In addition to ICT adoption, hotel productivity can also be influenced by a number of factors such as management style, employee training, customers and marketing, working conditions, and other external factors (Kilic and Okumus, 2005). Broadly, these factors can be grouped into:
(1) management and employee characteristic factors; and
(2) locational factors.
To control for the influences of the employee and management characteristic factors, Sigala (2003) used the approach of collecting and analyzing data from three star hotels only to evaluate the impact of ICT adoption on hotel productivity in the UK.
To control for the influence of locational factors Ham et al. (2005) used hotels located in one city only, i.e. Seoul, Korea.
To control for the influence of locational factors on productivity, we followed the study of Ham et al. (2005) and hotels were chosen from one location – Phuket, an island tourist destination in Thailand. In order to control for the influence of management and employee characteristic factors, we followed Sigala’s (2003) study approach and selected only three star hotels in Phuket.