A review of studies on luxury hotels over the past two decades

The purpose of this study was to identify current research trends and clarify the changing direction of studies on luxury hotels. Scholarly studies published between 1994 and 2014 were examined through content analysis, using such keywords as “luxury hotels”, “deluxe hotels”, “upscale hotels”, “high-end hotels”, and “fouror five-star hotels”. The contributions were then screened to focus on luxury hotel-centered topics. The search revealed 70 qualified scholarly research articles. Conceptual studies were limited, with empirical studies representing a majority of the luxury hotel researches. The luxury hotel researches that were identified were categorized into nine groups by research themes: marketing, human resources (HR), finance, strategic management, technology, service quality, food science, tourism and others, with marketing, HR and technology being the most popular research themes. Analysis of methodological trends in luxury hotel research indicated that the majority of the researchers utilized quantitative methods employing various statistical analysis techniques. Overall, luxury hotel research is still limited in the number of publications and diversity of research topics. This study was the first comprehensive content analysis on luxury hotels conducted to date. The findings of this study may provide future researchers and academicians with new insights based on past study as well as ideas for future research. It is hoped this study will contribute to the development of a reliable knowledge base from which practitioners may inform plans and action regarding future luxury hotels.

[1]  A. Mattila.  An Analysis of Means-End Hierarchies in Cross-Cultural Context: What Motivates Asian and Western Business Travelers to Stay at Luxury Hotels? , 1999 .

[2]  Yong-Ki Lee,et al.  Predictors of Relationship Quality and Relationship Outcomes in Luxury Restaurants , 2006 .

[3]  D. Connolly.  Shifting Paradigms , 2000 .

[4]  Janet R. Mccoll-Kennedy,et al.  Service provider training programs at odds with customer requirements in five‐star hotels , 1997 .

[5]  Eleanor Curtis.  Hotel: Interior Structures , 2001 .

[6]  A. Akin Aksu,et al.  The Internet and five‐star hotels: a case study from the Antalya region in Turkey , 2002 .

[7]  A. Patiar,et al.  ‘The lowest rung’: Women room attendants’ perceptions of five star hotels’ operational hierarchies’ , 2013 .

[8]  G. Antes,et al.  Five Steps to Conducting a Systematic Review , 2003, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

[9]  Emily J. Becker,et al.  The Proximity Hotel: A case study on guest satisfaction of sustainable luxury environments , 2009 .

[10]  Yu Wang.  Strategic Employee Training and Development in Chinese Luxury Hotels , 2005 .

[11]  F. Okumus,et al.  Understanding the Consumer Experience: An Exploratory Study of Luxury Hotels , 2011 .

[12]  Doina Olaru,et al.  Quality clusters: dimensions of email responses by luxury hotels. , 2007 .

[13]  Susan E. Jackson,et al.  Meta-analysis analysis. , 1987 .

[14]  D. Simmonds,et al.  The matching process in e‐mentoring: a case study in luxury hotels , 2010 .

[15]  S. Hui,et al.  Deploying Self-Service Technology in Luxury Hotel Brands: Perceptions of Business Travelers , 2014 .

[16]  John W. Creswell,et al.  Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches , 2010 .

[17]  Annie Chen,et al.  Examining Chinese consumers’ luxury hotel staying behavior , 2014 .

[18]  Francis W.H. Yik,et al.  Benchmarking operation and maintenance costs of luxury hotels , 2008 .

[19]  A. Strauss,et al.  The discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research aldine de gruyter , 1968 .

[20]  Cathy H. C. Hsu,et al.  Thirty years of research on tourism and hospitality management in China: A review and analysis of journal publications , 2011 .

[21]  B. Narteh,et al.  Relationship Marketing and Customer Loyalty: Evidence From the Ghanaian Luxury Hotel Industry , 2013 .

[22]  Pamela Danziger,et al.  Let Them Eat Cake: Marketing Luxury to the Masses - As well as the Classes , 2005 .

[23]  J. Kapferer.  Managing luxury brands , 1997 .

[24]  S. Hyun,et al.  A better investment in luxury restaurants: Environmental or non-environmental cues? , 2014 .

[25]  Judy A. Siguaw,et al.  Exploratory Evidence About Differences Between Guest Types and Purpose of Stay in a Luxury Experience , 2006 .

[26]  Colin Hales,et al.  Empowerment in five‐star hotels: choice, voice or rhetoric? , 1998 .

[27]  Robert K. Griffin,et al.  How Business Travelers Discriminate Between Mid-Priced and Luxury Hotels: , 1997 .

[28]  G. Siomkos,et al.  An empirical investigation of the relationship between market orientation and MrkIS effectiveness in upscale hotels in Greece , 2008 .

[29]  F. Lévêque.  UK Tractors, Paris Luxury Hotels and French Mobile Telephony Operators: Are All Oligopoly Information Exchanges Bad for Competition? , 2007, World Competition.

[30]  A. Palmer,et al.  Tourism and Statistics: Bibliometric Study 1998–2002 , 2005 .

[31]  Hsiu-Fang Hsieh,et al.  Three Approaches to Qualitative Content Analysis , 2005, Qualitative health research.

[32]  K. Elliott,et al.  Predictors of relationship quality for luxury restaurants , 2008 .

[33]  Antonio Colmenar-Santos,et al.  Solar thermal systems for high rise buildings with high consumption demand: Case study for a 5 star hotel in Sao Paulo, Brazil , 2014 .

[34]  Angela Knox.  HRM in the Australian Luxury Hotel Industry: Signs of Innovation? , 2002 .

[35]  L. Johnson,et al.  Measuring perceptions of brand luxury , 2004 .

[36]  F. Okumus,et al.  Understanding Why Women Work in Five-Star Hotels in a Developing Country and Their Work-Related Problems , 2010 .

[37]  Ş. Baloğlu,et al.  The website design and Internet site marketing practices of upscale and luxury hotels in Turkey , 2006 .

[38]  Haemoon Oh,et al.  Price fairness and its asymmetric effects on overall price, quality, and value judgments: the case of an upscale hotel , 2003 .

[39]  N. Denzin.  ‘On Elephants and gold standards’ , 2010 .

[40]  W. James Potter,et al.  Rethinking validity and reliability in content analysis , 1999 .

[41]  Cathy H. C. Hsu,et al.  Recent Tourism and Hospitality Research in China , 2008 .

[42]  I. Gil-Saura,et al.  Integrated marketing communications and information and communication technology in the hotel sector: An analysis of their use and development in Dalmatian first-class and luxury hotels , 2011 .

[43]  Celeste P.M. Wilderom,et al.  Managing employee empowerment in luxury hotels in Europe , 2007 .

[44]  S. Qi.  Fuzzy hierarchical evaluations of business website performance with application to luxury hotels , 2011, European Journal of Tourism Research.

[45]  Narumon Kimpakorn,et al.  Employees' commitment to brands in the service sector: Luxury hotel chains in Thailand , 2009 .

[46]  M. Davidson,et al.  A survey of employee relations practices and demographics of MNC chain and domestic luxury hotels in Australia , 2005 .

[47]  Dogan Gursoy,et al.  A yield management model for five-star hotels: computerized and non-computerized implementation. , 2006 .

[48]  W. Kim,et al.  Effect of information technology on performance in upscale hotels , 2005 .

[49]  Cathy H. C. Hsu,et al.  A Customer-Based Brand Equity Model for Upscale Hotels , 2012 .

[50]  Kaoru Tone,et al.  Data Envelopment Analysis , 1996 .

[51]  Shilei Lu,et al.  Energy consumption quota of four and five star luxury hotel buildings in Hainan province, China , 2012 .

[52]  P. Sheldon.  An authorship analysis of tourism research , 1991 .

[53]  Asad Mohsin,et al.  Customer perceptions of service quality in luxury hotels in New Delhi, India: an exploratory study , 2010 .

[54]  C. Guilding,et al.  Employment, flexibility and labour market practices of domestic and MNC chain luxury hotels in Australia: Where has accountability gone? , 2006 .

[55]  Johye Hwang,et al.  Luxury marketing: the influences of psychological and demographic characteristics on attitudes toward luxury restaurants. , 2011 .

[56]  W. Kim,et al.  The relationship between brand equity and firms’ performance in luxury hotels and chain restaurants ☆ , 2005 .

[57]  W. Kim,et al.  The effects of perceived justice on recovery satisfaction, trust, word-of-mouth, and revisit intention in upscale hotels. , 2009 .

[58]  K. Sanders,et al.  International Journal of Hospitality Management How Leader–member Exchange, Work Engagement and Hrm Consistency Explain Chinese Luxury Hotel Employees' Job Performance , 2022 .

[59]  G. Baldacchino.  Total quality management in a luxury hotel: A critique of practice , 1995 .

[60]  Josef A. Mazanec,et al.  Positioning analysis with self-organizing maps: An exploratory study on luxury hotels , 1995 .

[61]  D. Tranfield,et al.  Producing a systematic review. , 2009 .

[62]  O. Holsti.  Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and Humanities , 1969 .

[63]  E. C. Nebel,et al.  Career Paths in American Luxury Hotels: Hotel Food and Beverage Directors , 1994 .

[64]  N. Ratna,et al.  Is Organizational Social Capital Crucial for Productivity Growth? An Exploration of “Trust” within Luxury Hotels in New Zealand , 2012 .

[65]  A. Patiar,et al.  Transformational leadership style, market competition and departmental performance: evidence from luxury hotels in Australia. , 2009 .

[66]  Klaus Krippendorff,et al.  Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology , 1980 .

[67]  Una McMahon-Beattie,et al.  Luxury markets and premium pricing , 2006 .

[68]  Jorge Lengler,et al.  Exploring the antecedents of intentions to leave the job: the case of luxury hotel staff. , 2013 .

[69]  Measuring the Service Quality of Commercial Banks towards Luxury Hotels in Northern Cyprus , 2008 .

[70]  Harold D. Lasswell,et al.  Power and Personality , 1948 .

[71]  Chris Ryan,et al.  Eco-tourism and luxury – the case of Al Maha, Dubai , 2009 .

[72]  Ersem Karadag,et al.  The productivity and competency of information technology in upscale hotels: The perception of hotel managers in Turkey , 2009 .

[73]  A. O. Onyango,et al.  Pathogenic Escherichia coli and food handlers in luxury hotels in Nairobi, Kenya. , 2009, Travel medicine and infectious disease.

[74]  R. Chapman,et al.  Impediments to improvements in service quality in luxury hotels , 2005 .

[75]  A. Israeli,et al.  Hospitality crisis management practices: The case of Indian luxury hotels , 2011 .

[76]  R. Law,et al.  A study of hotel information technology applications , 2005 .

[77]  Rong-Da Liang,et al.  Effect of experiential value on customer satisfaction with service encounters in luxury-hotel restaurants. , 2009 .

[78]  A. K. Sandoval-Strausz.  Hotel: An American History , 2007 .

[79]  Rachel Sherman.  Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels , 2006 .

[80]  Geoff Walsham,et al.  Interpreting Information Systems in Organizations , 1993 .

[81]  John T. Bowen,et al.  Hospitality marketing research: A content analysis and implications for future research , 1998 .

[82]  D. Kucukusta,et al.  Corporate social responsibility practices in four and five-star hotels: Perspectives from Hong Kong visitors , 2013 .

[83]  A. Knox.  The Differential Effects of Regulatory Reform: Evidence from the Australian Luxury Hotel Industry , 2006 .

[84]  D. Finley,et al.  Strategic Human Resource Management in U.S. Luxury Resorts—A Case Study , 2008 .

[85]  Hokey Min,et al.  Competitive benchmarking of Korean luxury hotels using the analytic hierarchy process and competitive gap analysis , 1996 .

[86]  Hyo Sun Jung,et al.  International Journal of Hospitality Management the Effects of Emotional Intelligence on Counterproductive Work Behaviors and Organizational Citizen Behaviors among Food and Beverage Employees in a Deluxe Hotel , 2022 .

[87]  Heesup Han,et al.  Examining strategies for maximizing and utilizing brand prestige in the luxury cruise industry , 2014 .

[88]  Tianshu Zheng,et al.  An Analysis of Customers' E-Complaints for Luxury Resort Properties , 2009 .

[89]  Nancy L Kondracki,et al.  Content analysis: review of methods and their applications in nutrition education. , 2002, Journal of nutrition education and behavior.