London Hotel Research Articles

Ignaz Diener

Ignaz Diener was Vienna’s foremost restaurateur in the mid-1930s. Son of a Jewish tavern keeper, he spent the ten years before the outbreak of the First World War working in top hotels in Paris, London, Geneva and Berlin, acquiring both the culinary knowledge and linguistic skills required to move easily amongst an international clientele, adding Russian to his repertoire while a prisoner of war in Siberia. After the war, he worked for more than a decade for the world-famous Hotel Sacher, latterly as bar manager, before jumping ship to a newly opened restaurant, Zu den drei Husaren (The Three Hussars). His name and reputation were used to promote the Three Hussars ruthlessly as the place to go for smart Viennese society, leading to a lawsuit by Hotel Sacher, claiming unfair competition, which they lost. Diener’s success ended abruptly with the Anschluss in 1938, when The Three Hussars was sold to Otto Horcher, Göring’s favourite restaurateur, and he himself was imprisoned in the Gestapo HQ. Rescue came from the Duke of Windsor’s equerry who had sponsored him to go to England with his family – The Three Hussars was Edward Windsor’s favourite place to eat in Vienna. A year after arriving in London, Diener was interned on the Isle of Man, where he helped to run the canteens. On release, he wrote a highly successful recipe book called Kitchen Parade, explaining how the average family could make best use of rationed food. A friend from Vienna, Alexander Korda, then recruited him to run the canteens at Shepperton Studios, including, appropriately, for the filming of The Third Man. The final chapter of Diener’s career was as proprietor of a restaurant called The Green Monkey on the outskirts of Reading. He died in 1968.

CSR perceptions and practices in small hotels in urban cities

PurposeThis study aims to examine the perception and practices related to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) implemented in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), focussing on small hotels in London.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative research design comprising detailed semi-structured interviews was employed with 12 small hotel owner-managers in central London and its outskirts. The study adopts a social constructionist approach to explore CSR perspectives and practices, along with a social capital framework to investigate how CSR is perceived at the individual level and consequently manifested into CSR practices.FindingsThe findings indicate that a small hotel’s implementation of CSR is influenced by long-term versus short-term considerations, as well as socio-economic and socio-political conditions. Individual-level factors, like hoteliers’ CSR conceptualisation and personal and business values, affect CSR adoption in small hotels. Lastly, institutional-level factors, such as ineffective institutional participation and the hotelier’s cultural background against the cosmopolitan context of a big city, have contributed to a muted response to socially responsible issues.Research limitations/implicationsThis study was conducted with a limited sample of 12 participants from small hotels in London and its outskirts, which may limit the generalisability of the findings. Future research could enhance these findings by involving a larger and more diverse group of participants from various urban areas, potentially employing a quantitative research approach for broader applicability. This study’s insights can guide policymakers in educating small business owners on CSR benefits and implementation. It also proposes how governments could encourage sustainable practices among small hotels seeking to enhance their reputation. Moreover, these findings enable small businesses to develop their stakeholder strategies for greater CSR initiatives.Originality/valueThis study integrates social capital theory into investigating CSR in small hotels in London, broadening the literature on CSR perception and integration, particularly in SMEs and the hospitality sector.

Price dispersion across online platforms: evidence from hotel room prices in London (UK)

ABSTRACT This paper studies the widespread price dispersion of homogeneous products across different online platforms, even when consumers can easily access price information from comparison websites. We collect data for the 200 most popular hotels in London (UK) and document that prices vary widely across booking sites while making reservations for a hotel room. Additionally, we find that prices listed across different platforms tend to converge as the booking date gets closer to the date of stay. However, the price dispersion persists until the date of stay, implying that the law of one price does not hold. We present a simple theoretical model to explain this and show that in the presence of aggregate demand uncertainty and capacity constraints, price dispersion could exist even when products are homogeneous, consumers are homogeneous, all agents have perfect information about the market structure, and consumers face no search costs to acquire information about the products. Our theoretical intuition and robust empirical evidence provide additional insights into price dispersion across online platforms in different institutional settings. Our study complements the existing literature that relies on consumer search costs to explain the price dispersion phenomenon.

Examining the negative relationship between length of stay at a hotel and customer satisfaction: evidence from online customer reviews

PurposeStudies that investigate the length of stay as a predictor of consumer post-purchase behavior are rare despite its importance in efficient hotel management. By analyzing online customer reviews, this study aims to fill this gap in the extant literature on the relationship between length of stay and customer satisfaction level.Design/methodology/approachThe authors collected and used online review data on hotels in London for this study. A series of linear regression analyses were conducted to examine the effect of length of stay on customer satisfaction as measured by review ratings. The authors used the Mahalanobis matching approach to confirm the empirical findings.FindingsThis analysis shows that length of stay is negatively associated with customer satisfaction. Additionally, the authors find that this negative relationship is stronger in high-end hotels than in low-end hotels.Research limitations/implicationsThe research findings contribute to the literature by shedding light on a new stream of research, namely, length of stay. Additionally, the research findings offer novel insights that could help hotel managers understand the trade-off between longer stays and customer satisfaction.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first few studies to show the systematic impact of length of stay on the valence of online review ratings, as well as the moderating effect of hotel levels by analyzing customer online reviews on hotel experiences.

Assessing customer satisfaction of London luxury hotels with the AHP method and the SERVPERF scale: a case study of customer reviews on TripAdvisor

Customer feedback and satisfaction are critical indicators of success in the hospitality industry. The influence of customer reviews on the decisions of other customers to visit and on the brand reputation of hotels necessitates that hotel managers conduct a thorough analysis of customer satisfaction. This paper presents an approach for assessing the overall customer satisfaction of hotels by using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, the SERVPERF scale, and the 2-tuple linguistic model. The five dimensions of the SERVPERF scale have been customized to assess customer satisfaction in hotels, considering various hotel aspects such as rooms, service, cleanliness, and so on. The AHP method is applied to obtain the importance of the SERVPERF scale for each aspect of the hotels. The 2-tuple linguistic model is employed to address the issue of information loss in linguistic information fusion and enhance the comprehensibility of the results for hotel managers. The functionality of this proposal has been evaluated through a case study of luxury hotels in London, using 15,511 customer reviews gathered from TripAdvisor. The results show that the proposed model effectively captures and summarizes customer satisfaction with luxury hotels in London, allowing hotel managers to identify areas for improvement and discover potential business opportunities. This ultimately helps to increase customer satisfaction.

ВЕРБАЛЬНЫЕ И НЕВЕРБАЛЬНЫЕ АТТРАКТИВНЫЕ ЭЛЕМЕНТЫ АНГЛОЯЗЫЧНЫХ САЙТОВ ОТЕЛЕЙ КЛАССА «ЛЮКС» НА ПРИМЕРЕ САЙТА THE DORCHESTER

The article is devoted to the study of the attractive features of the websites of English luxury hotels. The website of The Dorchester Hotel in London is used as an example. This hotel is one of the most prestigious and premium priced hotels of the UK. The official web-site is the main way of communication between the potential guest and the hotel. That’s why the content of the hotel site is the necessary requirement to persuade a person to become a real guest. The article shows different verbal elements that can be attractive for potential guests such as emotional and expressive vocabulary (bespoke luxury, deluxe, executive, etc.), the superlative degree of adjectives (the most iconic, the best, etc.), lexical units referring to hotel business (the gold standard of care, the perfect room for your every need, etc.) A lot of ways of non-verbal communicative elements are used to attract the potential guests’ attention. However, different photos of the luxurious interiors of the hotel and the famous guests are the main semiotic sign for the discerning client.

Wage Theft and the Struggle over the Working Day in Hospitality Work: A Typology of Unpaid Labour Time

Drawing on Marxist political economy, this article examines wage theft in hospitality work. Through a detailed, qualitative study of workers’ experiences in London hotels, a novel typology is developed that reveals how managers extract additional unpaid labour time through wage theft. The article argues that both the legal definition and existing academic formulations of wage theft fail to encompass the full range of ways that employers extract unpaid labour time. They also overlook the systemic dimension of unpaid labour time under capitalism. The article contributes new insights into the sociological dimensions of exploitation by proposing an alternative conceptualisation of wage theft that incorporates both formal violations of the law and the more subtle, informal means by which the theft of wages is secured.

Substance use and homelessness: A longitudinal interview study conducted during COVID-19 with implications for policy and practice.

People who are homeless and using substances frequently encounter barriers to accessing support. This paper aims to inform policy and practice by analysing changes in the tobacco, alcohol and illicit drug use of people experiencing homelessness. Data derive from a qualitative longitudinal study (undertaken 2020/2021) and involving telephone interviews (n=310) conducted with 34 people accommodated in two London hotels provided as part of a UK policy response to COVID-19. The hotels offered various supports, including opioid replacement therapy, prescribed alcohol, licensed nicotine replacement therapy, and e-cigarettes. Participants' substance use data were organised by Iterative Categorization and subjected to a content analysis to identify patterns and themes.. At entry to the hotel, 5/34 participants (14.7%) had never used alcohol nor illicit drugs; 10/34 (29.4%) had only ever used alcohol (mostly without a problem); 11/34 (32.4%) had ever used illicit drugs but without a problem; and 8/34 (23.5%) had ever had a problem with illicit drugs. Sub-groups had different socio-demographic characteristics, particularly regarding being/not being a UK national, sex, and homelessness duration. Tobacco smoking was common across all sub-groups (18/34; 52.9%). Participants were often anxious about living with others who were using substances, and some worried about their own substance use. Substance use was changeable, with more decreases than increases. Changes related to intrapersonal (psychological), interpersonal (social) and structural (resource-based) factors. For example, decreases were precipitated by people feeling motivated to change, separation from others who used drugs, and receiving treatment or support. Findings indicate that various interventions and accommodation models may benefit people who are homeless and using substances. An initiative that combined shelter and basic amenities, pharmacological treatment, psychosocial support, and space where substances were not available and other people using substances could be avoided resulted in an overall reduction in substance use amongst those accommodated.

The effect of mobile device usage on creating text reviews

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine how the usage of mobile devices influences text-posting behavior in the online review-generation process. This study attempts to improve the understanding of the negative impacts of mobile channels on the quality of online reviews.Design/methodology/approachThe authors develop a series of hypotheses to investigate the text-posting behaviors with mobile device usage. To examine the authors' hypotheses, the authors collect online reviews posted in London hotels on Booking.com. The authors first use a logistic regression model to examine the relationship between the usage of mobile devices and text-posting behavior. Then, the authors explored the characteristics of textual content in mobile reviews compared to reviews written via traditional devices.FindingsThe authors' finding shows that the use of mobile devices negatively influences text-posting behavior. Compared to traditional devices, consumers are less likely to post texts in their reviews with mobile devices. Although consumers decide to post text comments in consumers' reviews, the quality of textual content is relatively low – short in length, with limited analytical thinking and less authenticity.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors' knowledge, no study has attempted to explore text generation in review-posting behaviors in the context of mobile channels. Also, the authors' findings show the negative effects of using mobile channels on the value of generated information, which is counterintuitive to previous research.

Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories, by Barbara Black

Reviewed by: Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories by Barbara Black Eloise Moss (bio) Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories, by Barbara Black; pp. x + 245. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2019, $64.95, $34.95 paper, $29.95 ebook, £54.95. The grand hotels of Victorian London provide the spatial crucible for Barbara Black's fascinating investigation of the role of hotels in shaping ideas of citizenship, national identities, morality (including discourses of crime, anonymity, and sexual fantasy), as well as global cross-cultural encounters since the mid-1800s. Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories is crammed full of literary and cinematic references to hotels and to the memoirs of both staff and famous guests—though predominantly focusing on the latter, particularly literary greats such as Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Ouida. The hotel magnates of the era, César Ritz and Richard D'Oyly Carte, are also afforded plenty of scrutiny here for effectively bringing the metropolis's hospitality industry up to the same standard as its Parisian and American counterparts, ensuring that London's hotels could become future "palaces" for luxury stays by exiled kings, diplomats, and celebrities (65). As such, one of the important contributions of this book (hinted at in its title) is to lay the groundwork for exploring the crucial role of hotels in determining the future course of international politics, gesturing toward the powerful motor of commercial hospitality spaces in the history of global diplomacy. [End Page 308] Hotel London is, however, a deep interrogation of hotel stays as a form of cultural psyche rather than a social history, although the second chapter, "Hotel Individualism," does offer architectural and social biographies of five case-study hotels: Brown's, Claridge's, the Langham, the Midland Grand, and the Savoy. Black argues that her focus on the similarity between hotels and the literary project, including the motifs of hotels as spaces of personal reinvention and arbiters of exclusion and inclusion in these texts (and in real life), shifts away from existing historiographical approaches to these buildings often written in an American history context. While scholarship on hotels in modern British history has been largely undertaken from a social historical perspective (particularly in work by John Walton and Kevin James, whose extensive scholarship on late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century British hotels does not feature in this book), literary scholar Charlotte Bates's oft-cited article about the interwar hotel, "Hotel Histories: Modern Tourists, Modern Nomads and the Culture of Hotel Consciousness" (2003), reached very similar conclusions to Black's work, with a comparable blend of disciplinary approaches—though some might simply call this cultural history. Emma Short's excellent recent book Mobility and the Hotel in Modern Literature: Passing Through (2019) is another example of this, though, being published in the same year as Hotel London, one could not expect Black to have drawn upon it. Where Black's work ranges more widely is in the dazzling set of connections it draws between hotels' cosmopolitanism—material, in the form of international goods and services, as well as human in these institutions' diverse populations—and the enduring power of London itself as a nexus of the global consumer economy, explicitly situating hotels as part of the dynamic trends outlined in Judith Walkowitz's study of pre-World War II Soho, Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (2012). Black charts how Victorian women's access to hotels as spaces of leisure and sociability, having been coaxed into hosting tea parties and dinners at hotels rather than at home by savvy hoteliers, is an important contribution to the history of the democratizing effects of these commercial spaces. Power and inequality recur as key themes (though are much less developed in relation to race and ethnicity), and are assisted by Black's deft integration of a wide range of theoretical essays on the transitional, experimental nature of hotels by authors such as Wayne Koestenbaum, while the presiding spirit of the text is Walter Benjamin. This elegant conceptual framing of hotels as homes away from home, yet inherently transitional spaces, accompanied by...

An assessment of crisis management techniques in hotels in London and Stockholm as response to COVID-19’s economic impact

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to gain a deeper understanding on if and how hotel senior managers (HSMs) in four-star chain hotels in London and Stockholm implemented crisis management techniques (CMTs) as a response to the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.Design/methodology/approachQualitative questionnaires were sent to 30 HSMs in London and Stockholm. From the feedback, this paper assesses, using thematic analysis, differences in CMTs used, past and present, alluding to COVID-19’s economic impacts on hotels.FindingsResults determined that crises broadly economically impacted destinations similarly through loss of travellers and thus revenue. However, with a more intricate and specific assessment, destinations are impacted differently; thus, CMTs must alter. Findings show many CMTs can be implemented to reduce crises’ economic impacts. The literature review and empirical results allude to many previous and current CMTs, although these must be relevant and specific to the crisis, hotel and/or destination.Practical implicationsThis paper has theoretical implications for academics on, among other things, theory building. Practically, it supports hotels in developing and determining CMTs to reduce the economic impacts of crises, to be better prepared when another pandemic emerges and contributes to the tourism and hospitality industry’s knowledge of management strategy within crises.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first Swedish study focusing on post-COVID-19 crisis management in hotels in London and Stockholm.

Exploring Bidirectional Performance of Hotel Attributes through Online Reviews Based on Sentiment Analysis and Kano-IPA Model

As people increasingly make hotel booking decisions relying on online reviews, how to effectively improve customer ratings has become a major point for hotel managers. Online reviews serve as a promising data source to enhance service attributes in order to improve online bookings. This paper employs online customer ratings and textual reviews to explore the bidirectional performance (good performance in positive reviews and poor performance in negative reviews) of hotel attributes in terms of four hotel star ratings. Sentiment analysis and a combination of the Kano model and importance-performance analysis (IPA) are applied. Feature extraction and sentiment analysis techniques are used to analyze the bidirectional performance of hotel attributes in terms of four hotel star ratings from 1,090,341 online reviews of hotels in London collected from TripAdvisor.com (accessed on 4 January 2022). In particular, a new sentiment lexicon for hospitality domain is built from numerous online reviews using the PolarityRank algorithm to convert textual reviews into sentiment scores. The Kano-IPA model is applied to explain customers’ rating behaviors and prioritize attributes for improvement. The results provide determinants of high/low customer ratings to different star hotels and suggest that hotel attributes contributing to high/low customer ratings vary across hotel star ratings. In addition, this paper analyzed the Kano categories and priority rankings of six hotel attributes for each star rating of hotels to formulate improvement strategies. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed in the end.

Setting up a drug treatment service in a COVID-protect hotel in inner London

At the start of the UK's COVID-19 lockdown, the government announced an ‘Everyone In’ strategy to get homeless people off the streets and into accommodation. An Inner London borough opened a hotel to house up to 100 homeless people to address their health needs. Local healthcare providers were asked to provide in-reach services. This article describes the setting up and delivery of a drug treatment service to provide substitute opioid therapy. Thirty-five people were taken into drug treatment in the hotel between April and December 2020. During this time various challenges had to be addressed including same-day prescribing, delivering and supervising controlled drugs and responding to drug dealing in the hotel. Partnership work between the different healthcare providers was essential for the success of this project and offers a model that could be used going forward to deliver comprehensive wrap-around services to hard-to-engage individuals with multiple health needs.

Location of Airbnb and hotels: the spatial distribution and relationships

Ubicación de los hoteles y preferencias: distribución espacial y relacionesPropósitoEl propósito de este estudio es comparar la distribución espacial de Airbnb y los hoteles en Londres y examinar la relación entre los factores demográficos, socioeconómicos y ambientales y la oferta de estos dos tipos de oferta de alojamiento.Diseño/metodología/enfoqueLa información local de los anuncios de Airbnb en Londres se recopiló a través de Insideairbnb.com. Los datos recopilados se examinaron mediante análisis de autocorrelación geoespacial y modelos econométricos espaciales.ResultadosLos resultados indican que Airbnb predomina en las zonas aledañas a los atractivos turísticos populares y las zonas periféricas de la ciudad, mientras que en la zona centro Airbnb y los hoteles se encuentran en estado de convivencia. El modelo monocéntrico y el modelo de aglomeración podrían extenderse al contexto de la acomodación entre pares. La ubicación de Airbnb y los hoteles tradicionales se basa en diferentes factores.OriginalidadEste estudio amplía los modelos teóricos de ubicación de hoteles en el contexto de Airbnb y arroja luz sobre la distinción entre estos dos modelos comerciales en términos de factores de ubicación.Limitaciones de la investigaciónEl estudio se basa en datos secundarios debido a la disponibilidad de datos. Y se basa en el caso de Londres, por lo que los hallazgos pueden no reflejar la situación de las ciudades pequeñas y los destinos rurales.Implicaciones practicesLos hallazgos sugieren que las autoridades locales deberían prestar más atención a la seguridad laboral de las empresas profesionales y restringir los alquileres a corto plazo alrededor de las atracciones turísticas.

Differences in online reviews caused by distribution channels

Since the use of social networks has become part of daily life for most people, many online travel agencies (OTAs) are allowing customers to log in using account credentials for social network services like Facebook (social network interface systems, SNIS) without having to create a local account on OTA sites themselves. This research explores the roles of SNIS in review generation on OTAs. For this purpose, we collected more than 174,000 online reviews for London hotels, posted from 2015 to 2016 on TripAdvisor.com. Through a series of analyses, we find that (1) concerning review generation, the portion of online reviews posted via SNIS shows no significant increase during the period; (2) reviews posted via SNIS tend to have lower ratings and be shorter than reviews posted via local accounts; (3) the channel itself, whether SNIS or a local account, does not have a direct impact on perceived review helpfulness.

Alumni Events, Sociability, and the Residual Organization

This paper argues that alumni events are not only settings where professional identities are renewed in social gatherings, or simply instruments to build and sustain commercially valuable networks. They can also be continuous with the organizations they celebrate by reproducing latent structural features of these organizations long after they cease to exist. Based primarily on participant observation of three annual lunches for alumni of the former accountancy firm Deloitte Haskins & Sells, and interviews with participants, organizers and non-participants, the paper makes two inter-related contributions to the study of professional service firms and to organization theory. First, it argues that alumni events reveal the variable durability and re-enactment of hybrid professional-social relations - what we call “sufficient sociability” - which were formed during intense working in small groups. Second, we show that these social relations, via table seating choices at an alumni event, produce what we call the “residual organization”. In this way, a modest alumni lunch in a central London hotel is transformed from an event of marginal interest, into a “site” where core issues of organization theory are at stake.

The Firm that Would Not Die: Alumni Events, Sociability and the Residual Organization

This paper argues that alumni events are not only settings where professional identities are renewed in social gatherings, or simply instruments to build and sustain commercially valuable networks. They can also be continuous with the organizations they celebrate by reproducing latent structural features of these organizations long after they cease to exist. Based primarily on participant observation of three annual lunches for alumni of the former accountancy firm Deloitte Haskins & Sells, and interviews with participants, organizers and non-participants, the paper makes two inter-related contributions to the study of professional service firms and to organization theory. First, it argues that alumni events reveal the variable durability and re-enactment of hybrid professional-social relations - what we call “sufficient sociability” - which were formed during intense working in small groups. Second, we show that these social relations, via table seating choices at an alumni event, produce what we call the “residual organization”. In this way, a modest alumni lunch in a central London hotel is transformed from an event of marginal interest, into a “site” where core issues of organization theory are at stake.

Developing a scale measuring customers’ servicescape perceptions in upscale hotels

PurposeThis paper aims to describe the detailed process of development of a reliable scale to measure customer perceptions of the upscale hotel servicescape that could then be used as a basis for intra- and inter-hotel comparisons and to examine relationships with other variables, such as emotions, satisfaction and loyalty.Design/methodology/approachA review of the existing service and hospitality literature provided a range of dimensions and attributes of the hotel servicescape, which were used as the basis for a Q-sort technique to determine the content adequacy of newly developed and existing items. Testing the emergent items was carried out through a questionnaire that was distributed at five luxury upscale hotels in London providing 612 fully valid responses, which, using a split sample, were subjected to both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to explore the dimensionality and reliability of the instrument.FindingsAlthough the Q-sort suggested four key dimensions, the outcome of the factor analyses revealed five dimensions with high reliability – aesthetic quality, functionality, atmosphere, spaciousness and physiological conditions. “Aesthetic quality” appeared to be the most important factor, followed by “functionality”, “atmosphere”, “spaciousness” and “physiological conditions”.Research limitations/implicationsAs this study was conducted with customers of upscale luxury hotels in London, the resulting scales need to be further tested in other hotel segments and in other locations.Practical implicationsThis study provides upscale hotel managers with an effective measurement tool, which will enable them to benchmark their operation and make improvements that could lead to a better impression and evaluation of their hotel. The scale has a variety of potential applications and can serve as a framework for further research in the hotel industry.Originality/valueIn spite of the wide interest in and importance of the servicescape in hotels, there are only a few studies dealing with this subject in the hotel context. This study provides a new tool for measuring customers’ perceptions.

Innovative service experiences of travellers visiting high-tech hotels: The case of Eccleston Square Hotel, London

The purpose of the current qualitative research on travelers' behaviors and attitudes visiting high-tech hotels is to examine and understand the effects of innovative service experiences. With the aim of contributing to knowledge in the field of service research, this paper has employed user-generated content (UGC) within the context of a qualitative research method. Data was obtained from online reviews left by travelers (n=350) on TripAdvisor who visited the Eccleston Square Hotel in London, which generated the unit of data analysis and was processed through content analysis. Findings of the present study have indicated that the innovative service experiences of travelers visiting the Eccleston Square Hotel reflect many heterogeneous and multidimensional features. Results have also revealed that travelers are more disposed towards visiting technologically oriented and equipped hotels that can improve the quality of customer experience while potentially creating a positive impact on their satisfaction levels and intentions to revisit, as well as positive eWOM effects for other travelers.

A foreign hotel in London – the history of Hilton’s negotiation of legitimacy in the Swinging Sixties

Abstract Whilst theories of business internationalization assert that foreignness poses challenges to multinational companies’ subsidiaries operating abroad, historical study of Hilton International’s expansion in the 1960s suggests otherwise. In its early internationalization Hilton International transferred abroad its institutional ownership advantages including corporate philosophy and culture, its practices, policies, processes and work systems and product design. Despite claims of social embeddedness, the London Hilton was perceived to be a typically American hotel. Analysis of Hilton’s expansion strategy suggests that the company used its foreignness as a differentiating factor. This article contributes towards the limited business history research in the area of internationalization and knowledge transference. Historical analysis of Hilton’s internationalization contradicts the institutionalism’s assumption that multinationals must adapt to local institutional settings. This article enhances the notion that playing the ‘foreignness’ game can lead to a comparative global advantage.