ABSTRACT: (RESULTS FROM A SURVEY ON PERFORMANCE IN ITALIAN LUXURY HOTELS) In the current context, characterized by an increasing attention that management experts pay on the analysis of the determinants of performance, the national and international literature has felt the need to start specific studies on the determinants of the performance in the tourism and hospitality industry. In such background, the main aim of this study is to carry out an analysis of the financial performance during the years 2008-2012 in the luxury hotels in major Italian cities of art, considered a tourist attraction for the destination “Italy” , and to identify the determinants of that performance. To this end, the main equity and economic indicators (EBITDA, ROA , ROE , ROS, net debt , debt/equity ratio, cash flow) have been analysed. These indicators are expressions of the financial performance of 107 hotel facilities, including 5-star and 5 star luxury, which represent 25% of the national total (362 structures). The elements of performance so identified have been correlated with a number of strategic factors, considered by the literature as determinants of performance hotel. In particular, the following variables are assumed as independent variables: the size (measured by revenue, employees and available rooms), location (geographic area belonging to the North, Centre, South and Islands and presence in large cities ), the product system (number of services offered and the type of customer segments followed), the structure of ownership (legal form and belong to a chain), and the degree of experience (years of experience in the hotel industry) . The main findings show the presence of significance for the variable “size”: in particular, the significance is negative with respect to the size measured by the number of employees, and positive with respect to the size measured by the number of available rooms. These findings are apparently in contrast, but they show that the performance of a hotel improves with increasing size, represented in this case by the number of available rooms which, differently from the employees, represent a resource quota to be optimized according to the techniques of yield management.
KEYWORDS: luxury hotels, financial performance, hospitality industry.
