Hospetitiveness – the Empirical Model of Competitiveness in Romanian Hospitality Industry

Our interest is focused on an important sector of the national economy: the hospitality industry. The paper is the result of a careful analysis of the literature and of a field research. According to the answers of hotels' managers, competitiveness is based mainly on service quality and cost control. The analyses of questionnaires and dedicated literature lead us to the design of a competitiveness model for hospitality industry, called "Hospetitiveness – The empirical model of competitiveness in the Romanian hospitality industry". The model has three levels: the first level (the base) is represented by decisive factors of competitiveness: human resources, innovation, services and costs, which influence all hotels' operations. The second level consists in the inclusion of competitiveness factors’ attributes in the organization’s processes and operations, in order to reach the objectives and obtain competitive advantage. This is the level where all the competitiveness factors are transposed in objective measures, in order to make them easily understood by the employees. The third level illustrates the dimensions of competitiveness as results of the impact of the decisive factors on the organization’s internal processes and operations. These dimensions are: customer satisfaction, market position and internal and external social responsibility. The model is dynamic, being the starting point for specific models in hotel management (e.g. business or seaside hotels’ management), and also the base for a best practices guide that translates competitiveness factors into key competitive advantage.