Local and International Trends in Hospitality and Gastronomy

Research methodology

After the brief review of recent hospitality trends, the following research questions were formulated by the author:

• 
  Outsourced operation of the food and beverage outlets is a recent trend, especially among the international hotel chains: is this trend already present in the case of Hungarian hotels?
  
• 
  In which food and beverage outlet types is outsourcing of food and beverage service profitable for the hotel according to the opinion of the managers/hotel operators in the case of Hungary?
  

The research method applied for this explorative study is qualitative research method. Qualitative research is applied in cased of relatively low sample research method that does not seek quantification and generalization. According to his purpose, qualitative research exploratory research, where the essence of problem solving, is to understand phenomena. In order to reveal the actual situation and manager view in Hungary, it is essential to understand how hospitality managers relate to the subject, whether they are at all concerned, what opinions and knowledge they have about outsourcing.
The author would like to draw attention to the drawbacks of qualitative research, that the result will not be representative, however, the positive aspect to be emphasized, is that it is open and flexible, which helps to enforce the freedom of the researcher, is able to understand the formation of opinions on a specific topic/theme. During the analysis upscale/luxury hotels were mainly taken into account in the case of Hungary and a Delphi expert study was carried out among food and beverage managers and hotel managers. The questionnaire was carried out in three rounds, between March and May 2017. The questionnaire was available on LinkedIn, an online professional community and business platform. The
respondents were hotel managers/food and beverage managers/supervisors having experience working in five star/luxury hotels. 64% of the respondents work currently in Europe.
In the case of this thesis, the aforementioned trend review collection served as the starting point, followed by the formulation of the problem, according to which the research question was formulated. During the formulation end evaluation of the Delphi process, Figure 2 was applied.
With regard to points (3) and (4), in the first round of the Delphi questionnaire, those experts were collected in a group, who possess relevant knowledge and expertise may be relevant in finding answers to the research question. Expert sampling was applied, the basis for the sampling criterion was determined from the point of view of the relevant topic and the purpose of the research. Along the lines of this logic in the first round the questionnaire set out to explore the current of hospitality industry in Hungary, in the second round open and closed questions were combined, and in the final round, a final agreement was searched about the long-term profitable food and beverage outlets in the case of hotel outsourcing.

Figure 2. Delphi survey process

Edited by the author, based on Riggs (1983)