Electronic intermediaries have become pervasive in sales transactions for many durables, such as cars, power tools, and apartments. Yet only recently have they successfully tackled the challenge of enabling parties to share such goods. A key impediment to sharing is a lender’s concern about damage due to unobservable actions by a renter, usually resulting in moral hazard. This paper shows how a...

The purpose of this study is to analyze cyber security and security practices of electronic information and network system, network threats, and techniques to prevent the cyber attacks in hotels. Helping the information technology directors and chief information officers (CIO) is the aim of this study to advance policy for security of electronic information in hotels and suggesting some techniq...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation rentals continue to grow at a phenomenal rate. Examining how this business model affects the competitive landscape of accommodation services is of strategic importance to hotels and tourism destinations. This study explores the competitive edge of P2P accommodation in comparison to hotels by extracting key content and themes from online reviews to explain the ke...

Nowadays “greenwashing” is a popular term. We are aware of companies such as BP Oil and many others being accused of greenwashing, claiming eco-consciousness or launching products and services that are less than legitimately green. But few people know that the term was originally coined to criticize hotels that encouraged guests to reuse towels for environmental reasons but made little or no ef...

Phishing is an internet security issue whose shape is still changing and size is still increasing. This thesis shows the possibility of a phishing attack on open, private Wireless LANs. Private WLANs which use a login page to authenticate users in hotels, airports and academic campuses are all vulnerable to this attack. Virginia Tech's WLAN is used as an example to show that the attack is possi...

Firms’ incentives to manufacture biased user reviews impede review usefulness. We examine the differences in reviews for a given hotel between two sites: Expedia.com (only a customer can post a review) and TripAdvisor.com (anyone can post). We argue that the net gains from promotional reviewing are highest for independent hotels with single-unit owners and lowest for branded chain hotels with m...

We use a unique proprietary monthly panel data set on the operations of a large hotel firm to study the effect of vertical integration decisions on the pricing and performance (occupancy rate and RevPar) of individual hotels. Aggregate data patterns – which managers pay most attention to – suggest sizeable performance differences between franchised and non-franchised hotels. However, empirical ...

Some 1% of the UK population derives their potable water from 140,000 private water supplies (PWSs) regulated by Local Authorities. The overwhelming majority of these are very small domestic supplies serving a single property or a small number of properties. Treatment for such supplies is rudimentary or non-existent and their microbiological quality has been shown to be poor in every published ...

The introduction of ambient scents in different business facilities might be an effective strategy to influence customers’ emotions and, ultimately, their experience. Yet, there is scant evidence on the effects introducing hotels particularly, hotels’ private areas such as guest rooms. Accordingly, this study aims analyse impact positive when a pleasant scent introduced hotel room. To end, rand...

Th e paper examines the host country-specifi c factors as determinants of hotel chains' market presence in a destination. Th ree types of hotel chains' market presence are identifi ed – absolute market presence (number of chain affi liated hotels/rooms), relative market presence (share of affi liated hotels/rooms in the total number of hotels/rooms in a destination) and market presence intensit...