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Center for Hospitality Research Roundtable Highlights

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The Center for Hospitality Research sponsors industry conferences and roundtables. Conferences include the Cornell Hospitality Research Summit (2012) and QUIS12 (2011). Several industry roundtables are organized each year to bring together top industry practitioners and Cornell faculty members to examine industry issues and trends through lens of research findings. Attendance at the center’s roundtables is open only to center partners and invited participants. This series of Hospitality Roundtable and Conference Highlights offers a comprehensive report on each event’s deliberations. These proceedings may be downloaded by any registered user of this Center for Hospitality Research site. Learn more about the center's roundtables.

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    CHR Analytics Roundtable 2023
    Scher, Emma; McGuire, Kelly (2023-12-11)
    Participants in the 2023 Cornell Analytics Roundtable focused on the changes that will be wrought by the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence applications, such as Open AI and ChatGPT. These industry leaders expect that sophisticated analytics can assist in providing improved operations that better reflect guests’ desires. Although challenges remain, the potential for applying AI to improve operations is considerable. Chief among the challenges are rapidly changing guest expectations and uneven staffing. Both public and private artificial intelligence applications can support hotels’ responses to guests’ changing expectations. Public applications are generally less costly, but the most effective approaches will involve privately developed AI applications. Through all of this, hotel operators and brands must develop new levels of trust so they can work together to apply analytics throughout their operations.
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    Roundtable Recap: Driving Operational Excellence Through Analytics
    Scher, Emma; McGuire, Kelly (2022-09-15)
    The analytics function in hotels is still relatively new. While some hospitality companies began to build out an analytics function earlier, it has only been in the last ten to fifteen years that the majority of industry players have made investments in people and technology to support broader and deeper use of analytics in their organizations. Through the years, industry functions like sales, marketing and revenue management have come together to drive awareness and education across their disciplines, but there has yet to be a similar forum for hospitality industry analytics leaders.
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    12th Annual Sustainability Roundtable Highlights
    Adalja, Aaron; Varney, Jeanne (2022-03-22)
    The Center for Hospitality Research at the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business at hosted its 12th annual Sustainability Roundtable in the fall with the beautiful colors of the season flourishing in Ithaca. Although everyone was not able to gather in Ithaca again this year, holding the event in a virtual format again allowed participants from around the world to dial in to reconnect and engage in meaningful discussions pertaining to pressing sustainability issues.
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    Finding the Balance Between Driving Revenue & Managing Costs
    Vouk, Ira (2021-09-14)
    In July, the School of Hotel Administration’s Center for Hospitality Research (CHR) hosted a virtual roundtable called Finding the Balance Between Driving Revenue & Managing Costs. A group of twenty-three academics and experts from various sectors of the hospitality industry attended the two-hour event. Through moderated discussion, they challenged the industry’s long standing practice of managing top line room revenues, proposed a shift to managing cash flow, and aimed to uncover opportunities for turning talk into action, with their ultimate goal being industry wide implementation of profit management and profit benchmarking.
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    Sustainability in the Era of COVID-19
    Varney, Jeanne; Adalja, Aaron (2021-02-19)
    As with all things 2020, the 11th annual Center for Hospitality Research Sustainability Roundtable took on a distinctively different format, a virtual webinar format. It would have been easy to “take a pass” on holding the Roundtable given the dire state of the hospitality industry and the inability to gather in person. However, even though issues surrounding sustainability may not be at the forefront for operators, brands, or owners of hotels, it is still considered an important pillar in most organizations’ corporate strategy. Therefore, the Center for Hospitality Research at the School of Hotel Administration in the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University, moved forward with hosting the annual Sustainability Roundtable.
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    Insights on Hospitality, Retailing, and Commercial Real Estate: 2014 Cornell Retail Real Estate Roundtable Proceedings
    Lawrence, Benjamin; Liu, Peng (2014-12-01)
    "Undeniably, the retail industry spectrum is broad,” said roundtable chair Peng Liu, as he opened the inaugural retail roundtable, held in New York City in June 2014. An associate professor of real estate at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, Liu added that real estate spans “from the overall economy and retail market trends to technology innovation and big data; and from retail leasing negotiations to shopping center investments and financing. The retail industry is an asset-intensive business with real estate playing a critical role.” Continued growth of internet-based commerce is one source of this phenomenon, and the rise of the internet has also created a new framework for many retailers, in which electronic operations and those at physical stores are blended with each other, as demanded by the customer.
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    Building Service Excellence for Customer Satisfaction
    Withiam, Glenn (2013-03-01)
    The 2012 Cornell Hospitality Research Summit offered a substantial menu of presentations on service excellence and revenue management. Several presenters emphasized the value of satisfied customers in the form of higher occupancy that supports firmer room rates. The presentations focused heavily on strategies for building customer satisfaction and for developing integrated, data-driven revenue management approaches. Most critically, presenters suggested that the hotel industry should integrate technology into customer satisfaction strategies, since technology provides the information that is critical to service excellence. Integrating revenue management more tightly with the hotel’s management strategies will help improve room rates and distribution. In its own right, distribution has become a critical aspect of hotel management.
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    Toward Sustainable Hotel and Restaurant Operations
    Withiam, Glenn (2013-06-01)
    The world tourism industry has moved forward on improving operational sustainability and on reporting the results of those efforts. However, the overall picture is complex, given the difficulty in determining what to report, which benchmarks to apply, and how consumers respond to sustainability reports. Many operators have compiled sustainability statistics up and down their supply chain—given that customers have espoused a broad interest in the industry’s carbon footprint. Carbon is one of the areas that is reported by many operators, as is water conservation. Continuing research will help the industry clarify and report on the industry’s sustainability status, but this remains a work in progress.
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    Hotel and Restaurant Strategy: Key Elements for Success
    Withiam, Glenn (2013-04-01)
    Strategy is the key to success for any hotel or restaurant company, but developing and implementing a strategy is sometimes an elusive goal. A series of presentations at the 2012 Cornell Hospitality Research Summit focused on how to develop and apply strategies in the hotel industry, restaurant industry, and the hospitality industry generally. Perhaps the most important aspect of strategic management is finding an appropriate way to measure whether a particular strategy is successful. Also critical is aligning all stakeholders in a hospitality operation.
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    Critical Issues for Industry and Educators
    Withiam, Glenn (2013-01-01)
    In a concentrated two-day period, the Cornell Hospitality Research Summit 2012 produced over 80 presentations on a wide variety of hospitality-related subjects, all focused on critical issues for the hospitality industry. The conference was highlighted by two keynote panels, which are summarized in this report. On day one, five CEOs examined the top issues for the hospitality industry. Opening day two, five hospitality education deans analyzed how the industry’s rapid change affects college curricula. Given the industry’s many moving parts, specialized disciplines, and parallel enterprises, the overall message emerging from the CHRS is the need to engage all stakeholders in the necessary elements that create success for hospitality enterprises: providing service and facilities that satisfy customers, giving operators the tools to expand revenues, and controlling costs to provide a reasonable return for investors. In the process, hospitality executives and academic researchers presented their research on the many disciplines and issues that come to bear on the contemporary hospitality industry, including customer service, distribution, hotel investment and value, human resources, internet analytics, pricing and revenue management, restaurant service and operations, social media, sustainability, and technology.