The perceptions of frontline employees towards hotel overbooking practices: exploring ethical challenges

Abstract

This paper explores the ethical perceptions of frontline hotel employees towards hotel overbooking policies. Thus far, the majority of literature has focused on the ethics of overbooking from the guests' perspective. This research finds that frontline employees form an ethical ideology based on their perceived need to deliver hospitableness to the guest. Overbooking is viewed as a threat to the host-guest relationship. However, if frontline employees can offer relevant compensation to guests and give advanced warning of an outbooking scenario they perceive that an ethical balance between hospitableness and commercially-driven overbooking practices can be achieved.

Unifying Futures and Spot Market: Overbooking-Enabled Resource Trading in Mobile Edge Networks

“…Although overbooking may seem risky, it is a common technique widely adopted in commercial domains such as airlines [9], hotels [10], bandwidth reservation [11], [12], etc. For instance, aiming to maximize the occupancy (and thus revenue), airlines routinely overbook tickets by ensuring the maximum number of passengers on a flight; otherwise, flights often depart with up to 15% seats empty (without considering overbooking), and thus incurs unsatisfying resource utilization and economic losses [8].…”

“…Overbooking: "Booking" refers to a presale manner (rather than spot trading), where "overbooking" presents the presale of a volatile commodity or service in excess of actual supply, which has been shown to provide substantial utilization and profit advantage under "no shows" (some consumers will cancel the trading of requested service) [8], which, however, has been neglected in most previous mentioned works (namely, these works mainly consider equal-booking where the amount of resources for sale equals to the actual supply). The widespread adoption of overbooking techniques focus on many fields such as airlines and hotels [9], [10], spectrum reservation [11], [12], storage market [29], network slicing [30]- [32], cloud computing [7], [33]- [36], and fog computing [37]. Specifically, Liu et al in [11] proposed an opportunistic link overbooking scheme for an edge gateway to improve its link efficiency, and developed an integrated analytical framework for determining the suitable link overbooking factor.…”

Digital Disruption Solution for Airlines in Brazil

“…However, overbooking cannot be treated as a common contingency, as passengers often feel betrayed and deceived by the companies (Wangenheim & Bayo, 2007;Büsing, Kadatz & Cleophas, 2019;Matikiti, Roberts-Lombard, & Mpinganjira, 2019). Haynes & Egan (2020) examined the ethics of overbooking from a guest's perspective exploring compensation options to guarantee satisfaction and customer loyalty (Hwang, & Wen, 2009).. If frontline employees can offer appropriate compensation to guests and give a warning of an outbooking scenario they perceive, then an ethical balance between hospitableness and commercially driven overbooking practices can be achieved.…”

The Relationship between Selective Staffing, Work Environment and Employee Turnover in the Malaysian Hotel Industry

“…Hence, the noteworthiness of HR is amazingly significant for the hospitality industry especially the hotel industry since it depends upon service quality, customer satisfaction and loyalty, competitiveness, and definitive execution (Betts, 2020). Regardless, managing employees effectively is likely the greatest challenge looked by hotel managers nowadays (Haynes & Egan, 2020).The challenges of managing human resources have been broadly talked about within the hospitality management (Naik &Kanade, 2019;Tuan, 2018;Kusluvan et al, 2010)especially concentrating on employee turnover (Santhanam, Kamalanabhan, Dyaram, & Ziegler, 2017;DiPietro & Condly, 200;Guthrie, 2001;Huselid, 1995;Koys, 2001;Kuria, Alice & Wanderi, 2012;Pare & Tremblay, 2007;Pizam& Thornburg, 2000) and staff shortages (Brien, Thomas, & Brown, 2017;Davidson, Guilding & Timo, 2006). Additionally, a combination of other human-related issues could be recognized, for illustration, the difficulty of pulling in and holding staff, managing an assorted workforce, low distinction and status of hospitality employments, maturing populace and drawback of more seasoned workers, the ought to prepare employees in modern communication and information technologies, HIV/AIDS issues, business law, minimum compensation and prohibitive government policies (Kusluvan, Ilhan, &Buyruk, 2010).…”