What Do These People Know that You Don’t?

Abstract

On October 6, 2003, the Center for Hospitality Research (CHR) at Cornell University, the publisher of the Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, started requiring that users register to view its Web site content. On its Web site (at The Center For Hospitality Research. org), users can download .pdf versions of Reports, Tools for the Hospitality Industry, Working Papers, Case Studies, and more—all gratis. In the first twelve months, more than sixty-four hundred people have registered, with more than fourteen hundred registering in the month of September 2004. In this editorial, I’ll focus on answering three questions: What brings people to the CHR Web site? Who are these folks? and What do they know that you don’t?