Catherine Cheung

Achieving voluntary reductions in the carbon footprint of tourism and climate change

This study examines attitudes to tourism and climate change among residents of Hong Kong and evaluates their willingness to voluntarily modify travel behaviours to reduce environmental impacts. Previous studies on environmental behavioural change identified a significant gap between awareness and action, with some studies even suggesting that the most aware individuals are unlikely to change their behaviours. Similar findings were noted in this study. Cluster analysis identified four cohorts of tourists, ranging from the regular international tourist to the least travel active. The regular international tourist group was most aware of global warming and climate change, but least willing to alter its travel behaviour. By contrast, less travel active tourists seem most willing to travel less. The paper concludes that government intervention may be required to create meaningful behavioural change in travel patterns.

Hotel development in China: a review of the English language literature

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to offer an overview of the existing English literature concerning the development of Chinas hotel industry by means of reviewing the topic from three academic online databases.Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews published studies found in refereed journals that can be accessed online via Emerald Management Review, ProQuest Basic Search and EBSCO Host Web. A total of 66 refereed journal papers were found over the period 1984‐2007. They were grouped into four major themes: strategy and development; marketing; service quality and human resources management.Findings – Research on Chinas hotel development grew rapidly with the rise of Chinas hotel industry, reflecting the situation, problems, challenges and opportunities affecting hotel development. Strategy and development is a dominant theme, accounting for 43 per cent of all papers.Practical implications – The paper summarises research on Chinas booming hotel industry, offers a general review of its hi...

The relevance of profiling travel activities for improving destination marketing strategies.

Recent economic progress has led to most Hong Kong residents having a high disposable income, and hence the high propensity to travel. Although there are many published articles studying the inbound tourism industry in Hong Kong, the examination of Hong Kongs recent outbound tourism industry has largely been overlooked by tourism researchers. This paper examines Hong Kong travellers’ perceptions of the importance of travel activities. Using a descriptive statistical approach, experimental results indicate that Hong Kong travellers perceived visiting friends/relatives and dining as the most important activities, whereas outdoor sports was perceived as the least important activity. Also discusses the destination marketing issues, and suggests that destinations should concentrate their efforts on the right marketing strategies.

A systematic review, analysis, and evaluation of research articles in the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly

This paper describes a review of articles published in the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly in the period 2008 to 2011. A content analysis approach was used to analyze 133 research articles making original contributions to the development of knowledge. The findings indicate that accounting and finance was the most researched area and that the hospitality sector receiving most attention from scholars was hotels. The authorship analysis also shows that most of the articles were written by academic researchers from the United States, illustrating the concentration of experience and practical expertise in that country. This paper is of interest to readers seeking information on the recent progress and development of hospitality research and practice in a top-tier hospitality journal.

Hospitality service quality and the role of performance appraisal

This paper overviews the human resources processes and their relationships with service quality (SQ) and total quality management (TQM) in a hotel setting. More importantly, this research presents a new model for the hospitality SQ measurement that incorporates hotel employees’ performance into the SQ level measurement. This new SQ for customer satisfaction model, in turn, can be integrated directly into the hospitality TQM operation since SQ is a basic component of TQM. This new model prevails over the traditional SQ models on several areas. First, the new model is more comprehensive. Also, the new model reflects the actual SQ situation better. Moreover, the new model fits the TQM concept better as both TQM and staff performance aim at continuous improvement in which the former steers towards continuous improvement of each process whereas the latter directs towards continuous improvement in performance.

What types of experiential learning activities can engage hospitality students in China

Hospitality higher education traditionally seems to focus more on disseminating knowledge and conducting research. There are criticisms on undergraduate students who have little understanding on how to apply the knowledge learnt from classrooms and what practical skills to obtain upon graduation. This issue is debated and discussed among hospitality academics in the Chinese Mainland. As the use of experiential learning is increasingly recognized to be beneficial in engaging students, hospitality schools in China started to introduce this teaching method in hospitality education which aims to promote vocation-oriented education. Hence, the current study aims to identify currently how experiential learning is implemented to effectively engage hospitality students in China.

The survival of hotels during disaster: A case study of Hong Kong in 2003

The mysterious Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome made Hong Kong a key travel destination in Asia, world famous in 2003 but for the worst reasons. As a major sector of the local tourism industry, hotels in Hong Kong went through an unprecedented and traumatic time during the SARS infection period. While a few published articles in hospitality and tourism research journals have initially discussed the impact of SARS on hotels, these articles were predominantly the collection and compilation of secondary reported news. In other words, the existing hospitality and tourism literature has no published research that investigates the influence of SARS on specific hotels in Hong Kong and the responses of hotels to the crisis. This paper offers an overview of the emergence of SARS in Hong Kong and, more importantly, reports on the practices employed by hotels to survive during this harsh period. Through in-depth interviews with senior executives in six hotels in Hong Kong, empirical results showed that hotels were adopting various strategies during different stages of the crisis in order to survive. Industry-wide recovery effort and mutual support are also essential recovery strategies. This paper presents feasible management strategies and operational procedures for hoteliers to refer to in the eventuality of a future or potential crises.

Determinants of tourism hotel expenditure in Hong Kong

This paper reports on a study about applying regression techniques to identify the determinants and functional forms of tourism hotel expenditure in Hong Kong. Annual time series data from 1983 to 1997 of average room rate, the number of visitor arrivals, the service price index, and hotel accommodation rates were hypothesised to affect tourism hotel expenditure. Seven exogenous variables were selected for regression model development in both linear and log‐linear forms. In view of the potential problems of multicollinearity between the independent variables, and therefore the associated instability of the regression coefficients, stepwise regression analyses were employed to improve the initial model. Final empirical results showed that the hotel expenditure in Hong Kong could be explained by four of the seven exogenous variables. A log‐linear form of the regression model appeared to slightly outperform the linear form.

Essential hotel managerial competencies for graduate students

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the current provision for graduate hospitality management education can fulfill the essential competency requirements for hospitality industry managers in Hong Kong. A quantitative survey of hotel managers and graduate students was carried out, followed by in-depth interviews with educators and an analysis of relevant graduate program documents. The results show that leadership was perceived by hotel managers to be the most important competency, followed by industry knowledge and communication skills. Graduate students, in contrast, believed that graduate programs enhance their communication skills, industry knowledge, and interpersonal skills. The findings imply that hospitality management programs should pay more attention to the development of leadership skills, as the skills that are considered by hotel managers to be the most important competency. Implications of the findings for educators and managers in terms of best practice in developing hotel managerial competencies are also discussed.

Weighing of Hotel Website Dimensions and Attributes

The wide establishment of hotel websites has recently drawn the attention of many tourism and hospitality researchers to investigate the factors that contribute to a successful hotel website, and the ways of measuring the performance of hotel websites. The published articles in the hospitality and tourism literature, however, have largely overlooked the decision making approach which involved the development of weighing and rating scales from website users. To fill in such a void, this research makes an attempt to develop a weighing model for contents of hotel websites. The model was built on the basis of input from hotel website users who were international visitors to Hong Kong. Empirical findings indicated that Reservations Information and Website Management were the dimensions with the largest and smallest weights; whereas Transportation and Special Request Forms were the attributes with the largest and smallest overall weights. The value of a weight thus directly reflects its perceived importance.