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In this article, the innovative twostage procedure of Simar and Wilson (2007) is used to estimate the efficiency determinants of Portuguese hotel groups from 1998 to 2005. In the first stage, the hotels' technical efficiency is estimated with Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), in order to establish which hotels have the most efficient performance. These could serve as peers to help improve performance of the least efficient hotels. In the second stage, the Simar and Wilson model is used to bootstrap the DEA scores with a truncated regression. The article contributes to the hotel industry literature by adopting a somewhat novel approach that has never been applied to this industry despite its managerial implications. The motivation for the analysis lies in the fact that during the period under analysis Portuguese hotels faced a number of threats. Knowing what the best practices are is then good news for managers and institutions.

Purpose – This paper aims to shed some light on the role of boards of directors in improving internet financial reporting (IFR) quality. Design/methodology/approach – The empirical study uses a data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach on a sample of 32 French firms belonging to the CAC40 index as of December 2007. Findings – The empirical results show that 28 percent of the sample firms are located on the efficiency frontier for all IFR components. These firms' boards of directors and their committees seem to act as effective monitors of top executives, which improves the quality of the firm's disclosure policy through, inter alia, an increase in the level of IFR. Under efficient board control, firms develop user-friendly and readily accessible web sites disclosing the information required by various stakeholders. Additional empirical results show that 46.9 percent of the sample firms lie outside the efficiency frontier for all IFR measures, suggesting inefficiencies in the composition, structure, and/or functioning of their boards of directors. The inefficient monitoring and oversight of top executives by the board allowed for lower levels of IFR quality for nearly half of the CAC40 firms in 2007. Research limitations/implications – The study uses only CAC40 companies, which are relatively large and financially healthier than the average French firms, exhibiting diffuse ownership structures, with heavy foreign shareholding, and investing more in communications. This may limit the generalizability of the results to other French listed firms. Originality/value – The paper extends the literature on corporate governance and voluntary corporate disclosure by investigating the association between board characteristics and IFR quality. It examines the relative performance of the board directors in improving IFR policy.

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Economic characteristics of home countries can cause considerable variations in the tourism demand. For example, the average level of expenditure per tourist varies from one origin to another and these variations may alter overtime. Thus different tourist nationalities are associated with different level of expenditures and risks. Therefore strategies aimed at minimizing the variations may become an important issue for the policy makers. In this paper, we aim to use the productivity measurement theory in a mean-variance space to a French region (Nord Pas-de-Calais) by introducing the utility function in a mean-variance framework. With this method, we can calculate the optimal portfolio share for each origin and give some useful political advices to the policy decision makers to improve the performance of the tourist sector.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the managerial efficiency and the customer satisfaction of Parisian boutique hotels by using the multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods. Design/methodology/approach In the first stage, hotels’ managerial efficiency is assessed by data envelopment analysis to establish which hotel has the most efficient performance. In the second stage, the customer satisfaction of these hotels is estimated by the ELECTRE (ELimination et Choix Traduisant la RÉalité) method to assess the hotel’s ability to satisfy their customers. Findings Empirical results show that there is an inverse relation between customer satisfaction and ability to maximise the Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR). In other words, trying to improve efficiency implies a reduction in guests’ satisfaction (and vice versa). Research limitations/implications Therefore, through this research the authors can realise that hotel managers should give more attention to customer service because it has a more direct and important impact on customer satisfaction. It also positively impacts on resource management. However, there are some limitations to this study. First, this study only focuses on 12 hotels. Because the data set is very confidential, it is very difficult to have a bigger sample. Then, the evaluation is based on 2014 figures only. It could be interesting to know their performance for previous years to understand their evolution. Finally, it is necessary to know the percentage of direct reservations for each hotel. For instance, if a hotel is relying too much on online travel agents (i.e. Booking.com, Expedia, etc.), it needs to pay a significant amount of commission to these companies. As a result, it could have a good RevPAR but might pay a huge commission (for example, 20 per cent for most of sites) at the end. In terms of perspectives, it is necessary to conduct a more extensive research to test the hypothesis in a different context. Additionally, the data were taken for a single period of time. It will be very interesting to create a panel of hotels and collect data over a period of time (Barros, 2005; Barros and Santos, 2006; Barros and Deike, 2008). This would enable to better understand the relationship between managerial efficiency and customer satisfaction in a long-term prospective. Originality/value This paper presents the relationship between the managerial efficiency and customer satisfaction in Parisian boutique hotels context. Study suggests that in service industry, increase of firm’s efficiency could negatively impact the guest satisfaction. Therefore, through studying the authors can realise that why hotel managers should focus on customer satisfaction, which attributes play the vital role in customer satisfaction and how to optimize their resources. One of the originalities of this paper is that the authors use the customers’ feedback from the UGC websites (Trip Advisor and Booking.com) as the performance evaluation indicators for customer satisfaction. The data are very confidential and hard to get.