Tourism, Security and Safety From Theory to Practice

The Hospitality Crisis Management Questionnaire
The practices were used to build a questionnaire that was made up of two parts.
The first part examined the level of importance managers assigned to each of the
21 practices using a Likert scale of 1, least important, to 7, most important. The
second part included questions about the level of actual use for each of the 21 prac-
tices also using a Likert scale ranging from 1, rarely used, to 7, extensively used.
The questionnaire was pre-tested by four experienced executives and then was sent
out to 328 general managers from all of the hotels in Israel registered with the
Ministry of Tourism. To ensure an adequate response rate, an accompanying letter
explained that the questionnaire was sponsored jointly by university researchers as
well as by the Israeli Hotel Association. Additionally, the letter emphasized the
significance of the issue under investigation and promised to release major find-
ings to the respondents upon completion. Finally, a self-addressed stamped enve-
lope was provided to participants. Out of 328 questionnaires, 116 usable
questionnaires were returned, constituting a response rate of 35%. General descrip-
tive statistics for each practice (according to importance and usage) are provided
in Table 5.
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Before we turn to data analysis, it is important to list the propositions that form
the basis of this study. First, in Proposition 1 we assume that there will be a strong
positive correlation between the importance one assigns to a certain practice and
the level of usage of this practice. This is a necessary condition for rational and
coherent crisis management, assuming that managers, through their actions, pur-
sue the practices that they perceive to be important. This normative assumption
forms the basis of the Performance-Importance Model (Martilla and James, 1977)
that was considered to be an effective management tool but lost favor over the
years when other, more quantitative methods became practical with computeriza-
tion (Duke and Persia, 1996). The matching between performance and importance,
or between usage and importance in the current study, is used as a general guide-
line for managerial decisions. This model was employed in the context of the hos-
pitality and tourism industries in different variations (Hollenhorst, Olson, and
Fortney, 1992; Evans and Chon, 1989; Mengak, Dottavio, and O’Leary, 1986).
Israeli Hospitality Crisis Management
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