Lodging Industry
OVERVIEW

Introduction

This tutorial is designed to help you begin researching the Lodging industry. The Lodging industry encompasses all aspects of providing shelter away from home, including hotels, motels, inns, bed & breakfast establishments, timeshare & vacation rental properties, campground & RV parks, and so on.

According to the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA), in 2009 there were more than 50,000 properties in the United States offering more than 4.8 million guestrooms, and total industry revenue that year topped $127 billion.
 

Information on the Lodging industry runs the gamut from news and brief articles for practitioners to scholarly books and articles for academic researchers. This tutorial will help you find the right information at the right time.

Topic Selection

A good topic for an academic project is one that interests you, fulfills the parameters of the assignment, and is researchable.  The following guidelines may assist you in choosing an appropriate Lodging topic:

Try to choose a "manageable" topic that is not too broad or too narrow for the assignment.

For example, guest satisfaction in hotels is probably too broad of a topic for a ten-page research paper.  You would quickly be overwhelmed with thousands of relevant books and articles on such a topic, way too many to use in a ten-page paper.

On the other hand, the impact of clean bed sheets on guest satisfaction at Quality Inn establishments is probably too narrow for such a paper.  You would have difficulty finding information in trade or scholarly books and articles on such a specialized topic.

In this scenario, you might eventually refine your topic to something more manageable, such as the impact of cleanliness on hotel guest satisfaction.  A librarian or professor can also help you identify suitable topics in your area of interest.

Identify concepts associated with your topic: these are relevant main keywords and their synonyms and near-synonyms.  For example, for our topic of  the impact of cleanliness on hotel guest satisfaction, you might identify concepts such as:

• Concept 1: hotel... lodging
• Concept 2: satisfaction... happy... pleased
• Concept 3: clean... cleanliness... dirty

These keywords will be helpful when you search for information on your topic in library catalogs and article databases.  As you do more research, you may add or delete keywords (or even entire concepts) from your search.  Throughout the process, try to remain flexible and be willing to alter the focus of your topic as you learn more about it.