Do hotel managers have sufficient financial skills to help them manage their areas?

Abstract

Purpose-The purpose of this article is to investigate whether managers in hotels have sufficient financial skills to help them effectively manage their areas, within the context of a changing industry. Design/methodology/approach-Additional findings from a series of recent research projects amongst hospitality financial controllers have been utilised to give an alternative viewpoint to those found from literature. Findings-A review of literature identified a strong need for managers to have financial skills, but there is little recent evidence as to whether they actually hold these skills. Hotels are changing fast with pressure to maintain profits resulting in new approaches to management, but there is concern that the development of systems has meant an over-reliance on these to control costs. Financial controllers consider that departmental and general managers do not have enough business skillsand finance skills in particular-to optimise costs and revenues and hence maintain profits. Research limitations/implications-The findings were based on a fairly small sample of respondents, utilising projects designed for alternative purposes. However, the findings raise questions as to the trust that hotel companies have placed in their systems and approaches. Practical implications-If the concerns expressed by controllers are not addressed by hotels, then inevitably standards of control will suffer, costs will rise and hence profitability will be negatively affected Originality/value-There has been little recent consideration of the realities and the impact of systems changes on management, the majority of earlier projects considering the need for skills rather than the actual possession of these amongst managers.

A comparison of graduating seniors who receive job offers and those who do not according to hospitality recruiters’ selection criteria

“…Managers in this study believed that certain interpersonal skills, problem solving abilities, and selfmanagement skills are most important for a successful hospitality career. Burgess (2000Burgess ( , 2007 focused the discussion on financial management in hotels and asserted that financial management skills are important to hotel managers.…”

Bridging the gap: An examination of the relative alignment of hospitality research and industry priorities

“…For example, given the challenges presented to the tourism and hospitality industry to attract and retain good employees, extensive research, in the hotel context, has been undertaken to investigate employee satisfaction and its relationship to factors such as organisational trust (e.g., Chathoth et al, 2007), intention to leave (e.g., and work-family conflict (e.g., . In addition to undertaking research that is concerned with developing insight into the attitudes of the hotel workforce, other HR issues explored required skills (e.g., Burgess, 2007;Baum, 2006) which has also led to research that is focussed on educational/curriculum development (e.g., Raybould and Wilkins, 2006;Alexander, 2007;Breakey and Craig-Smith, 2007) or training and development (e.g., Kline and Harris, 2008;Poulsten, 2008). Consideration of the implications of HR to organisational strategy has also been investigated from a performance measurement perspective (e.g., McPhail et al, 2008) as well as how it contributes to a competitive advantage (e.g., Collins, 2007;Connolly and McGing, 2007), albeit to a lesser extent.…”

Management Practices of Club Financial Executives

“…Studies on labor strategies (Lv, Xu, & Ji, 2012) to address or measure labor burnout, work stress, and depression (Karatepe & Ehsani, 2012;Tiyce, Hing, Cairncross, & Breen, 2013), compensation (Torres & Adler, 2012;Venegas, 2010;Venegas, 2013;Venegas & DeFranco, 2008), and job satisfaction (Schmidgall & DeFranco, 2004;Wolfe & Kim, 2013) are all available. From the macro view of developing competent international management (D'Annunzio-Green, 1997) to the micro view of education and training needs of the hotel financial controller in management (Burgess, 1994), or even the flip side of financial skills development of hotel managers (Burgess, 2007), all these studies provide different snapshots of the hospitality industry in general and partially of the club segment on its management. While the compensation studies are on financial executives, studies on how financial executives manage are not readily available.…”