Benchmarking and ranking three hotel groups based on relational-emotional skills of employees

Identifying, comparing, and ranking the likely weaknesses and strengths with relational-emotional skills of hotel employees could be regarded as an intelligent competitive method that paves the ground effectively for developing such skills. The present investigation aims to rank three hotel groups based on their employees’ enthno-cultural skills with guests. To this end, Espinas (two hotels), Parsian (three hotels), and Aria (three hotels) hotel groups were chosen and in order to gather data, self-reported questionnaires were applied. Methodologically, to rank these three hotel groups, an amalgam of Fuzzy, analytical hierarchical process, and structural equation modeling was applied. The results show that the expert samples place more emphasis on Empathic feeling and expression, Empathic perspective taking, Acceptance of cultural differences, and Empathic awareness, respectively. Also, in terms of ethno-cultural skills, Espinas, Aria, and Parsian were ranked, respectively with the final coefficients of 0.3455, 0.3285, and 0.3260. So, it could be argued that there is a slight difference among these three groups when ethno-cultural skills are taken into consideration. It seems this study is the first one of its kind that has ranked hotels based on employees’ such skills.