Cross-Cultural Aspects of Tourism and Hospitality

A Services Marketing and Management Perspective

Erdogan Koc

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000172065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Cross-Cultural Aspects of Tourism and Hospitality is the first textbook to offer students, lecturers, researchers and practitioners a comprehensive guide to the influence of culture on service providers as well as on customers, affecting both the supply and the demand sides of the industry – organisational behaviour, and human resource management, and marketing and consumer behaviour.

Given the need for delivering superior customer value, understanding different cultures from both demand and supply sides of tourism and hospitality and the impact of culture on these international industries is an essential part of all students' and practitioners' learning and development. This book takes a research-based approach critically reviewing seminal cultural theories and evaluating how these influence employee and customer behaviour in service encounters, marketing, and management processes and activities. Individual chapters cover a diverse range of cultural aspects including intercultural competence and intercultural sensitivity, uncertainty and risk avoidance, context in communication, power distance, indulgence and restraint, time orientation, gender, assertiveness, individualism and collectivism, performance orientation, and humane orientation.

This book integrates international case studies throughout to show the application of theory, includes self-test questions, activities, further reading, and a set of PowerPoint slides to accompany each chapter. This will be essential reading for all students, lecturers, researchers and practitioners and future managers in the fields of Tourism and Hospitality.

Chapter 1

Introduction: international and global nature of tourism and hospitality

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

•understand the international nature of tourism and hospitality operations;

•explain the intertwined and dyadic perspective of management (human resource management and organisational behaviour) and marketing (consumer behaviour and services marketing);

•explain service characteristics in relation to tourism and hospitality;

•understand the influence of culture on the design and implementation of marketing mix elements and service quality dimensions;

•develop a service blueprint for a tourism or hospitality service by taking dyadic cross-cultural aspects of tourism and hospitality services into account.

Introduction

This introductory chapter sets the scene for the whole of the book by explaining the importance and potential of international tourism and hospitality activities and the influence of culture on customers, employees, managers, and systems. As increasingly more and more international customers, employees, and managers with different cultural backgrounds participate in tourism and hospitality activities, a cross-cultural study of the dyadic aspects of their interactions is of paramount importance in a dynamic and fast-growth market. As the setting up and maintenance of tourism and hospitality businesses require a significant amount of financial resources, the stakes are high and complexities often result in business failures.

Disneyland Paris (Euro Disney), which was the second-largest construction project at the time of its opening in 1992 (Hartley, 2006), can be given as an example. Euro Disney (see the Euro Disney case study in Chapter 2) made a total loss of two billion dollars at end of its third year (Matusitz, 2010), as result of several business and management mistakes, and the inability to understand the cultural environment, customers, employees, managers, and systems. Primarily, the Euro Disney management ignored the basic quote “When in Rome do as the Romans do”, and had an ethnocentric approach in its operations in France. This was partly due to the overconfidence emanating from the success of the company’s previous project, Tokyo Disneyland, opened up in Tokyo, Japan in 1982.

Activity

GENE (Generalised ethnocentrism) scale

You can measure whether you are ethnocentric or not by doing the following test.

Important Note: Throughout the book there are several self-report scales/tests like the one below. Please save your personal test score records (especially the ones relating to cultural awareness, cultural competence, ethnocentrism, cultural intelligence, etc.) in order to make comparisons later. After studying the whole book, you are advised to go back and redo all these tests once more. By doing this you can compare these scores with your earlier ones. This is expected to help you to see the changes that have taken place as a result of the learning experience.

The Intercultural Communication Competence Scale Instructions

Please read the statements below and indicate how much each statement describes you by assigning a value, in the blank section on the left of each statement, from 1 to 5 as follows:

(5) strongly agree (4) agree (3) neutral (2) disagree (1) strongly disagree

Please keep in mind that there is no right or wrong response for each statement. In order to avoid biased responses, you are recommended to record your initial response without elaborating too much on the statements.

______ 1. Most other cultures are backward compared to my culture.

______ 2. My culture should be the role model for other cultures.

______ 3. People from other cultures act strange when they come into my culture.

______ 4. Lifestyles in other cultures are just as valid as those in my culture.

______ 5. Other cultures should try to be more like my culture.

______ 6. I’m not interested in the values and customs of other cultures.

______ 7. People in my culture could learn a lot from people of other cultures.

______ 8. Most people from other cultures just don’t know what’s good for them.

______ 9. I respect the values and customs of other cultures.

______ 10. Other cultures are smart to look up to our culture.

______ 11. Most people would be happier if they lived like people in my culture.

______ 12. I have many friends from other cultures.

______ 13. People in my culture have just about the best lifestyles of anywhere.

______ 14. Lifestyles in other cultures are not as valid as those in my culture.

______ 15. I’m very interested in the values and customs of other cultures.

______ 16. I apply my values when judging people who are different.

______ 17. I see people who are similar to me as virtuous.

______ 18. I do not cooperate with people who are different.

______ 19. Most people in my culture just don’t know what is good for them.

______ 20. I do not trust people who are different.

______ 21. I dislike interacting with people from different cultures.

______ 22. I have little respect for the values and customs of other cultures.

______ YOUR TOTAL SCORE (Please calculate your score as follows).

Scoring:

Step 1: Please add your scores for items 4, 7, and 9.

Step 2: Add your scores for 1, 2, 5, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 18, 20, 21, and 22 (note that not all items are used in scoring).

Step 3: Subtract the sum from Step 1 from 18 (i.e., 18 minus Step 1 sum)

Step 4: Add the results of Step 2 and Step 3. This sum is your generalised ethnocentrism score.

Higher scores (e.g., scores above 55) indicate a higher level of ethnocentrism.

Source: Neely (2002).

Used with permission given by the author (James W. Neuliep).

However, unlike the French, the Japanese did not ask or expect anything to be Japanese, that is, adjusted to their culture and habits. Disneyland did not have to make significant cultural considerations in Disneyland Tokyo as the Japanese wanted to have a truly American experience.

The case of the Mardan Place Hotel, Antalya, Turkey can also be related here as a major failure in tourism and hospitality. The failure of this hotel is also primarily due to ignoring the cross-cultural aspects of tourism and hospitality. The Mardan Palace Hotel, which was described as Europe’s most ostentatious resort hotel at the time of its opening in 2009, could not pay its debts and went bankrupt in 2015. The total investment made for the project at the time was 1.5 billion dollars. The cases of Disneyland Paris and the Mardan Palace Hotel demonstrate how failure to understand customers, employees, managers, and systems can produce disastrous results for tourism and hospitality businesses. Research shows that the failure rate in tourism and hospitality is quite high. For instance, in the hospitality industry, almost 30% of new restaurants go out of business in their first year of operation (Parsa et al., 2005; Fields, 2014).

Given the frequency and intensity of interaction (both between customers and staff, and among the staff themselves), and the tangibility, inseparability, heterogeneity, and perishability nature of tourism and hospitality services, the need to understand the influence of culture in the design and management of tourism and hospitality businesses is extremely evident. Based on this background, this chapter explains the international and multicultural nature of tourism and hospitality operations, and how culture may influence the efficient and e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction: international and global nature of tourism and hospitality
• Chapter 2 Culture: a cross-cultural perspective
• Chapter 3 Intercultural competence, intercultural sensitivity, and cultural intelligence
• Chapter 4 Culture and context in communication
• Chapter 5 The influence of indulgence and restraint on tourism and hospitality
• Chapter 6 Power distance as a cultural variable
• Chapter 7 Uncertainty avoidance as a cultural variable
• Chapter 8 Masculinity versus femininity, gender egalitarianism, and assertiveness
• Chapter 9 The influence of individualism and collectivism on tourism and hospitality
• Chapter 10 Performance and humane orientation as cultural variables
• Chapter 11 Time orientation as a cultural variable
• Chapter 12 A review of Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner’s cultural dimensions
• Chapter 13 Conclusions
• Index