Національні особливості організації готельної справи у світовій індустрії гостинності

Abstract

The article defines, analyzes and systemizes national hotel ranking practices with reference to global tendencies in generating a single unified classification system for hospitality business. It underlines that the issues of hotel standardization and ranking are coming forward and gradually becoming as relevant as ever in the context of quantitative and qualitative growth of hospitality industry. Research findings show that global practices include 30 various classification systems. These are based on two different approaches applied for generating hotel rating systems: on the basis of ranking standards defined by the bodies of national administrations and on the basis of standards system offered by the professional associations of hoteliers and hospitality business expert bodies. The article examines in depth and systemizes characteristic aspects of hotel classification systems in the countries that are inside the top ten by the tourism competitiveness index (Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Spain, Great Britain, the USA, France, Canada, Sweden, and Singapore). We conclude from the research that because of the complexity and diversity of standards, applied to rank the quality of hotel services worldwide, it turns out to be rather troublesome to find a common denominator that would allow to associate different countries in different locations with absoluеely different economies, different levels of demographic, social and cultural development. Consequently, it is almost impossible to work out a single unified classification system to categorize hotels. In terms of primary and auxilliary hotel services the article offers and reasons an option to unify service standards in the sector of auxiliary services. This may be seen as some form of compromise that will at least roughly link nation specific aspects of hotel service arrangements in different countries and standard requirements of customers in terms of relevant satisfaction of their expectations according to the money spent on a hotel star-rating.