Institutions are fundamental aspects for driving tourism and hospitality globally. They are the socio-economic "rules of the game" that serve to shape and constrain human and organisational interactions. This book is the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive overview of institutional theory in a tourism and hospitality context. The complexity and multiple scaled nature of the institutional environment plays a crucial role in the development and formation of tourism destinations, attractions, organisations, and businesses, as well as influencing the activities of individuals. Institutional theory therefore provides a means to understand the complexity and processes of change at different scales of analysis and provides insights into the organisational and political basis of tourism policy development and implementation. Chapters introduce and expand on institutional analysis in tourism and hospitality, institutional theory in the social sciences, methodological issues, and future directions in institutional analysis in tourism and hospitality, making use of case studies throughout. This book will appeal to students of tourism, hospitality, leisure, and events, as well as other social science disciplines. Providing a comprehensive overview of and guide to the application of institutional theory, this book will serve as a complete reference to institutional theory in a tourism and hospitality setting for years to come.

Theory and Practice in Hospitality and Tourism Research includes 111 contributions from the 2nd International Hospitality and Tourism Conference 2014 (Penang, Malaysia, 2-4 September 2014), and covers a comprehensive range of topics, including: - Hospitality management - Hospitality & tourism marketing - Tourism management - Technology & innovation in hospitality & tourism - Foodservice & food safety - Gastronomy The book will be of interest to postgraduate students, academics and professionals involved in the fields of hospitality and tourism.

The aim of this book is to enhance theoretical and practical understanding of quality management in tourism and hospitality. It provides a benchmark of current knowledge, and examines the range of research methods being applied to further develop tourism and hospitality service management research. It is hoped that this book will stimulate new research questions by highlighting tensions and challenges in the area.

Tourism research that is inspired by theories of practice is currently gaining in prominence. This book provides a much-needed introduction to the potential applications of theories of practice in tourism studies. It brings together a variety of approaches exploring how theories of practice bridge themes and fields which are usually addressed separately within tourism research: consumption and production; travel and the everyday; governance and policy; technology and the social. The book critically engages with practices as a fruitful approach to tourism research as well as how the particularities of tourism might inform our understanding of practice theories. This book contributes to conceptual and methodological debates providing insights from authors who have engaged with practice theory as an entry point to researching tourism. It offers a solid starting point for researchers and students alike who wish to learn about, and try, this approach, as well as explore its possibilities and limitations in the field of tourism.

Social media is fundamentally changing the way travellers and tourists search, find, read and trust, as well as collaboratively produce information about tourism suppliers and tourism destinations. Presenting cutting-edge theory, research and case studies investigating Web 2.0 applications and tools that transform the role and behaviour of the new generation of travellers, this book also examines the ways in which tourism organisations reengineer and implement their business models and operations, such as new service development, marketing, networking and knowledge management. Written by an international group of researchers widely known for their expertise in the field of the Internet and tourism, chapters include applications and case studies in various travel, tourism and leisure sectors.

Cross-Cultural Aspects of Tourism and Hospitality is the first textbook to offer students, lecturers, researchers and practitioners a comprehensive guide to the influence of culture on service providers as well as on customers, affecting both the supply and the demand sides of the industry – organisational behaviour, and human resource management, and marketing and consumer behaviour. Given the need for delivering superior customer value, understanding different cultures from both demand and supply sides of tourism and hospitality and the impact of culture on these international industries is an essential part of all students’ and practitioners’ learning and development. This book takes a research-based approach critically reviewing seminal cultural theories and evaluating how these influence employee and customer behaviour in service encounters, marketing, and management processes and activities. Individual chapters cover a diverse range of cultural aspects including intercultural competence and intercultural sensitivity, uncertainty and risk avoidance, context in communication, power distance, indulgence and restraint, time orientation, gender, assertiveness, individualism and collectivism, performance orientation, and humane orientation. This book integrates international case studies throughout to show the application of theory, includes self-test questions, activities, further reading, and a set of PowerPoint slides to accompany each chapter. This will be essential reading for all students, lecturers, researchers and practitioners and future managers in the fields of Tourism and Hospitality.

The chapters in this volume provide tools and evidence useful for deep understanding of tourists’ buying, consumption, and being through examinations of consumers’ self-descriptions of personal markers of their trip configurations.

Economic Principles for the Hospitality Industry is the ideal introduction to the fundamentals of economics in this dynamic and highly competitive sector. Applying economic theory to a range of diverse and global hospitality industry settings, this book gives the theory real-world context. Looking at critical issues around sustainable economic development in the hospitality industry such as diversification, technology, determinants of demand, and pricing, it enables students to effectively conduct business analyses, evaluate business performance and conduct effective improvements over time. Written in an engaging style, this book assumes no prior knowledge of economics and contains a range of features, including international case studies and discussion questions, to aid beginners in the subject. This will be an essential introductory yet comprehensive resource on economics for all hospitality students.

Using a combination of theoretical discussion and real-world case studies, this book focuses on current and future use of RAISA technologies in the tourism economy, including examples from the hotel, restaurant, travel agency, museum, and events industries.

Management Science in Hospitality and Tourism is a timely and unique book focusing on management science applications. The first section of the book introduces the concept of management science application in hospitality and tourism and related issues to set the stage for subsequent sections. Section II focuses on management science applications with conceptual pieces, empirical applications, and best practices with examples coming from different parts of the world and settings. The last section ends with a chapter focusing on challenges and future research directions. This book goes beyond revenue management topics and presents a broad range of topics in management science applications as they relate to hospitality and tourism cases. Researchers and students in hospitality and tourism will find this book very useful since it contains chapters on data analytics, e-commerce and technology, revenue and yield management, optimization methods, resource allocation, goal programming, dynamic programming, Markov chain models, trends analysis and detection, measuring potential and attractiveness in tourism development, performance measures and use of indices in hospitality and tourism, and more. There is a heightened interest in these areas of business applications in today’s data-driven business environment, and this book addresses that interest. This book is the only comprehensive text on management science applications in hospitality and tourism. It will help managers and hospitality and tourism students as future managers to develop an in-depth understanding of the importance of data analysis, interpretation, and generating information, and intelligence for decision making. It covers a broad range of applications representing different geographic regions of the world.