Juan Antonio Campos-Soria

Service Quality and Competitiveness in the Hospitality Sector

This paper analyses and quantifies the main interrelationships between service quality and the competitiveness of hotels, distinguishing between external and internal effects. The external effects were evaluated according to customer satisfaction, its influence on the sales volume and the clients willingness to pay. The internal effects of quality on competitiveness were estimated using average direct costs. The sign and value of the estimated coefficients were used to examine a set of hypotheses for improving the competitiveness of hotels. The direct, positive effect of high service quality on competitiveness is a particularly important finding.

Income and the substitution pattern between domestic and international tourism demand.

This article analyses the role of income in the decision of participating in the tourism demand within 1 year. The tourists who are participating can travel to domestic destinations only, abroad destinations only or to both of them. Such a substitution pattern is modelled using a bivariate probit model. The analysis is carried out to the regional level using a survey conducted in 15 European (EU-15) countries. In addition to the traditional socioeconomic variables, the analysis adds new variables to the outbound tourism demand modelling, such as the attributes of the place of residence. The results show that tourism demand is income elastic. However, there are marked differences in the income elasticities of the probabilities of travelling domestically or abroad. Above certain income threshold, the substitution pattern between destinations takes part. The probability of travelling domestically only remains constant, whereas the probability of travelling abroad keeps growing. Additionally, the article proves that income elasticities vary significantly and nonlinearly with income.

Gender segregation and wage difference in the hospitality industry.

This article estimates the contribution of different types of gender segregation to the wage difference between men and women in the hospitality industry. Matched employer–employee data from a sample of hotels and restaurants in Andalusia are used to this end. The data source includes information on 181 hotels and 121 restaurants. Impacts on the wage gap are obtained for two empirical specifications. In the first, equal returns of observable variables are assumed for men and women and, in the second, returns are assumed to be different for each gender. The authors find that industrial and vertical segregation – and to a lesser extent establishment segregation – increase the wage differential. However, horizontal and category segregation help to diminish this, although the impact of the latter is not very substantial. Regarding occupational segregation, women predominate in worst-paid jobs, but their wages drop less than mens earnings. These estimations are robust to both empirical specifications.

Gender segregation and earnings differences in the Spanish labour market

ABSTRACT This article analyses the effects of different types of gender segregation on the gender wage differential for the Spanish labour market. Matched employer–employee data from a sample of 226,535 workers are used. These workers are employed in 61 occupations within 26,492 establishments in 51 different industries. Workers belonging to the same industry, establishment or job share common factors which cannot be observed and these factors affect wages. If these unobservable variables are correlated with the explanatory variables, their estimated effects will be biased. For this reason, we estimate the effects of each type of gender segregation on the wage gap using a robust specification to these possible correlations. We obtain that industrial segregation by gender explains a lower part of the wage gap between men and women than previous researches found using standard regressions, while the contributions of establishment segregation and occupational segregation within each establishment are greater.

Explaining tourists´ attitudes to environmental support: a multilevel approach

ABSTRACT This article contributes to a better understanding of tourists’ attitudes to environmental support when they make their holiday plans. Modelling these decisions is a challenge because although environmental concerns are heterogeneous across countries, they also depend on the individual characteristics of the tourists from each country. This article uses a multilevel approach, using a two-level structure, in which individuals are nested into countries. This approach may be helpful for understanding the contextual and compositional effects simultaneously. The estimates from a two-level random intercept logistic model and the post-estimation analysis, based on non-parametric techniques, demonstrate that the effects of country vary randomly, and that there is significant variance in the level of tourists´ environmental support within and between countries. Regarding the contextual effect, the post-materialist hypothesis explained most of the heterogeneity between the EU-27 countries. The affluence hypothesis was rejected and the challenge response hypothesis was only partially supported. The results from the compositional effect support the attribution hypothesis, demonstrating that the environmental concern of tourists is higher when travelling domestically than abroad.