ABSTRACT
Productivity is one of the most challenging topics of interest in the hospitality industry. It has been written about in depth in the USA (Mill 1989) and the UK (Johns 1996; Jones 1990). There have also been an increasing number of empirical research studies on the topic. Many have commented on the importance of managing labour productivity (Mill 1989; Johns 1996; Riley and Jones 2000), largely because labour represents such a large percentage of the cost of running a hospitality operation. The average full-service hotel spends between 32% and 36% of revenue on direct labour, so improving labour efficiency can have a significant impact on profit improvement and is a key performance area in hotels (Johnson and Ball 2006; Pickens 2006). Despite this, there is still much that is not known about the extent to which any operation’s performance can be judged efficient or its labour force productive.
