This study reports productivity of authors, universities, and countries using research contributions to top hospitality and tourism journals. Since the new millennium, hospitality and tourism research has seen tremendous expansion and diversification. To understand hospitality and tourism research in the first decade of the new millennium, this study examined articles published in the six most commonly cited hospitality and tourism journals: To provide more insight, this study classified and analyzed articles from the selected journals into various research agendas. A total of 2,834 research articles in these journals from 2000 to 2009 revealed the 50 most prolific authors and universities and the 20 countries of residence of these authors and institutions in the field of hospitality and tourism. In addition, overall productivity rankings for 100 hospitality and tourism authors and universities and 30 countries are presented. The results of this study provide valuable and detailed information for academic stakeholders such as current and prospect graduate students, faculty, and academic administrators.

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Franchising captures a sizeable portion of the restaurant industry and plays an important role in its growth. However, despite the importance of franchising to the restaurant industry, little has been done to investigate the characteristics of restaurant firms that engage in franchising. This study intends to explain what characteristics of restaurant firms relate to franchising. Accordingly, a logistic regression model was developed to identify variables that best differentiate restaurant franchisor firms from nonfranchisor firms. The results indicated that (a) the degree of geographic dispersion and involvement in foreign countries increases the probability of becoming a restaurant franchisor; (b) as a restaurant firm ages, the probability of franchising decreases; and (c) the decrease of specific knowledge requirements increases the probability of franchising. This study also provides suggestions to help restaurant firms considering franchising for their operations.

The study investigated the role of communication satisfaction as a moderator strengthening the effect of three components of the expectancy theory (expectancy, instrumentality, valence) on work motivation in a hotel setting. High and low communication satisfaction groups respond differently to expectancy, instrumentality, valence, and work motivation. Employees who are highly satisfied with communication respond more positively toward motivation components, and they are more likely to perform well in their job when they are motivated. However, a series of confirmatory factor analyses of metric invariance indicated that there is no significant difference in the moderating effect between high and low

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A marketing campaign focusing on the health attributes of targeted entrée items was not successful in boosting sales. Sensory attributes (i.e., taste, quality, and appearance) appear to be more influential to meal selection.

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This study attempts to verify the moderating roles of the customer-firm relationship with regard to customers' responses to service failure and recovery. The hypotheses were tested based on the responses from 480 full-service restaurant customers, using t-tests and moderated regression analyzes. The findings indicate that in general, high relational customers tend to have high recovery expectations but, at the same time, respond more favorably to recovery efforts than do low relational customers in both low and high recovery situations. These results appear to stem from the wider zones of tolerance of high relational customers than those of low relational customers. This study demonstrates the importance of adopting the concept of zone of tolerance for accurate understandings of customers' responses to service failure and recovery.