Research

CHR Research: Focused on the Industry

The Center for Hospitality Research offers a wide variety of accessible reports aimed at providing specific approaches for addressing industry issues. The reports are written by faculty researchers at the School of Hotel Administration and elsewhere, with a goal of answering specific questions facing the industry. Based on their direct contact with industry leaders, CHR experts explain the implications of their studies for the reader’s benefit. All CHR reports are offered at no charge as a service to the industry.

Submit a Manuscript

Visit the new Research Publications section on the Centers and Institutes homepage to submit a manuscript for publication. Prior to submitting, read the submission guidelines to ensure your manuscript is in the proper format, and email us if you have any questions.

Full Catalogue of CHR Reports

The full catalogue and a searchable database of nearly two decades of CHR reports, including industry tools and roundtable highlights, can be found in the CHR section of the Hotel School’s Scholarly Commons.

Selected Research Reports

Here are summaries of selected research reports by Hotel School faculty. Click through to read the full reports.

Cornell Hospitality Case Study Challenge: Creating a Luxury Villa Resort Brand

As a innovation to engage you in a new way, we invite you to submit a ‘solution’ to a ‘real’ hospitality case study. Below you will find a link to the case study titled Beach Enclave Turks & Caicos: Creating a Luxury Villa Resort Brand.

At the end of the case, you will find 3 possible ‘solution’ options to address the challenge facing the case protagonists. By June 22, in 100 words or less, please tell us which solution you would recommend and why, and give us permission to post your solution to the case. After we receive all your solutions, we will pick a few to post, plus we will post ‘the’ solution picked by the case study protagonists explaining why they chose that one.

In this way, you can test your analysis of this case study, compare it to those who are facing the challenge, and hopefully learn something in the process.

Thank you for your participation,
Chekitan Dev and Laure Stroock

Click here to email your solution to Professor Dev

Read the full case

Equipment Purchases: Putting a Number on It

When hospitality managers price out potential new or replacement equipment, they generally can choose among several different models that could do the job. Sometimes a particular model is a standout, but more often the comparison involves each model’s up-front costs, ongoing running costs, and expected useful life, as well as each machine’s specific features. However, […]

Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking Index 2017: Energy, Water, and Carbon

by Eric Ricaurte

This report presents the results of the fourth annual Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking (CHSB) study, an update to last year’s CHSB2016 study, which was undertaken as a collaborative effort of the Cornell University Center for Hospitality Research, hotel participants, Greenview, and an industry advisory group.

Total Hotel Revenue Management: A Strategic Profit Perspective

by Breffni M. Noone, Cathy A. Enz, and Jessie Glassmire

Hospitality firms are expanding traditional revenue management (RM) practice to focus on customer value and strategic profit management. Participants in series of semi-structured interviews suggested that revenue management is moving away from a sole focus on top-line rooms revenue toward a bottom-line orientation focused on the customer.

The Billboard Effect: Still Alive and Well

by Chris Anderson and Saram Han

As a follow-up on two earlier studies, this report confirms the so-called billboard effect on demand that occurs when online travel agents (OTAs) include a particular hotel in their listings. Even though many guests book directly with the hotel brand, this study’s findings are similar to those of earlier studies which showed that being listed on an OTA site increased reservations through the hotel brand’s site.

Hotel Performance Impact of Socially Engaging with Consumers

by Chris Anderson

Hotels that encourage guest reviews increase their ratings on sites like TripAdvisor and also improve sales and revenue. Using data from TripAdvisor, this study found that hotels that encouraged and responded to guest reviews (using Revinate Surveys) saw increases in their ratings, as compared to their competitive set.

What Matters Most to Your Guests: An Exploratory Study of Online Reviews

by Rohit Verma

Service and room quality are overwhelmingly the most important aspects for guests at high-end properties, based on over 95,000 reviews on TripAdvisor.

The Future of Hotel Revenue Management

by Sheryl Kimes

Slowly but surely, hotels are becoming more strategic with revenue management and are integrating RM into all areas of hotel operations, according to this survey of more than 400 hotel professionals.

Hotel Brand Standards: How to Pick the Right Amenities for Your Property

by Chekitan Dev

Hotels can subject amenities to an analysis of return on investment. In this study, free Internet attracted new guests, but free bottled water was a large factor for returning guests.