United States

International researchers in hotel chain management have pointed out that hotel owners and operators managing local properties tend to forge strategic alliances with international hotel chain companies. Such alliances let them to improve the performance and asset value of local operators with the resource and brand of franchisers. However, a hotel group is different from a hotel chain: the latter is a group of a brand hotel and local operators sharing similar brand and concept, but the former is a group of a headquarter company and local properties with variety of brands. In the management of dispersed local properties across various local markets, as a multi-unit organization, a hotel group may focus on sharing service standards and transferring knowledge among local operators and creating synergy as a whole. With direct control to local properties via direct ownership, a hotel group may more easily implement it and achieve higher performance than the franchising contract. For instance, Japanese hotel groups, such as the APA Group, and the Toyoko INN, have demonstrated high performance and rapid growth via the direct ownership. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to examine how direct ownership and leasing contracts, rather than franchising and management contracts, result in larger sales and effective management. To that end, we perform the multiple regression analysis of sales scale of 97 large hotel groups in Japan during the late 2010s, testing effects of their size, the proportion of direct ownership and franchise contracts, the room concentration to major brand. As a result, averagely, while 84 % of rooms is under direct ownership or leasing contracts in Japanese hotel groups, we find that high concentration to major brand enhances large sales of a group, but the high proportion of franchise contracts diminishes. Group sales performance in economic brand strategy is accelerated by direct control.

TOUR 2021

Direct ownership and group performance of Japanese hotel groups in late 2010’s: Analysis of effects of direct control on sales expansion in economy brand strategy

service focus strategy

multi-unit organization

franchising contract

direct ownership

organizational performance

hotel groups

Dear Delegates, 

On behalf of the organizing committee at UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management and Elsevier, I have the greatest pleasure to welcome you to the **6th World Research Summit for Tourism and Hospitality: Resilience, Adaptability, and Innovation.** 

Though we cannot host you this year owing to Covid-19 at our beautiful resort-like campus in Orlando, Florida, we believe this virtual and live-streamed conference will provide an interactive, dynamic, and shared international platform for global academics and practitioners to discuss how to enhance research applications and knowledge management through resilience, adaptability, digital intelligence, innovation, and smart knowledge in bringing our industry and research back to normal. This summit particularly offers unique opportunities to unfold and embrace various repercussions of COVID-19 pandemic with various stakeholders, including academic researchers, industry professionals, and government officials, through dialogues on how to better utilize research outputs for the benefits of the industry, in a resilient, intelligent and innovative way. 

I hope you will agree that we have put together a wonderful program including keynote speeches, panel discussions, concurrent presentations, poster sessions, and best paper recognition and award ceremony. We hope you will take advantage of these activities and engage yourself with great learning and sharing opportunities during the two days of the Summit. Thank you for joining us and we look forward to our discussions! 

Sincerely, 
Dr. Youcheng Wang 
Dean and Preeminent Chair Professor

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This conference provides an interactive, dynamic, and shared international platform for global academics and practitioners to discuss how to enhance research applications and knowledge management through resilience, adaptability, digital intelligence, innovation, and smart knowledge in bringing our industry and research back to normal. This summit particularly offers unique opportunities to unfold and embrace various repercussions of COVID-19 pandemic with various stakeholders, including academic researchers, industry professionals, and government officials, through dialogues on how to better utilize research outputs for the benefits of the industry, in a resilient, intelligent and innovative way.

technical paper

The mining-industrial heritage plays an important role in the evolution of domestic tourism, contributing to developing creativity, revitalizing local cultural values and enhancing natural and anthropic tourism potential of the area. At the same time this activity represents a real opportunity for economic, social and cultural recovery. In Central and Eastern Europe there are a growing number of former industrial areas where the development of tourism can actively contribute to the regeneration of settlements and economic development.

The purpose of our research was to identify, classify and discuss the main attributes of the development of industrial heritage tourism in the scientific literature and their application in the elaboration of a model of integration in the tourism circuit of an old steel area in Romania. The iron ore deposits in the Harghita Mountains (Eastern Carpathians) have been known for 2000 years and the first iron processing plant was mentioned in 1561. The Vlăhița steel plant operated almost without interruption between 1825 and 2006, when it was permanently closed. In connection with the reconversion of the former steel plant, our research evaluated the tourism system in the area using tools specific to spatial analysis in tourism (Defert’s tourist function index, average length of stay, index of use of tourist accommodation capacity etc.).

The results show that the capitalization of industrial heritage can contribute to consolidating regional identity and increasing tourism potential, and the reconversion of the former iron plant into a space for entertainment and education is a way to preserve and reintegrate the historical heritage of the area. The study provides suggestions for future improvements in the development of the heritage tourism industry and emphasizes the importance of adopting sustainable development policies and strategies that also include tourism, an important component in a modern economy.

From iron to tourism: The reconversion of an old mining-industrial area

The purpose of the present study is to investigate how diversification in the tourism market affects destination competitiveness across member-states of the Eurozone economic space. We conceptualize destination competitiveness in terms of tourism direct GDP whereas we use two discrete and profitable tourism segments, namely business and leisure tourism spending to define market diversification. The methodological approach was based on annual balanced panel data obtained from World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) over the period 1996–2019. We used second-generation panel tests to detect potential cointegrating relationships and causalities across countries under consideration. Research findings revealed two bi-directional causalities. The first identified causality indicates that business tourism spending Granger causes direct Gross Domestic Product (GDP) directly generated in the tourism sector and vice versa. An increase (decrease) in business tourism spending will cause an increase (decrease) in tourism direct GDP. The second bi-directional causality suggests that changes to leisure tourism spending will cause changes to tourism direct GDP in the same direction and vice versa. Based on results practical implications arise indicating that the enhancement of business and leisure tourism (e.g., investments and innovations), will increase destination competitiveness.

How competitive is the tourism market in the eurozone economic space?

The COVID-19 pandemic caused unprecedented furloughs and layoffs throughout the global hospitality industry. As a result, new policies in the hospitality industry altered the way employees interact with their work environment (Huang et al., 2020). This study examined laid-off and furloughed workers’ intention to return to their organization and to the hospitality industry. The literature has not yet investigated the effects of anticipated workplace changes on return intent. The purpose of this study was to determine which changes were the most impactful in shaping hospitality workers’ return to their organization and to the industry.




Participants were recruited through Prolific.com targeting those who were laid off or furloughed from their hospitality job due to COVID-19 at the time of data collection. In total, the analyses included 219 laid-off or furloughed hospitality workers from various industry sub-sectors (56.4% food service, 14.1% lodging, 28.7% other). A summary of our measures is provided in Table 1.




Descriptive statistics and correlations among study variables are located in Table 2. Stepwise regression analysis with forward selection was used to identify the worries that predicted intention to return to their job and intention to return to industry. Regression analysis revealed that (a) worry about sick leave policies (b= -.17,p< .001) and (b) worry about workload intensification (b= -.15,p< .001) were the strongest predictors of intent to return to the hospitality organization. The only significant predictor of intent to return to the hospitality industry was worry about enforcing COVID-19 policies (b= .20,p< .001). Detailed regression results are in Table 3 and 4.




Implications of this study highlight a greater responsibility that hospitality industry stakeholders must acknowledge for implementing systems and policies that take returning employee perspectives into consideration, addressing their concerns around sick leave, workload intensification, and worry about enforcement policies.




Tables [https://drive.google.com/file/d/15TReEod5TBApEk9K7nk4oTuCravX8spY/view?usp=sharing]

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From iron to tourism: The reconversion of an old mining-industrial area

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Predictors of return intent in the hospitality industry in the age of COVID-19

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