Greek Hotel Research Articles

Integrating customer relationship management in hotel operations: managerial and operational implications

As travelers are becoming more price sensitive, less brand loyal and more sophisticated, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) becomes a strategic necessity for attracting and increasing guests’ patronage. Although CRM in hospitality has overstated the importance of ICT, it is now widely recognised that successful CRM implementation should effectively combine and align ICT functionality with business operations. Given the lack of a widely accepted framework for CRM implementation, this paper proposed a model for managing and integrating ICT capabilities into CRM strategies and business processes. The model argues that successful CRM implementation requires the management and alignment of three managerial processes: ICT, relationship (internal and external) and knowledge management. The model is tested by gathering data from Greek hotels, while findings provide useful practical implications and suggestions for future research.

Revisiting Competencies for Hospitality Management: Contemporary Views of the Stakeholders

The portfolio of the hotel management competencies that graduates are required to posses seems to be central to the success of hospitality management education. In the past, a large number of researchers have examined the issue of hospitality management competencies and its implications for hospitality education. The present paper is aimed at investigating the management competencies required by graduate trainees in the hotel industry according to the views of the general managers of top Greek hotels and recent graduates of hospitality management courses. The survey outcomes are compared with those of three other similar studies that took place in three different countries. “Soft skills” were found to be among the most important competencies required by employers and recent graduates

Blue Autumn by Christopher Buckley

Reviews 381 are under this land, like shovels.”Shaky ground indeed. The national politics in “Grounds”make another turn. Let’s hear (you and I) what is troubling Alberta farmers because the Toronto newspapers and bankers swamped by a “big bang in finance”do not hear, or hold. “Grounds”gives the book a symmetry which a “Postscriptum”on asymmetry turns over (twice). Noble’s is a poetry of space in which “the farmsteads drift apart / in the winter like icebergs.”At times he breaks words into the surrounding space; the text moves on the vertical, horizontal, oblique. This move pushes the literal into the letteral, a “my/th/ought-ical doub t”about the referentiality ofwords being the motive. Since space is the very stuff of the poem, I wish the publisher had chosen a different font ( “I”and “1”tend to blur) and had designed the pages to allow for easier movement through the book. But, despite some heavy patches, Let’s HearIt deserves a wide reading and careful hearing. BIRKSPROXTON RedDeer College Blue Autumn. By Christopher Buckley (Providence: Copper Beech Press, 1990. 71 pages, $9.95.) Christopher Buckley’s twenty-four contemplative poems are bound to­ gether by device and spirit. The devices are obvious: four sections of six poems each, all introspective essays, most in graceful 8-12 syllable lines that participate in English tradition without hint of the metronome. Buckley quietly controls the pace of thought with stanza patterns, ambiguous enjambments, and caesu­ ras that cut against the grain. Across this texture, the poems evolve like clouds. “Clouds in Summer” floats in three-stanza clusters ofthree-line stanzas across the page; “On the Eiffel Tower”is tall and tapering. There are long lines, short lines, and quatrains, but mostly discursive verse paragraphs reminiscent ofWordsworth, this collection’s remote father. Something is always moving here, though its character remains somehow and quietly the same. The unifying image appears on the cover, a skyof moving clouds. The word cloudis in nearly every poem ofthe collection. Again and again, the poet gazes at the sky, or he sees in metaphors of heavenly motion. His mother “drifts about the stove and is herself a warm and lilac cloud / dusted with flour.” A Greek hotel’swalls are “thick as clouds,”or a childhood school yard a cloud “so dense/ I went ahead on rote.” There is mist, spray, the Milky Way. Clouds, always the same, always changing, center contemplations of consistency in change, recol­ lection and rebirth, preoccupations of middle age. A biographical thread, almost a story, runs through the book. The first 382 WesternAmerican Literature poem is a dream of childhood return, and the first half of the book relives origins: a West Virginia town where his mother washed clothes “all day/in steamy clouds,” migration to California, school days with fiestas, Latin and catechism classes, football. Buckley heightens pedestrian detail to symbolism. Gradually, childhood fades, and Buckley finds himself an educated Everyman aging among old friends, traveling Europe, contemplating art and ideas, asking clouds of memories and intuitions for answers, hearing some. WILLIAM H. GREEN Chattahoochee Valley State College Skies ofSuch Valuable Glass. By Art Homer. (Seattle: Owl Creek Press, 1990. 64 pages, $9.00.) The poems in this collection are all, finally, about intimacy. The traveler finds in the names of new places and things a way of closing on them. The rememberer rediscovers the birthplace offeeling. The lover, even when it’s the body ofbetrayal he’sexamining, finds a pain truer than the selfish or sentimen­ tal—even a place for compassion. Triggered by Charles Darwin’s accounts of his voyage on the Beagle, “Vision for a Wrong Century”reinvents an uncertain world between theories: They kill, they smile and eat. Science isn’t sure. Is it not true all heretics are Turks? Witness the beards of sailors aboard their ship. Not only do their bishops marry, but this one leaves his housekeeper (really a simple, candid girl) bad Spanish and instructions: Doyoufeed these caterpillars every day that they might turn to butterflies. Surely some great evil is abroad. The padres must meet with the governor, the man be arrested upon return. On his own faraway voyage...

Who are the work-motivated managers in the hotel industry—an exploratory study

This paper examines the impact on work motivation of demographic characteristics. Data from 130 senior managers in Greek hotels revealed that age, education and length of employment with current organization have only a slight effect on manager's work motivation. While length of time in current job, sex and maritalstatus have no impact at all. A regression analysis revealed that these six demographic factors taken together account for 8 per cent of the variation in the work motivation if no other factors are examined. Based on these findings some suggestions are made about staffing and promotion policies in the hotel industry. Particularly it is suggested that age and qualifications and time in present organization are an advantage not a barrier for high work motivation.

Herzberg's Proposals and Their Applicability To the Hotel Industry

Two implications of Herzberg's Two-Factor theory were derived and tested empirically, using data obtained from 287 people employed by twenty hotels in Greece. The results supported the hypothesis that when the organization does not allow workers the opportunity to satisfy most of their needs, hygiene factors become powerful sources of motivation, leading to improved performance and thus to productivity. On the other hand, very little contribution to productivity is due to motivators. The findings were interpreted in terms of the employment conditions in Greek hotel industry.