This research is to evaluate the operational performance of International Tourist Hotels in Taiwan, and explores the critical success factors that contribute to good performance. In the face of a highly competitive environment, a hotel's operational performance plays a crucial role in determining the hotel's profitability and competitiveness. Performance measures can provide hotel managers with benchmarking information and insights into how the hotel can improve performance with its current resources, or through changing resource allocation. Therefore, it is very important for managers to evaluate their hotels' operational performance. Different approaches and techniques have previously been employed to conduct such evaluations; however, the often-used mechanisms for measuring and analysing performance of hotels do not capture the relevant performance issues necessary for the hotel sector. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) however provides a framework that integrates several relatively disparate inputs and outputs, producing a single productivity index to help analysts identify which hotel is the most efficient. This technique has been used in this study to assess the relative productivity efficiency of Taiwanese hotels. This research initially adopted DEA to measure the relative operational efficiency of 57 international tourist hotels in Taiwan. However, the DEA approach can only determine relative operational efficiency but does not identify the factors that give rise to inefficiency or lead to efficiency. Furthermore, DEA only calls attention to those hotels in which efficiency and inefficiency exist, but cannot provide suggestions on how to improve operational efficiency. A qualitative approach is a good way to address this limitation of DEA. Thus after using DEA to evaluate hotel's operational efficiency this research used a qualitative approach to further explore the critical success factors that contribute to hotels having good performance in Taiwan. From their DEA score, the 57 international tourist hotels were divided into three groups: the hotels with good efficiency, the hotels with average efficiency and the hotels with poor efficiency. Based on these three groups, this research chose several hotels as sample from each group, conducting in-depth interviews with the managers of each sampled hotel. The interviews revealed that there are 13 critical success factors contributing to Taiwanese international tourist hotels having good performance, including: 1.owner's emphasis, 2. professional knowledge and experience in hotel management, 3. innovation and features, 4. outsourcing, 5. quality employees, 6. training, 7. positioning, 8. empowerment, 9. corporate culture, 10.physical facilities and renovation, 11.work environment, 12.brand, and 13.creative marketing. Among the 13 critical success factors, hotel owner's emphasis played a significant role. The owners of the good-performance hotels regard their hotel as a core business. Therefore, they provide full support to management with the finance and resources necessary for hotel operation. They perceive operating a hotel as a highly professional task and are willing to provide full trust and to sufficiently delegate their power to professional hotel managers. In addition, their proactive attitude has a strong influence on the hotel's corporate culture and this corporate culture further effects employees' behaviour and makes hotel operations more efficient. Additionally, through cultivating quality employees, conducting employee training and empowering employees to deal with service failures in the first instance, hotel's operational efficiency, service quality, customer's satisfaction and hotel's reputation are also enhanced. Moreover, the interviews also revealed that through innovation in physical facilities, management strategies, service content, and regular renovation, those hotels with good operational performance increase their profit, raise awareness of the hotels, improve the image of the hotels and attract more customers. Through determination of these factors, this research provides hotel managers with a list of advice and recommendations to develop effective strategies to meet a highly competitive environment. Furthermore, the development of this research makes a useful contribution to theory in performance measurement, and provides an approach to overcome the limitations of previous performance research, and develop the strategic theory to enhance hotel performance.
| Date of Award | 2009 |
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| Original language | English |
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