Correspondence: Peter Jones, Faculty of Management & Law, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH, Surrey, UK. E-mail: p.jones@surrey.ac.uk

¹is ITCA Chair of Production and Operations Management in the School of Management at the University of Surrey. He has researched productivity for a number of years as part of a research programme designed to understand and improve operational performance in the hospitality industry. Since 1981 he has written or edited 12 textbooks on operations management, published numerous articles in a wide range of operations management and hospitality journals, and presented over 90 conference papers throughout the world.

²worked in the hotel industry for a number of years in India before recently graduating with his MBA from the University of Surrey.

Received 2 March 2009; Revised 2 March 2009; Published online 20 April 2009.

Abstract

Evidence from a number of studies suggests that productivity in hotels is largely driven by factors outside the control of the manager. This paper questions this assumption by examining the level of productivity in the housekeeping departments in a chain of 45 hotels. The paper reviews the concept of productivity and the issues relating to its measurement, before reviewing previous studies of productivity in the hotel sector. A number of factors are identified that appear to affect productivity performance. These are then investigated through analysing one year's data from a web-based labour scheduling system that records every hour worked by every employee in a chain of hotels. This kind of data has not been used in any previous published study, which unlike studies based on Data Envelopment Analysis, enables specific performance indices or benchmarks to be identified. The paper concludes that there is no significant difference in productivity levels according to the size, location, demand variability or age of the hotel, thereby refuting evidence from some prior studies. It concludes that managers have much more control over productivity performance than previously thought.