Main Competitive Factors in European Small and Medium-Sized Family Hotels

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the current state of knowledge of the factors that affect the competitiveness of family hotel SMEs in a pandemic environment, through a systematic review of the international academic literature with an emphasis on the European continent. The research work consisted of a systematic review that involved the analysis of documents, articles, dissertations, and international academic works that presented both theoretical and empirical research results. The search was conducted from January to May 2021 in online databases and search engines. The studies focused on finance, innovation, and marketing as the main factors that generate competitiveness among family hotel SMEs. Most of them have been published since 2014 in European countries. Some characteristics are overlapping in various geographical contexts, such as the importance of profitability, financing, the use of financial information; product and process innovation; market positioning, knowledge of the competition, and customer satisfaction. Some implications for small and medium-sized family hotel businesses in Europe were analysed, namely those arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. Small and medium-sized family hotel businesses have national and international economic relevance, especially in tourism. Still, studies in this field are scarce. In this way, a compilation of recent works is made, to identify the main factors that affect the competitiveness of these enterprises that currently face serious problems in this domain, aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as contribute to the state of the art and subject knowledge gaps. The major limitation of this research is the existence of more articles located in databases (such as Web of Science and Scopus) and repositories in other countries that were not included in the search, due to restricted access to their content.