Hospitality and Tourism Management

Tourism is an activity that can have a truly major impact on sustainable development. In this book, similarities and differences between international tourists from China, France and the USA are investigated. Moreover, the significant role that culture holds in affecting travellers' buying behavior has led growing number of researchers to study differences, particularly between Western and Asian countries. This book undertakes a critical review of these and relevant issues affecting the reliability and validity of cross-cultural research (CCR). In addition, small countries' exceptional natural beauty and unique cultural resources often look towards tourism development as an economic growth strategy. However, communities often disagree on the nature of development strategies. The authors of this book propose a standard methodology on sustainable tourism for application in tourism destinations and enterprises in all the business cycle of tourism activity. Furthermore, due to the affect of globalization and the rapid changes that occur in global higher education during the past decade, the concept of internationalization in higher education institutions has been widely discussed. This book reviews various aspects of internationalization and discusses its applications/implications in relation to the hospitality higher education. Other chapters provide an exploratory analysis of gender differences in perceptions of managerial work, investigate destination benchmarking in the context of measuring customer satisfaction as an output of performance improvement, and provides a theoretical framework that investigates the fundamentals of discounting and empirically assesses the efficacy of the discounting process in the lodging industry.