Operational Issues in Tourism and Hospitality Management

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TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY MANAGEMENT
Tourism and Hospitality Management
Name of the Student
Nam of the University
Author Note

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TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY MANAGEMENT
Operational Issues
Management is not only about planning, it is also about identifying the issues addressing
during the operations. In the tourism and hospitality industry, there are lots of challenges which
must be fulfilled for smooth development. One of the most common issues is the issue in the
sales department. It is not only the duty of the front office but also the marketing and sales
department to manage the sales (Baum et al. 2016). The issues in the sales department occur
mainly in the transfer of booking information from the reservation to the receptionist. It usually
happens due to overbooking, long waiting and others.
Another issue in the tourism and hospitality industry is the shortage of skill and labor. It
is primarily due to the part –time job base of the staffs who struggle with the long working hours,
unsocial working time, and excessive pressure (Brown, Thomasand Bosselman2015). Hence, it
becomes difficult to manage the schedule with the part –time working. Sometimes, it leads to the
turnover of the employees. With the shortage of skills and labor, there is gap in the services too
and customer dissatisfaction generates from here.
The Human Resource Issues
In the tourism and hospitality industry, high employee turnover rates often lead to poorly
trained staffs composition. When a hotel faces short-term solution to high turnover rates, there is
a tendency to hire new people and engage them into service instead of training them properly. It
might provide short-term solution to the organization and resolve the staff shortage issue, but
ultimately affects the business indirectly (Ling, Liuand Wu2017). An employee without proper
training distorts the business reputation unknowingly. It can also disturb the customer

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TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY MANAGEMENT
satisfaction and cause needless hazards and frustration in the workplace. Hence, it is a serious
issue in this industry which must be taken into considerations.
Another major issue in the human resource is the problem of theft in the tourism and
hospitality industry. The staffs in a hotel have open access to the products of the company. In a
restaurant, the items are such as alcohol, food, decorating objects and money too (Santhanam et
al. 2018). A dishonest employee can easily steal the items. Hence, it is important to check
regularly the inventory levels having monitored the behaviors of the employees ensuring that the
business is not suffering from the employee theft. The employee theft can leave greater impact
on the profits of the organization and the financial stability too.
The Financial Issues
In the hospitality and tourism industry, most of the hotels can access he STR reports, the
data sets, the guest satisfaction surveys and financial data from multiple properties. Since this
particular industry claims to have data, the major challenge is how that data can be best
deciphered to determine the story being told (Zaitseva, Goncharovaand Androsenko2016). A
centralized platform can make this easier to use the operational management. An overload of the
data can even dismiss the efficiencies of the analytical tools and business –intelligence
Another challenge comes with the Enterprise Resource Planning. Every hotel/restaurant
tries to build a separate enterprise back-office system in order to manage the accounting and
financial aspects. The challenge comes with the implementation of scalable solutions which are
affordable too and free from extra expenses.
The products and market related issues