s value.

 Give us a specific review of the impact of this article. What additional research has this article led to (either your own or other’s)?

 I’ve presented versions of this article at several conferences, and it’s always well-received across disciplines. The core ideas presented in the article have informed work I’m currently doing on service branding, as well as work on measuring and managing the customer experience in service contexts. It’s also an article I recommend to marketing and operations managers whom I teach in our executive education programs—it resonates with them.

 What has the article done for you? (i.e. Have you won any awards or recognition?)

 This article helped me to get tenure at Cornell!

JHTR Now Indexed in the Social Science Citation Index

We just received the news that The Journal of Hospitality & Travel Research is now indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index, Current Contents/Social and Behavioral Sciences! Congratulations to Editor Anna Mattila, her Editorial Review Board and the International Council on Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Education!

Click here for Manuscript Submission Guidelines.