Title: A Research Study To Assess The Critical Factors That May Affect The Growth And Success Of Themed “Romantic Hotels” In China

Underpinning research questions:

State the overall aim (general): To find out and assess the critical factors that may affect the growth and success of themed “Romantic Hotels” in China

Objective 1: To get a clear understanding about the “Romantic Hotels” s market and operation conditions in China

Objective 2: To understand the business management related theories such as marketing strategies used in hotel operation

Objective 3: To summarize the factors such as economic factors, cultural factors, social factors and environment factors that affect the “Romantic Hotels”  operations in China

Objective 4: To find out the relationships between different factors affecting the success of “Romantic Hotels” in China

Objective 5: To provide effective suggestions for successful operations of “Romantic Hotels” s in China based on the summarized critical factors

Contents page:

Chapter 1: Introduction

This chapter mainly discusses about the background information of romantic hotels markets and operation conditions in China. Meanwhile, this chapter introduces the research objectives and rational for this study.

Chapter 2: Literature review

This chapter will mainly the theories about customer’s consumer behaviors in China hospitality industry and also analyzes the theories about the factors including, location, environment, culture, society situations and services for the operations of romantic hotels in China.

Chapter 3: Research methodology

This chapter will mainly analyze how to use the method including quantitative method such as questionnaires to collect data and how to use the software such as Excel to process the data and analyze the collected data.

Chapter 4: Findings and discussion

This chapter will mainly analyze the findings based on collected data in Chapter 3 and then conduct the discussion these findings.

Chapter 5: Recommendation and conclusion

This chapter will mainly make recommendations and conclusions on the success of “Romantic Hotels” s in China on the  basis of findings in Chapter 4.

Recognition of associate theories:

Theme hotel:

The concept of theme hotel is the result of more successful theme restaurants, which first rises in Las Vegas, Orlando, etc. In a western country, theme has more than 50 years of history, while in China has just started (Goldman, et.al, 2002). But as a result of China's hotel industry is maturing stage, the product homogeneity induces very competitive prices, coupled with the diversification of consumer demand, personalized and experience tourism development and so on, all these bring new takes to the development of China's hotel industry. In addition, overseas franchising brands of hotel industry in recent years, continuously achieve large markets in Chinese large and medium-sized cities, has brought about great challenges to the development of hotel industry in China (Lee, 2006). And the emergence of theme hotel provides a new way to solve the problem including consumer demand for personalized product homogeneity, the process of tourism experience and participate in international competition and broaden new horizons for the development of hotel industry in China (Andrawis and Atiya, 2009). As a branch of them hotel, the “Romantic Hotels”  gradually captures public’s attentions with the  development of theme hotel (Dwyer and Forsyth, 1996). The romantic hotel is around the couples’ consumption psychology and consumption behavior to provide services (Pullman and Rodgers, 2010). Giving priority to room design, decoration in a "romantic, warm, passion" style so as to advocate love living concepts and management style to attract customers. In the hotel all the details are carefully designed, fascinating (Arnett, et.al,  2002).

Hospitality:

As the main infrastructure of tourism, quantity and quality of service in hospitality is one of the important symbol of the development level of tourism industry, and hotel industry is an important part of the tourism industry (Bitran and Gilbert, 1996).

The hospitality industry is to an important source to create tourism revenue. Statistics show that both at home and abroad, the hotel industry revenues generally accounts for a large proportion of the total of tourism industry (Qing and Liu, 2013). In 2013 in China, the 9751 national three-star hotels generate total revenue of 98.316 billion RMB, an increase of 7.5% over the previous year, accounting for more than 20% of the tourism income of 488.2 billion RMB (Qing and Liu, 2013). Tourists not only accommodate at the hotel, but also purchase tourist commodities and other products within hotels, and bring a lot of incomes for the hotel. Hospitality in the process of operation also make many related industries greatly developed, which creates a considerable "multiplier effect" (Kim and Olson, 2013).

Hospitality industry's development not only brings new culture and new way of life, and hotel in the process of business innovation and development has brought new management concept and management system (Boyd, 2003). A region or a city’s hospitality industry constitutes an important part of the local investment environment, the level of its development to a certain extent, marks a direct impact on merchants recognition of local investment environment. Accommodation service is the basic form of hotel product (Lee, 1999), but with the expansion of the industry and the diversification of market demand, the hotel also provides food, entertainment, shopping, transportation, business, meeting, and a series of leisure services, including butler service, day care services, etc., to form the hotel product comprehensive characteristics (Cook, 2009).

Business  growth:

Business growth is like the growth of the people, is a change from the “qualitative” status to the “quantity” states, and business growth is the process that constantly promotes perfection of the system and function of internal organizations (Pullman and Rodgers, 2010) to promote enterprise system constantly expanding, the body metabolism, constantly adapt to the environment, and the process of the benign interaction between with the environment. The performance of business growth includes specific performance for the expansion of enterprise scale, the continuous improvement of the internal structure and mature, the enterprise function of optimization and so on. Firm growth has periods, experts and scholars believe that there is a life cycle stage, expansion stage, mature period, aging period, etc. for business growth (Gee, 2004). The hospitality industry currently is in the expansion stage in China and has great development potential and growth opportunities in Chinese market.

Keywords:

1. Theme hotel
2.  Hospitality
3. Business growth
4. Critical analysis

Research methods that could be used:

To conduct the research, this study will mainly apply two kinds of research methods. The first research method is document or literatures survey method. This research will use the document or literature survey method to collect the secondary data about the romantic hotels operation and market information in China (Anderson, et. al, 2010). Specifically, this study will use the reference or literature search method and the method of retrieval tools to collect second hand data. This study will find the related romantic hotels information through libraries and network to understand the market and research in China.

Secondly, this research will also apply field survey method to collect the information from consumers of romantic hotels in China. The researcher will conduct the interviews about the several friends in China to get more information about the romantic hotels market information and operation information in China. At the same time, this research will use the questionnaires to distribute 300 questionnaires on the Chinese main websites including Sina.com, Baidu.com and Sohu.com to get the evaluation data of consumers of romantic hotels in China so as to know the needs of the consumers’ attitude, consumption level and related factors for romantic hotels. To apply the  investigation method is for the sake of more real, objective and accurate grasp of market demand so as to get better information to accurately analyze the conditions and critical factors affecting the operations of romantic hotels in China. 

After gathering the data, in order to improve the data quality and use value, this study will also process the quantitative data, include: audit the quality of collected data. The audit method includes measuring audit and logical audit, this research will use a combination of both to review and process the quantitative data of romantic hotels. The study of collected data and information would also be evaluated, including data sources and its itself evaluation (Gray and Laidlaw, 2004). After the quality audit and evaluation on data, this research will classification and summary the collected quantitative data. This research will use five kinds of manual summary (row notation, folding, table, login, CARDS), select the table method and the login method to process the data. And finally, this research will use the graphic method to present the collected data.

List potential research gathering techniques:

1. Literature search method
2. Retrieval tools method
3. Interview
4. Questionnaire

Appropriate forms of analysis

1. Resource

This research will both have PC and word resources including books and online articles and journals as well as online data.

2. Analysis

This research will mainly use EXCEL software to process the collected data and conduct analysis.

 

Reference

Goldman, P., Freling, R., Pak, K. and Piersma, N. (2002) Models and techniques for hotel revenue management using a rolling horizon. Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management. 1(3): 207-219.

Pullman, M. and Rodgers, S. (2010) Capacity management for hospitality and tourism: A review of current approaches. International Journal of Hospitality Management. 29(1): 177-187. Bitran, G.R. and Gilbert, S.M. (1996) Managing hotel reservations with uncertain arrivals. Operations Research. 44(1): 35-49. Andrawis, R. and Atiya, A. (2009) A new Bayesian formulation for Holt's exponential smoothing. Journal of Forecasting. 28(3): 218-234.

Lee, M.J. (2006), Analytical reflections on the economic impact assessment of conventions and special events, Journal of Convention and Event Tourism, 8(3), 71-85.

Anderson, D.R., Sweeney, D.J. and Williams, T.A. (2010), Quantitative Methods for Business, 11th ed., South-Western Cengage Learning, Mason, OH.

Downs, C. W., & Hazen, M. D. (2004). Assessing organizational communication. New York: The Guilford Press.

Gray, J., & Laidlaw, H. (2004). Improving the measurement of communication satisfaction. Management Communication Quarterly, 17(3), 425-448.

Heskett, J.L., Jones, T.O., Loveman, G.W., Sasser, W.E., & Schlesinger, L.A. (1994). Putting the service profit chain to work. Harvard Business Review, 72(2), 164-174.

Arnett, D.B., Laverie, D.A., & McLane, C. (2002). Using job satisfaction and pride as internal-marketing tools. Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, 43 (2), 87-96.

Gee, C. Y. (2004) International hotels: development and management. Educational

Institute, AH&MA, East Lansing, MI

Hunt, J (2010) China. International Tourism Report 3, 23-48

Kim, C. Y. and Olson, M. D. (2013) A framework for the identification of political

environmental issues faced by international hotel chains in newly industrialized countries in Asia. International Journal of Hospitality Management 12 (2), 163-174

Boyd, M. (2003). China looks to incentive tourism. Tourism Asia, 10-14

Choy, D., Guan, L. D., & Zhang, W. (2006). Tourism in P. R. China: marketing trends and changing policies. Tourism Management, 7 (3), 197-201

Cook, D. (2009). China’s hotels: still playing catch-up. The Cornell Hotel & Restaurant  Administration Quarterly, 30 (3), 64-71

Qing, L., & Liu, J. (2013). Assessment of hotel rating system in China. Tourism

Management, 14 (6), 440-452