مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تأثیر جایگاه توریستی بر بهره وری هتل – الزویر 2018

The study of the tourist destination is of special importance for the hospitality industry because its product can only be consumed where it has been generated (Bull, 1994). Moreover, the tourist destination has been shown to have a significant impact on hotel profitability and survival (Lado-Sestayo, Vivel-Búa & Otero-González, 2016a). However, despite the importance of the characteristics of the tourist destination, they have been neglected in studies of efficiency in the hotel sector, hindering understanding of the extent to which inefficiencies are due to hotel management or to the characteristics of the location at the tourist destination level (Barros, 2005). Knowledge of the causes of inefficiencies is important for benchmarking purposes as it allows identification of the scope for improvement for both hotel and tourist destination managers (Huang, Mesak, Hsu, & Qu, 2012). This paper analyses the efficiency of 400 Spanish hotels, considering the characteristics of the tourist destination and internal factors related to the firm. From a theoretical perspective, there are three approaches to studying the impact of location on the hotel sector: one line of research is focused on geographical positioning variables; a second line is concerned with the study of the existence of externalities; the third approach analyses the impact of the competitive environment (Yang, Luo, & Law, 2014). These approaches have not yet been considered in the study of hotel efficiency, so filling this gap is the first main objective of this paper. Most studies on efficiency in the hotel sector have focused on firm characteristics, usually dealing with hotels from one single market, with some exceptions (e.g. Assaf, 2012; Neves & Lourenço, 2009), and using small sample sizes (Oliveira, Pedro, & Marques, 2015; Wöber, 2007). In addition, the few recent studies which have considered some external aspects of hotels, mostly environmental variables, highlight the existence of differences in efficiency levels among locations. However, these studies have focused on regional characteristics and have not incorporated factors at the tourist destination level (De Jorge & Suárez, 2014; ParteEsteban & Alberca-Oliver, 2015; Pulina, Detotto, & Paba, 2010). It is common for a region to have several tourist destinations, so the impact of the location might be different within the same region. For example, in Spain there are 17 regions and 97 tourist destinations. Moreover, some of these tourist destinations are in the same region, but they are very different regarding seasonality, accessibility and other characteristics (rural vs. urban, coastal vs. inland, etc.). Therefore, a regional empirical study may not be sufficient to evaluate the impact of location on efficiency. Thus, unlike previous studies which have addressed regional effects, the second main objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of location factors at the tourist destination level.