Strategic Hospitality Management in a Global Environment (LT7F03) Assignment Sample

Understanding consumer behavior in the hotel industry. Gain valuable insights to navigate the dynamic hospitality landscape.

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Introduction Strategic Hospitality Management In A Global Environment (LT7F03) Assignment

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The report develops an understanding of strategic hospitality management in a global environment. This report highlights the hotel industry in an international market as a whole. To understand the broader topic of the international hotel industry, the report includes seven parts. The first topic of the report discusses various new approaches to managing human resources in the hotel industry (Evans, 2015). The next part highlights digital trends in the hospitality industry in an international context with problems and solutions Faced by the hotel industry. The report also provides information about the organizational culture and the implication of change in it. The report also provides an understanding of current marketing trends and leadership competency for the international hotel industry. To understand every aspect of the global hospitality business, the relationship between perceived value and Customer Loyalty is discussed (Konovalova et.al. 2018). How strategic management is important in the hotel industry is also explained as a necessary condition to gain a competitive advantage.

New approaches to organizing human resources in the international hotel industry

The foundation of a successful firm in the hotel industry is excellent human resource management. The precise explanation of the management and leadership explains the new methods for arranging human resources in the global hotel business. The Human Resources Management (HRM) function includes several tasks, but the most important ones are determining what staffing requirements exist and whether to hire employees or autonomous contractors to fill them, hiring and training the best workers to ensure they are high performers, handling performance issues, and ensuring personnel and management practises comply with a variety of convention (Pham et.al. 2018). Managing employee records, wages, benefits, and personnel policies are additional activity.

Motivating employees: A manager's accountability is to employ their team to achieve the industry goals. The manager should be able to motivate the workforce to achieve this. However, it's simpler said than done! The theory and practice of motivation are tricky topics that cross numerous fields. Although the general basic and practical research shows the concept of motivation is not well understood and is normally not successfully applied. Considering human nature as a whole is essential to understand the motivation (Nieves and Quintana, 2018). Individual personality can be both very simple and quite composite.

Effectual management and leadership: as well as valuable employee enthusiasm in the place of work, depending on an appreciation and approval of this. Whether these objectives are business-related, charitable, or both, the leader's role of the leader is to instil a feeling of purpose and passion into the work that the organisation performs, whether these aims be entrepreneurial or humanitarian or both. One of the strategic approaches must be identifying, developing, and maintaining leadership in the hospitality sector (Ashton, 2018). Without industry leaders at every level, an organisation may potentially function poorly. It might overlook strategic possibilities, hinder innovation, underutilize your workforce, and miss its targets for customer satisfaction, quality, productivity, and profitability.

According to the second SHRM method, which is called "best fit," a company's market positions and business plans should dictate its HRM policies and procedures. There are a variety of ideas on the "best fit" SHRM approach, such as those that relate certain strategic decisions and choices to HRM practises and policies to more sophisticated models that take into account broader organisational characteristics (strategy, positions, and portfolio characteristics). These models are used to decide HRM practices. The focus on external market positioning and the difficulties in gaining a competitive edge when other companies in the same industry follow comparable strategies and market positions are the main drawbacks of the "best fit" SHRM strategy.

Hotel industry managers can use human resource management (HRM) arrangements, to hire, screen, choose, prepare, expand, reward, and maintain their workforce. Planning and development for human resources are incorporated in HRM. A strategy for acquiring, using, recovering, and preserving an organization's people resources is known as human resource planning (Mathis et.al. 2016). The process of supporting individuals in acquiring competencies and abilities ensures that they will be beneficial to the business in light of both the current and future state of the hotel industry. Any hotel industry human resources department performs tasks like job study, staffing, selection, orientation, and training.

The hotel sector department also faces a variety of difficulties, such as recruiting qualified personnel and making employees put up with excessive hours. The means of stimulating and retaining workers and new approaches to organizing human resources in the international hotel industry are as follows:

  • Retention of employees: To keep staff, it's critical to consider the following factors: Every day at work, the workforce should be conscious of what is accepted of them. People are reserved and on edge by shifting opportunities, which leads to unhealthy stress. They undermine the employees' self-assurance. Effective Supervisor: Employees quit their jobs or companies more frequently than they quit their managers or supervisors. The team leader ought to be able to encourage and boost the members of his or her team; it is not sufficient that they like or that they are honest individuals.
  • Employee psychoanalysis: Managers' major purpose should be to get labour back to being fully dynamic. To ascertain a workforce concern, the HR department or the department head can offer confidential, concise counselling.
  • Utilization of Talent and Skills: A motivated worker wants to contribute to projects outside of the scope of their specified job description. Many workers have much more to offer than they now do.
  • Fairness and Equitable Treatment: If one person receives more pay or other benefits, other employees may feel unfairly treated and begin seeking alternative employment possibilities.
  • Numerous Possibilities to Learn and Develop: A career-focused, valued employee needs to have possibilities for progress within the company.
  • Employees should feel appreciated: recognised, and rewarded: expressing gratitude regularly can go a long way. The thank you is much more acceptable if there are monetary awards, incentives, bonuses, and presents. Salary increases based on performance and accomplishments aid in motivating and keeping employees.

Digital marketing trends in the international hospitality industry –

The marketing approach in the hospitality business is extremely important to get success in the international environment. A good marketing strategy uses digital marketing as the most important element, in dealing with and adopting changing technology in the global environment. As a consequence of Covid 19 deadly disease, the hostel industry made a huge reshuffle in its marketing tools and technique. This part of the portfolio includes a compilation of the most famous current digital marketing techniques in the global hotel industry:

  • Virtual Reality (VR): Virtual reality is a very unique technology used in the digital marketing of the hospitality industry. At the time of booking hotels, users can get a virtual experience using a VR headset and it will give the consumer a glimpse of the hotel with the feel of the person being there (Leite and Azevedo, 2017). This technology helps the buyer to take a more accurate decision regarding the size of the room and the location view. Many hotel businesses are using 360-degree video as a part of virtual reality of tools in digital marketing strategy.
  • Chatbots & Artificial Intelligence (AI): Chatbots are a key part of artificial intelligence technology, they sent an artificially intelligent answer to questions and queries asked by consumers. Chatbots are hugely beneficial digital trends in today's era specific to the hospitality industry. Because by the help of chatbots basic questions can be responded to with no effort from human beings, enhancing answering time and freeing humans to tackle other tougher problems (Semerádov and Vávrová, 2016).
  • Artificial intelligence also analyzes data automatically and assists with a marketing strategy by providing personalized offers to consumers according to their needs and preferences. Some companies have launched an artificially intelligent robot, which can react to individual speech and reply to problems.
  • Robots: Recently, the use of robots inside workplaces in the hospitality sector has increased; the use of AI-driven robots is increasing as a part of digital marketing strategy. These robots can perform a series of difficult tasks. Henn-na Hotel in Nagasaki is an example; this hotel introduced the world’s earliest machine personnel lodge. It used a robot that gives information about tourists and a front desk robot is also featured which is capable to communicate with intellect.
  • Influencer marketing: Influencer marketing is a very important tool of digital marketing; it is growing at a fast rate in the current era. The hospitality industry is using influencer marketing in place of traditional marketing techniques (Leung al.2015). Hotels and cafes are collaborating with digital influencers and icons on social media for marketing their services. By doing so, hotel companies are getting access to a large audience and developing the brand's trust and credibility.
  • Focusing on User-Generated Content: A potential customer will trust more user reviews than what a hotel company is saying about itself. That’s why focusing on the users' reviews is an important part of any company’s digital marketing strategy. The review can be in the form of comments, social publications, blog posts, and forums (Mkwizu, 2019). In this digital period, hotel companies can utilize user-generated content and take advantage of it in creating a brand image. The company can pursue visitors to share their experiences about the services provided by the company on social platforms.
  • Using Re-marketing Ads: Remarketing focuses the company's promotion efforts on persons who show interest in the company's services (Dzhandzhugazova al. 2016). The hotel can collect statistics of users who are visiting the company's website or else engaging with the company's content on social media such as Instagram and Youtube. Once the management gets the appropriate insight, then they can direct the company's efforts to market divisions that are most hopeful. Research shows, remarketing ads have a higher conversion rate than traditional ads.
  • Personalization: Personalization can be done on basis of six factors which are Travel Party, Visitor Behavior, Custom Targeting, Timing, Visitor Profile, and Demand. These can be used alone or used in combination; this is decided according to the targeted customers. A specialized personal massage is generated for target customers to give them personalized thought in marketing.
  • Cookies and marketing: The tenth year of 2022 will be for Chrome's support in the form of third-party cookies. Websites use cookies, which are tiny files that are sent by websites to browsers, to track and store data on visitors. The websites (or domains) that they are browsing do not create third-party cookies. These are typically added as scripts or tags to websites for internet publicity. Every website that loads the system from the third-party server can enter a third-party cookie. Third-party cookies are considered a privacy infringement.

Change and organizational culture in hospitality – a major challenge

A company's values, beliefs, and attitudes, as well as how they affect employees' behaviour, constitute its organizational culture. Employees in the hospitality industry assist customers, giving customers a glimpse into the inner workings of the organization. Employees in the hospitality sector include hotel staff, chefs and waiters, bartenders, tour operators, and taxi and limousine drivers (Bhardwaj and Kalia, 2021). These workers are on the front lines of the tourism industry and have the power to persuade a visitor to return or steer clear of the destination the following time. The hospitality sector may employ more people than any other sector in some cities. Even while every company creates a workplace culture, the hospitality sector stands out more than others.

Challenges: The hospitality industry faces a high employee turnover rate, the reason for this is workers are hired seasonally and when the season is over people leave the job. Another reason is people consider this job as an alternative, when people find better jobs in other sectors then they leave the hospitality sector (Bavik, 2016). If employees even plan to stay around, other hotels and restaurants provide better options for earning good clients and extra tips. Irregularity in the hospitality business is one challenge, because of it workers prefer to do the job only when high-money days are around and leave when a business faces a slowdown.

Pay Model: The pay model in the hospitality business is very vague and uncertain, this makes another challenge in the organizational culture of the hotels and restaurants. Generally, workers are paid on an hourly basis and this part is below the federal minimum wage. Hospitality workers include taxi drivers, hotel workers, casino employees, etc (Erhardt, et.al. 2016). Tips are in bulk in the composition of their income and this is the way workers can make good money in the hospitality industry. Employees paid primarily by tips may make more money than their supervisors. Employees do not give importance to the supervisor and do not listen to instructions given by managers. They try to do work according to the customer so they will receive a good amount of money as a tip. This creates many challenges for a manager in the organizational culture of the hospitality industry.

Leadership: A strict manager is not a good option for leadership because of the employee dynamics. A good and friendly supervisor is needed who can lead all workers and provide excellent client service. Workers value a leader who knows the hospitality industry from the up to bottom, all this makes leadership in this industry difficult.

The Workers' Culture: Hotel industry workers be inclined to stick collectively, even sharing companionship with employees of an enemy company (Nazarian et.al. 2017). Food and beverage workers, hotel crew members, and casino employees have their words and culture that outsiders have difficulty in understanding.

Challenges of Organizational Culture Change

  1. Employees are unsure of the purpose of the change: A willingness to resolve concerns and effective communication of the intended change are the first steps in ensuring that employees believe changes are for the best. When the change's aim is unknown to them or they are not convinced that it is necessary, hotel personnel will be against the change.
  2. Ineffective communication and training: Adoption is easier when hotel staff members are ready for potential difficulties. Although there will be execution elements put in place, planning them ahead of time will make it easier for personnel to adapt to the new shift.
  3. Lack of feedback: To assess how well the transition is progressing and whether any problems are being encountered, it is crucial to get feedback from hotel employees. When each level of the organization has a different understanding of the specifics, the biggest gaps—which result in ineffective adjustments—appear (Ghaderi et.al.2021). A company can involve the employees in decision-making, win their support, and assist in smoother implementation by asking for input.

Current trends in hospitality marketing for a global market

In today's era, there are numerous ways the marketing the hospitality industry, and choosing the appropriate technique is very essential because this involves the resources of the company. The world is on the rise at high-speed and innovative marketing trends are rising every day (Bowie et.al. 2016). Every company which is in the hospitality business should explore every marketing tool and then decide what the most appropriate ones are. The reports have already discussed digital marketing trends in the hospitality industry, in addition to those some other marketing trends are given below:

Brand marketing: In this current era, brand marketing is crucially growing in the hospitality business. Hotel Company which is recognized as a brand is successfully attracting more audience and their businesses are flourishing. Brand marketing includes investment in a brand website and guest program with the main focus on creating brand awareness among the audience (Calder et.al. 2016). The ending goal should be pouring the company's sales and becoming a magnet for the audience at the company's property just by the hotel's name.

Thought leadership marketing: Thought leadership is one of the most trending marketing strategies in the hospitality industry; these marketing experts from a particular domain share their views, ideas, and opinions to market the services of the company (Morrison, 2022). Some people think that thought leadership marketing and influencer marketing are the same, but in reality, these two are different. In influencer marketing, an influencer can be from any domain or field which may or may not be related to the hospitality industry but have a wide number of followers. It means the influence can influence its large audience without in-depth and specific knowledge about the product or service.

On the other hand, in thought leadership marketing, the person has experienced the hospitality industry and knows as an expert in this field. For example, if a person has been working for the last 15 years in the hospitality industry, the person has gained experience as well as knowledge about this industry. This person is now an expert with knowledge about the problem faced in the hotel business, the operation of a hotel, and the best marketing techniques. These experts are very helpful in the marketing of the hotel business, for this purpose the blogs, articles, and podcasts shared by the expert be used.

Multichannel marketing: Multichannel marketing refers to performing marketing of a company's hotel across diverse platforms. This platform includes an over-the-air platform, social media platforms, and Meta Explorer engines. These platforms have grown significant traction in the last few years and still, these are the most accepted marketing trend in the hotel industry (Chen and Lamberti, 2016). The cause is the easiness of booking a hotel and the accessibility to other options on a sole platform. Guest sees ten to fifteen results that appear on the top, hotel need to be on that list to get more customers. Many platforms deal with the hospitality business specifically, for example, Airbnb, this platform only deals in holiday rentals and homestays. Therefore, visitors who want these types of properties have a preference for booking on Airbnb. Even though these platforms charge specified commissions on each booking, they offer huge business to hoteliers. Hence, this kind of marketing will constantly trend in the hospitality industry.

Example: Vrbo uses a multichannel marketing technique and within the last quite a few years, VRBO has prolonged beyond hotels and resorts. More consumers rent homes and apartments from the owners through online rental marketplaces. . Vrbo distributes messages and user-generated content across social media channels to raise brand awareness and elicit strong emotions from people planning vacations.

Flywheel marketing: Flywheel marketing is an interesting marketing just as the name sounds and it has been proficient in the hostel industry even earlier than the internet come into life. A basic sales cycle is used for selling the services to a user; a sales cycle involves three steps which are Lead generation, converting it into the vision, and Closure of the sale (Baker and Magnini, 2016). Flywheel marketing highlights the trip of the consumers. It includes engaging the visitor from the initial day to even after the checkout. Furthermore, special concentration is on hostility which results in losing prospects and if these errors are identified, then managers try to eradicate them.

Content marketing: Content marketing is a very important marketing strategy in every field, since hotels are in the progress to build their websites, spend on eminence content became very significant in hospitality marketing trends. This strategy involves hiring bloggers as well as professional content writers to create quality content for hotels. The companies also use SEO optimization for content marketing and this is an all-time favourite trend in the hotel industry related to marketing. Visual marketing is an important part of content marketing, it includes videos and images. In general, a client brows about hotels to visit the gallery section on the website for pictures and videos. Hotel Company should use visual marketing to present pictures and videos which are of high quality and looks appealing.

Example: Kimpton hotels use blogs for content marketing. Its recent famous case named “life is suite” is a very creative marketing idea of the company. This blog took the readers on a tiny journey through probable travel destinations and used it as a way to stay top-of-mind for the period of lockdowns and shelter-in-place.

Leadership competency model in hotels and its application

COMPETENCY MODELS

A competency model is an expressive tool that recognizes the awareness, skills, capability, and actions required to perform efficiently in a company. It is designed to help a company to meet its strategic goals and aims by making human resources more capable. The first Competency model came into existence in 1970; it was created by David Mc- Clell. The competency model gains popularity in the late 1980s with its first model.

Competency models concentrate more on behaviour traits than on personality traits; the reason is personality traits are hard to evaluate precisely (Bharwani and Talib, 2017).

A leadership competency modelis a structure used by Human Resource professionals or higher-level executives to find out and assess competencies that a leader should possess for a wonderful performance. It assists in the assessment of leadership potential, recognizes training needs, and executes applicable development programs (Shum et.al. 2018). In the hotel industry leadership competencies mainly consist of skills and behaviours openly attributable to effective guidance and performance. Following leadership competency, hotel managers must possess:

Driving and managing change: This is a main behavioural trait of a leader in the hospitality industry; the leader should incite change and explain it to the subordinates for the growth of the business. A leader should demonstrate a cheerful and open approach to change. A leader must have the capability to make subordinates comfortable with changes implemented in the operations of the hotel.

Strategic thinking: Strategic thinking refers to the thought process that centre on the scrutiny of vital factors and inconsistent element that will control the enduring growth of a business, a group, or a human being (Goldman et.al. 2015). A leader should be a strategic thinker because Strategic thinking comprises cautious and purposeful expectancy of threats and weaknesses to protect against and chances to pursue. This trait of a leader helps in setting clear plans, goals, and innovative ideas which helps to survive and flourish in a diverse environment. This sort of thinking is an essential competency in hotel managers to deal with market forces and available resources.

Building partnerships: In the case of the hospitality industry, Strategic partnerships are the proficient relationships recognized between different brands for the achievement of a common goal. It includes undertaking various activities to build and preserve lasting working relationships to attain organizational objectives (Wan et.al. 2017). A leader can build strategic Partnerships with the industry or with companies from other industries, for instance, Hilton London Bankside has collaborated with Bompas & Parr, a design studio to provide full vegan rooms. Vegan rooms mean furniture and other things will be made of plant-based raw material rather than leather, wool, etc.

Leading and empowering others: a good leader always led and inspires others to achieve set organizational and personal objectives. A leader in the hotel industry should be capable of the empowering group to work jointly toward a collective goal (Rothman and Melwani 2017). This also helps in cultivates trust and establishment of ethical conduct for maintaining the quality of service provided to visitors or consumers. A leader with this trait can assist persons in achieving their full potential and efficiently delegating tasks.

Managing performance: a competent leader creates an encouraging environment at the workplace that facilitates effective performance by the team members.

Create an ethical environment: Ethical practices are very important in the hospitality industry, for the reason that staff is faced with a wide range of ethical problems. In a moral dilemma, a human being decides amid doing wrong actions or doing moral actions since it is the accurate object to carry out. The hospitality business must consider all work ethics while performing leadership jobs, these ethics include Integrity, Trustworthiness, Respect for others, and most important Accountability.

Empathy

Only 40% of front-line executives are "skilled or excellent in empathy," according to a Forbes article that quotes research on the subject. A Betterworks human resources officer is quoted in the same piece as saying, "officers recognize from studies that empathy is on the turndown. That's bad because it's the single most important skill for leading and fostering employee engagement in a multicultural, scattered, and dynamic organization.

Flexibility

Since the hotel business is dynamic, managers who can change with the times are those who will best position their organizations for success. According to Business 2 Community, the lesson to be learned from this is that "the best leaders - the ones who can adapt to change most effectively - can quickly diagnose a situation, and evaluate the challenges involved. Apply a diverse set of behaviours that are optimized for meeting the challenges identified by the leader." Additionally, leaders can do a weak harmonizing act to handle a multitude of problems without no developing "tunnel vision" on a single problem to the exclusion of others.

Hospitality - perceived value and satisfaction on Customer Loyalty

The association between a client's perception of value and customer loyalty has been studied for a long period in different divisions of the service industry. Particularly in the hotel service industry, most previous research that studies this relationship has measured customer perceived value as a single dimensional. Here single dimensional refers to an emphasis on only one factor which is value for money (El-Adly, 2019). This narrow viewpoint on customer perceived value pays no attention to other key dimensions of value that are related to the full hospitality experience. the hotel guest experience while staying in a hotel room may have an enormous influence on consumers' satisfaction with the hotel. consequently, this study aims to make wider the outlook of customer perceived value in the hotel context. This is done by examining it as a multidimensional assemble that replicates the whole hospitality incident and examining its persuade on mutual satisfaction and loyalty of the consumer towards the hotel.

Customer loyalty

Customer service loyalty is the degree to which a customer repeats a buying behaviour from a particular service provider, this also includes customers' positive attitudinal outlook toward the service provider (Keshavarz and Jamshidi, 2018). Whenever consumer needs for services arise, the person always considers only a particular service provider, it shows that a consumer is loyal towards only that service provider. The following five things would be best for measuring consumer loyalty:

  • Consumers say positive things about the hotel company and facilities provided by staff,
  • Recommending the hotel to others such as friends, family, and other knowledgeable people,
  • cheering other individuals and companies to collaborate with the hotel
  • Considering the hotel as the foremost option to stay in the future, and
  • Doing more business with the hotel in the upcoming days

Customer Loyalty Scale

The customer loyalty scale measures the level of consumer loyalty towards a particular service provider. Customer Loyalty had three divisions which are:

  • optimistic word-of-mouth,
  • change behaviour,
  • eagerness to pay extra.

Perceived Value

In marketing vocabulary, perceived value is the customer's evaluation of the advantage received from the consumption of a product or service. This includes the product's ability to meet consumers' needs and expectations, especially in relationships with other products (Gumussoy and Koseoglu, 2016). Managers in the hospitality industry try to influence consumers' perceived value of services provided by them by describing the quality of services provided that makes it finer than the competitor's services.

Eight elements help to determine consumer values which are competence, brilliance, participation aesthetics, political affairs, morality, self-worth, and spirituality There are four drivers meaning of value:

  • Value is near the ground price,
  • Value is what a consumer wants as a result and receives by consuming a service,
  • Value is the quality that the customer collects for the price given, and
  • Value is what the customer gets for what they present

The value will be produced through an exchange between the benefit obtained and the give-up made by the buyer during the purchasing process, it can be inferred from the above four criteria. The generation of customer-perceived value occurs when the advantages gained exceed the cost borne by the consumer. Despite COVID-19's devastating effects on the hotel sector, few studies offer practitioner-oriented viewpoints that capture aspects of customer loyalty in developed nations. Within the context of the UK hotel sector, the researchers look at how customer loyalty is impacted by perceptions of value and experience (Kusumawati and Rahayu, 2020). During the first week of the COVID-19-induced lockdown in the UK, a random questionnaire survey was administered to 170 guests at three prestigious hotels.

Subsequent structural equation modelling analysis confirmed that the perception of value and the quality of the service experience continue to have a positive impact on both customer loyalty and satisfaction. The strongest levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty are found among clients who value services highly. Through the intermediary of customer satisfaction, value perception and service experience also have an indirect impact on guest loyalty. When perceived service value is higher, there is a larger correlation between perceived experience and guest pleasure (Keshavarz and Jamshidi, 2018). The potential to reset business paradigms can be used by the hospitality sector, a pandemic vector. To adapt to the new normal, efforts should be made across the board to reduce customer sacrifice through the simplicity of pricing and transaction operations, even though micro-segmentation is necessary to position offerings to target groups.

The strongest levels of customer pleasure and trustworthiness are found amongst clients who value services highly. Throughout the intermediary of purchaser pleasure, value perception and service occurrence also have a not direct collision on guest loyalty. When apparent service value is superior, there is a larger correlation between perceived knowledge and guest pleasure. The potential to reset business paradigms can be used by the hospitality sector, a pandemic vector. To adapt to the new normal, efforts should be made across the board to decrease customer surrender through the simplicity of charge and transaction actions, even though micro-segmentation is necessary to position offerings to target groups.

Strategic orientation – a necessary condition to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage

Strategic orientation is an essential condition to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage which should particularly be considered in the tourism industry, given the high competition and rapidly changing environment.

Concept of strategic orientation:

A company’s strategic orientation is a sign of the strategic directions applied by a company to form the right behaviours. Strategic orientation is consisting of three types of orientation which are related to entrepreneurial, marketing, and learning orientation. Strategic orientation is a method of structuring and developing the organization's strategy (Dereli, 2015). At the same time, it states that the strategic orientation helps in achieving greater performance levels as compared to the competitors. It can be done by implementing the proper plan in the context of the hotel industry by use of strategic orientation. Strategic orientation gives instructions on the necessity for constant performance improvement. Strategic orientation includes strategies decided by managers to deal with the external environment changes. The strategic orientation is a culture led by the belief and principles of higher-level managers and top management to be energetic in creating an organizational culture and system of values.

Strategic Orientation is performing according to the managerial main concerns, strategies, and vision. The main motivation for strategic orientation is a contribution to the company’s direction to achieve competitive advantage (Jones et.al. 2018). The hospitality industry uses strategic orientation in the following way

  • Ability to comprehend the organization's vision, goals, and priorities
  • To contribute to them. Ensuring that the manager's behaviour and those of others are in line with the organization's priorities and goals.
  • Set the organization's priorities, aims, strategies, and image to advance it.

Competitive advantage: competitive advantage refers to reasons that permit a company to make products or services better than its competitors. The products and services can be better in terms of cost or quality. The competitive advantage helps in making more sales and growth of the company (Ferreira et.al. 2020). Competitive advantages are recognized by a range of factors counting the structure of cost, branding, the distribution network, quality of service and goods provided, and consumer service.

Strategic orientation and competitive advantage: Strategic orientation is very important for creating a competitive advantage in the hospitality industry. Simply put, a hotel (or any firm) has a competitive edge if it can consistently generate higher profits. Surplus returns are profits that exceed the capital expenditures made during the hotel's construction and operation. To add an edge over the competition, hoteliers must make an exclusive brand and it can be done with help of strategic orientation. Hotels need strategic orientation to create the following competitive advantage:

Cost Leadership: It tries to provide the best quality hotel services at the lowest possible price. Strategic management helps hotel managers to find out cost-effective ways to do every task in the hostel business, this will reduce the overall of the hotel company (Jansson et.al. 2017). it will assist in achieving the target of low marketing expenses, operating expenses as well as administrative expenses, and each single of these categories can be a competitive advantage. If the cost will come then the accommodation and other service charges will also be low, this is how strategic orientation is a necessity for gaining a competitive advantage in the hospitality industry.

Differentiation: The differentiation of services of a company from competitors, and by addition of some exceptional characteristics to the hospitality services will create a competitive advantage. The company will need to build a strategy by creating a strategic orientation environment in the company to achieve the differentiation targets. Strategic orientation is necessary to create and implement a differentiation strategy in the hotel business, hotel can also improve consumer loyalty by creating a consumer-focused organization strategy.

Strategic orientation is essential for gaining and maintaining a competitive advantage

Hotelier managers can make specific strategies to grow their business in the hospitality industry which will result in gaining a competitive advantage (West et.al. 2015). Strategy can be made to achieve the following target, this target will create and maintain a competitive advantage:

  • Cater to International Travelers: it will increase the number of guests as well as the revenue.
  • Enhance Fitness and Spa Facilities: the hotel can make a strategy that provides other facilities such as fitness and spa to create a competitive advantage over its rival. Because the additional facility will attract the visitor to hotels' homestays.
  • Good Accommodations: a specific strategy for enhancing accommodation facilities is very important to stand out in the hospitality industry. The accommodation should be spacious and attractive to visitors.

Consumer Behavior hotel chains will have to: listen to and learn from their customers

Consumer behaviour refers to all activities performed by a consumer in the process of buying of product or service. The buying process includes the purchase, use as well as disposal of products and services a consumer can be an individual, group, or organization (Richard, 2017). Consumer behaviour is influenced by many factors such as emotions, taste, and preference.

Understanding consumer behaviour is very important for a company that is pursuing the hospitality business. Studying consumer behaviour helps hotel managers better understand who are company's customers and how they act to adapt services provided by the hotel company. it will also help in the marketing of the company's services, to meet consumers' demands, and draw them in large numbers.

Understanding consumer behaviour requires a lot of data, and Hotel Company possibly has two key sources. For common information company’s manager can glance at industry reports, these reports describe the most up-to-date trends in the hospitality industry. For instance, if a manager wants guests to stay for three or more nights, by studying consumer behaviour manager can quickly learn business travellers can stay not leisure travellers (Liu et.al. 2019). Using this knowledge, the manager will focus the company's strategies on growing the percentage of business travellers, or on discovering ways to make longer relaxation stays extra attractive.

A company’s second source of data will be the information collected by the managers and their team at their hotel. The hotel manager can then examine their own collected data to verify whether samples reported in another place appear to be suitable locally or to discover fresh local trends which can be used for creating future strategies for the hotel.

When hoteliers want to find large quantities of data, it is significant to classify the information to separate the new helpful facts. A manager can follow a market segmentation approach to divide the useful and useful information (Godey et.al. 2016). Hotel company managers might divide guests based on purposes such as business or leisure, or the basis of origin such as domestic or international. This division can be by age such as under the age of 45 or over 45, etc. The manager divides the behaviour of consumers into the buying decision phase, the order phase, the stay, and the post-stay phase.

For example: Once data has been divided along these lines, managers are now able to focus on data that, for instance, shows managers how business travellers under 40 select a hotel or how many Chinese visitors spend daily compared to Europeans.

If the property manager currently uses a customer relationship management system, they may have access to a variety of tools that will make it easier for them to acquire the information they need to make decisions (Bowen and McCain, 2015). There are two main forms of data to take into account, though: data on what customers do as opposed to data on what consumers think and like.

Customers' opinions of the manager's services and their ratings of the guest experience management offers may be gathered through data and feedback from customers to the manager. Sadly, there is a risk that the manager will act on this information without first taking into account things like which of the manager's clients is voicing a particular viewpoint. Perhaps the opinions of loyal, high-value consumers should be given more weight than occasional, transient visitors (Moreno et.al. 2017). Therefore, it's critical to go past the viewpoints to more accurately predict how any adjustments managers make will impact the bottom line.

This is the situation when behavioural data can be quite useful. Instead of depending just on what consumers say, the manager can see what customers do—how customers participate with their feet. Managers who make decisions can track their effects by looking at questionnaires and surveys.

Smart utilization of customer data should be a major part of the hotel manager's overall strategy if the manager aims to optimize hotel operations to boost revenues and customer happiness. Simply manager needs to make sure that the management considers the motivations behind the data and never views it from a straightforward, one-dimensional approach. It is worthwhile to take a much closer look at the tales it can manage.

Conclusion

As people say, the consumer is key, especially in the service industry, and that is why the last segment of this report includes consumer behaviour in hotel chains. Therefore, this study aims to make wider the outlook of customer perceived value in the hotel context. This is done by examining it as a multidimensional assemble that replicates the whole hospitality incident and examining its persuade on mutual satisfaction and loyalty of the consumer towards the hotel. From the above portfolio, it is concluded that stating desirable traits related to the behaviour of a person is vital for a competency model to be useful as a human-resources management tool. Since behaviour is the observable expression of personality traits and characteristics, the majority of competency models represent traits and characteristics in behavioural terms.

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