An Insight into the Hospitality Industry
Volume 19, Number 3 Article by Gautam Sinha September, 2007
Services Management: An Insight into the Hospitality Industry : By Vinnie Jauhari and Kamlesh Mishra, Gurgaon: IIMT, 2004, pp 340, Price: Rs 750/ $35.
This is the second compilation in succession on the service industry by Vinnie Jauhari. This volume focuses on the hospitality industry, as a subset of the service industry. The contributors cover an eclectic mix of practitioners and academics from India and abroad.
Most firms today provide a combination of goods and services and a service management focus can help drive revenues. Focusing on the strategy, marketing, HR and IT aspects of services management can help the hospitality industry immensely. This timely book covers the various aspects of the hospitality industry and services management. The first section describes the status of the hospitality industry in India. The first paper gives an overall view of the hospitality industry in India in terms of consumer adaptiveness, brand recognition, consolidation, demand/supply, HR, marketing, finance and infrastructure related aspects. The other papers in this section discuss aspects such as the role of environment safety and security, the role of organisational leadership in the Indian hospitality industry, and the growth and scope of the industry with special reference to the Indian tourism industry. However, there is a lack of flow in the text.
The next section deals with HR issues in the hospitality industry, providing a lucid explanation of factors that go into choosing competency modelling techniques in India and the UK. The four papers in this section cover the issues of employee motivation and empowerment, the costs associated with staff turnover in the hospitality sector, and approaches to mapping competencies and identifying appropriate HR strategies in the sector. The third section is devoted to strategic implementation issues involved in the hospitality industry. The first paper explores the practical and research implications of a study undertaken to identify the critical success factors in the hotels of the UK and the Netherlands. Other papers deal with the growth of the fast food sector in India (a comparison of various Indian and multinational brands), the rating of the service factor for independent restaurants in the NCR Delhi region and the implementation of a yield management system. This section could have done with more examples and cases of strategies adopted by the food industry, to present a more balanced perspective.
The fourth section links the IT and hospitality industries through two papers on web-based pricing strategies and utilisation of multiple web-based distribution channels, and on customer information pattern in online booking in different hotels. The section could have been vastly improved with the inclusion of some more papers on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in the context of the hospitality industry with emphasis on the analytical areas of CRM. The last section explores the linkages between the hospitality industry and the tourism industry, the market scenario and the economy in general, and the infrastructure of a country.
Overall, this collection of papers makes a modest contribution to the literature in services management, giving an insight into the critical issues for the hospitality industry via lucidly presented research findings and cases. The book will provide useful reading for students, researchers, academicians and managers in the area of services management.
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