Tourism, Security and Safety From Theory to Practice

Analysis of the Crisis Management Questionnaire Findings
In our attempt to design a tool for measuring hospitality crisis management prac-
tices, we offer a list comprising items that were generated from the literature as
well as from in-depth interviews. The 21 items (or practices), measured first in
Table 9
Rotated Component Matrix for Product of Practice Importance and Practice
Usage
Practice
Component
1
2
3
4
19
0.809
0.006
−
0.021
0.145
21
0.782
0.014
0.009
0.184
20
0.640
0.205
0.110
0.149
18
0.572
0.113
−
0.091
0.023
13
0.538
−
0.056
0.276
0.052
2
0.469
−
0.312
0.069
−
0.070
12
0.459
0.197
0.279
−
0.003
4
0.328
−
0.040
0.216
−
0.247
16
0.064
0.852
−
0.047
−
0.075
15
0.131
0.840
−
0.082
0.113
14
0.129
0.675
−
0.057
0.120
6
0.011
0.479
0.277
−
0.142
17
0.312
0.420
0.074
0.262
5
−
0.122
0.381
0.037
0.070
8
0.164
−
0.050
0.750
0.218
7
−
0.015
−
0.036
0.675
0.079
11
−
0.035
0.358
0.615
−
0.159
3
0.202
−
0.021
0.456
0.004
9
0.113
0.026
0.319
0.834
10
0.061
0.093
0.065
0.817
1
0.268
0.084
−
0.306
0.472
Note:
Extraction method: principal component analysis. Rotation method: Varimax with Kaiser
normalization. A rotation converged in five iterations.
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terms of importance and later in terms of actual usage, were grouped into four
major aspects: human resources, marketing, maintenance, and government. The 21
practices were used as the basis for a questionnaire that was completed by 116
Israeli executives. From the analysis, we can see that the most important practice
for managing hospitality crises is an industry-wide demand for a grace period on
local (municipality) payments. This practice is also the most widely used. The
practice that ranked lowest in terms of importance is the replacement of high-
tenure employees with new employees. Also in term of usage, this practice scored
second lowest. Clearly, the Israeli hospitality executives feel more comfortable
turning, in an organized way, to the local government for help rather than replac-
ing their workforce. This probably reflects both the dominant managerial culture
as well as some past experiences regarding the effectiveness of various practices.
It is also interesting to note that in almost all cases, the average ranks assigned
to the importance of practices are higher than the average ranks for usage. Only in
four cases, freezing pay rates, price drop on special offers, reducing list price, and
the practice of cost cuts by postponing maintenance to the engineering systems
(practices 4, 9, 10, and 16, respectively), the average means for usage were slightly
higher than the means for importance. We can therefore speculate that in most
practices there is a hidden agenda that possibly more could be done. On the other
hand, the four practices that are more used than important may reflect some
ambivalent feelings about their effectiveness (or importance). This speculation is
interesting, especially in light of the fact that practice 9: Freezing pay rates, scored
the highest correlation between importance and usage; followed by practice 4:
Cost cuts by postponing maintenance to the engineering systems; practice 16:
Reducing list price: and practice 10: Price drop on special offers. One possible
explanation is that these four practices have been extensively used in past crises
and are almost automatically considered when a new crisis arises. Given the criti-
cism of Mansfeld (1999) about the lack of learning from past experience, it is
doubtful that Israeli hospitality executives actually examined the effectiveness of
these four practices when the crises were over.
Proposition 1 stated that there will be a strong positive correlation between the
importance executives assign to a certain crisis management practice and the level
of usage of this practice. Clearly, Table 5 illustrates Pearson correlations ranging
from 0.32 (the lowest) to 0.74 (the highest). All correlations were positive, sup-
porting Proposition 1. Thus it may be argued that this basic correspondence
between importance and usage constitutes a necessary condition for rational and
coherent crisis management.