Hospitality Industry & Education
Back at Les Roches (Switzerland) he had the opportunity to participate within a group of Laureate international institutions on the harmonization of curricula regarding Hotel & Tourism Management. Serving as faculty member of the Laureate Education Hospitality Convergence of Curricula and Harmonization of delivery working group helped me to better understand the importance of updated courses curricula. This process was instrumental in the NEASC/CIHE accreditation process that the school finally obtained. His current research has three papers in the pipeline within the education area.
The piece of research which he is taking more of his time is co-authored with Dr. Kirsten Tripodi (PhD), Assistant Professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, International School of Hospitality & Tourism Management, also President of NENA (North American Chapter of CHRIE – Council of Hotel, Restaurant & Institutional Educators). The paper is under the title: An Investigation of I-CHRIE Hospitality Programs Work-Based Experiential Learning Best Practices and we expect to be published by the end of 2015. This research project has evolved and is benchmark different Hospitality Management (HM) programs in higher education institutions with on-campus operations of various types – hotels, restaurants, catering, meeting and conventions etc. – that integrate hospitality students’ with enriching academic experiences. The purpose of this project is to portrait best practices in this area in order to help the development of hospitality programs. We will be inquiring about work-based experiential learning and on campus enterprises (hotels, restaurants, dining halls, catering operations, even farmer’s markets) that are used within the context of a class for real-life experience and practice.
The other one he has presented in the 2016 Spring edition of the JMU Diversity Conference as work in progress and it specifically pertains students diversity and inclusion. This paper is developing and tries to tackle literature over the topic of promoting positive inclusion and cross-cultural interaction of international students. It offers campus administrators and instructors (targeted readers) particular course of actions to promote positive cross-cultural interaction.
One book chapter he has co-written with Prof. Reg Foucar-Szocki (EdD) and provides an overview of the industry exploring the careers in Hospitality Management (HM), highlighting JMU degree in HM. The book is under the topic “Why Study Hospitality” and the manuscript is about to be published still this year.
In the last 2 years, with the support of JMU College of Business REU, Reg and he picked up on experiential learning project and started a new project titled “Geo positioning Hotels on campus Experiential learning“. The deliverable of this research will be a map of the hotels on campus affiliated with hospitality academic programs across the USA with a Geo positioning study of its location. The problem we are tackling is the definition of a campus hotel environment and looking into its development over time. This study has a database with variables within 4 categories: demographic data, which includes city population, age, gender etc.; real estate data, which includes car parking availability, number of front facades, city parcels classification (commercial versus residential); commercial data indicating hospitality and other points of interest such as restaurant and bars but also gas stations, banks, schools, other relevant public spaces; educational data, indicating the university population, private or public/state, school, department, number of students etc. As the inauguration of the 231 room’s Hotel Madison (as a new amenity on the JMU campus) took place in 2018, the importance of this project is driven from a desire to understand competitive advantages from a developer and for an academic learning is paramount. With previous research work we found 42 hotels, the lens now shift into mapping these and crossing with other maps e.g. campuses maps, urban concentrations or highways, better understand its implementation using as tools ArcGIS and QGIS.
Hospitality Revenue Management
His latest piece of published research was a book chapter published by well recognized academic publisher Palgrave Macmillan titled “Revenue Management and its application within the Hospitality Industry: History and future development.” The main purpose of this review is to map some of the factors which contributed to the advent of revenue management systems in hospitality. This paper reviews the theoretical basis of Revenue Management science and its application from a historical perspective. In the Revenue Management application context, there is a special focus on its application to the hospitality industry. In addition, a few routes and trends on the future of hospitality revenue management systems are explored. This paper contributes to the research on understanding the revenue management adoption by the hospitality industry.
Miguel has also been involved in the Revenue Management Education (RevME) certification and book which is being developed in since 2019 and to be published soon.
Hotels Websites key value attributes
Also in Switzerland, apart from the daily teaching hotel school work, he was involved with a research project in conjunction with two professors at Universidad Europea, Madrid on the Iberian hotel companies’ web sites. The purpose of this research study was to determine the key attributes of value in the Iberian (Portuguese & Spanish) Hotel chains web sites, critical to attract bookers, increase traffic and optimize service-client relationships. The research group had in mind that a poor web site is a substantial (and increasing!) lost opportunity cost. These attributes are thought to analyze European hoteliers’ investment on online distribution channel. This allowed the group to take conclusions on how efficiently do they manage e-information for ex. How efficiently do they sell their rooms, give and collect customers’ information (link to CRM?), avoid complaints or increase Customer Loyalty Programs. The research group has conducted a questionnaire and based on this studied the biggest 50 hotel companies established in Spain (#35) and Portugal (#15). This piece of research was bi-lingual published research and is available here.
Marketing & Customer Satisfaction
During his Master studies at Cornell, under the direct supervision of Marketing Research Professor Wayne Neu, a group of three graduate colleague students including Miguel conducted a study for the Hospitality Research Center at Cornell University School of Hotel Administration. The researchers approached 150 subscribers of the magazine in Canada and the United States with an easy-to-complete survey to determine the characteristics of a hospitality magazine that were most important to business practitioners, and better understand readers’ perceptions of the Cornell Quarterly that would assist to increase satisfaction and subscription rate. At the end of the semester the students gave a presentation to the magazine editorial staff fully answering their client key questions:
1. What do readers value in a business magazine?
2. What is subscribers’ perception of the Cornell Quarterly Magazine?
3. What factors are going to be decisive to renew or cancel the subscription?
Another highlight of his graduate learning experience, was Miguel’s Honors’ Monograph on “Marketing Strategies for Senior Living Facilities,” a Masters Independent Study supervised by Prof. Judy A. Siguaw MMH (Fall 2001-Spring 2002).
He is was a member of the HOSTEUR Editorial research review board, at the International CHRIE – The Council on Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Education magazine.
Miguel is the co-editor of the School of Hospitality Sports and Recreation Management bi-annually Newsletter and contributor to the JMU school website.