Data Analysis in the Hospitality Industry

Based on a series of lectures given to students taking a BA or HND in Hotel and Catering Management, the aim of this book is to provide an understanding of the methods used in quantitative analysis and give an indication of their scope of application.

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This book is based on a series of lectures given at Portsmouth Polytechnic over the period 1980 to 1987 to first-year students taking a BA or HND in Hotel and Catering Management. In the beginning the emphasis of the course was on the methods used in quantitative analysis but successive groups of customers quickly made it clear that it was the applications that interested them. At the same time, they became aware that, generally though not always, more realistic applications do not have simple solutions. The result is a compromise that is intended to provide an understanding of the methods and give an indication of their scope of application, without becoming submerged by the inevitable detail of a real problem. As the references given in this book show, there is an increasing interest in the applcation of quantitative methods in the hotel and catering industry. This trend seems bound to continue and it is hoped that this book will provide readers with the basic knowledge required to appreciate the methods used and the results obtained and in particular, to understand the limitations of the methods and the validity of the results.