A) A large insurance company offers group disability insurance products to businesses, which in turn offer the product to their employees. Pricing policies to prevent a loss is difficult. Since it is difficult to know exactly which employees are more prone to file claims, it is hard to price policies accurately. If policies are priced too low, high-risk clients will be attracted and losses incurred. If policies are priced too high, not enough clients will be attracted. Compounding this factor is the fact that companies are motivated to exaggerate their safety in order to negotiate a lower price.  

What problem is being described in this scenario?  

What types of activities can the insurance company undertake to distinguish between customers with a low probability versus a high probability of claiming?

B)The large accommodation chains like Marriott, Accor do not run individual hotels themselves but rather lease the naming rights to a franchisee who leases the building from a property trust. What are the main advantages for hotel chains of not directly operating the hotel? What are the main disadvantages of the franchisee not owning the building?   

The food and beverage manager of the Glitz Hotel just got a great deal on beverages for the bar. Instead of buying large 5L containers for $25 each, they instead were able to purchase 1,000 cases of 12-packs of 500ml cans for $26,640. Beverages are served in 500ml servings. Usually, they sell 800 beverages over a weekend, but they actually sold 900 this past weekend. However, 20 customers had to be refunded due to problems with the cans.

Direct labour costs are driven by the number of beverages served. A typical weekend requires four servers each working two 8-hour shifts at $12/hour. At the end of the weekend, actual labour costs were $816.50 for 71 hours.

Required:

A   Calculate the following variances:

Material rate

Material quantity

Direct Labour rate

Direct labour efficiency

B   Briefly explain the variances to the hotel manager, and explain if the variances are somehow interlinked. Assess the special purchase and identify other factors that should be considered.

Suppose that you are responsible for making arrangements for a medical convention and you have been charged with finding a city for the convention that has the least expensive hotel rooms. You have narrowed your choices to Atlanta and Houston. The data set contains a sample of hotel room prices from Atlanta and Houston. Based on the sample data, can you conclude that the mean price of a hotel room in Atlanta is lower than one in Houston? Perform a two-sample t-test with a significance level of α = 0.05. Use Excel to show your work.

1. Create a box plot of the data.

2. State the null and alternative hypotheses. Is this a left-tailed, right-tailed or two-tailed test?

3. Compute the following. Assume unequal variance and df = 66. The t.test() function can be used to compute the p-value directly.

Do you reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis? Whats the conclusion?

Suppose that you are responsible for making arrangements for a medical convention and you have been charged with finding a city for the convention that has the least expensive hotel rooms. You have narrowed your choices to Atlanta and Houston. The data set contains a sample of hotel room prices from Atlanta and Houston. Based on the sample data, can you conclude that the mean price of a hotel room in Atlanta is lower than one in Houston? Perform a two-sample t-test with a significance level of α = 0.05. Use Excel to show your work.

1. Create a box plot of the data.

2. State the null and alternative hypotheses. Is this a left-tailed, right-tailed or two-tailed test?

3. Compute the following. Assume unequal variance and df = 66. The t.test() function can be used to compute the p-value directly.

Do you reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis? Whats the conclusion?

Your professor is going on vacation. He has narrowed down a list of potential hotels, but he is still overwhelmed by the data. He loves great food and wants to do all the activities at the resort.

1. Develop two unique ways to display the data (two unique types of charts) to show him where he should stay.

2. Recommend the best way to present the data. Write a narrative summary of what hotel you recommend based on the data visualization and the tradeoffs that you observe.

The Attached report shows the performance of Hotel XYZ for 2014 and 2015. Hotel XYZ is a luxury resort with a mix of 85% Transient and 15% Group.

After looking at this report, please answer the following questions:

• What was the Total YOY( year over year) growth? Was the growth driven by Room nights? ADR? both?
• Which segment drove this growth or decline? Transient or group?
• Which sub-segment within Transient and Group drove the growth or decline? Please explain both.
• Hotel XYZ overall strategy for next year is to grow rate without significantly increasing room nights. Based on the performance of 2015 and 2014, how will you shift your segmentation in order to achieve this?

Religious Rowan worked for many years for a hotel restaurant as a waitstaff person. The restaurant had a family-style menu and was closed on Sundays. The restaurant was owned and operated by the hotel and primarily served a family oriented clientele. The restaurant was acquired by a national chain that changed the dynamic of the restaurant, making it into a bar and pub that was open 7 days per week.

Religious Rowan is a devout conservative churchgoer and does not believe in working on Sundays, because that is a time for church, nor does Rowan believe in the consumption of alcohol. Rowan told the new employers that due to religious beliefs, working any Sunday shifts and/or taking orders and serving alcohol to clients would be impossible.

The employer agreed that Rowan could always have Sundays off but insisted that Rowan get certified by the state to be able to sell alcohol as that was a new requirement of the waitstaff position. Rowan refused, and because there were always several other waitstaff personnel available that could take and serve alcohol orders, the restaurant said that was fine, because Rowan was otherwise an excellent employee.

Rowan was able to serve for 3.5 years in the same role with the accommodations of not working on Sundays or being involved in selling or serving alcohol without a problem. However, a new restaurant manager came in and determined that in order for the restaurant to improve its efficiency of operations, which was a goal the new manager was hired to implement, Rowan could still skip Sunday shifts but could no longer be accommodated by not participating in the sale of alcohol to customers as that pulled other waitstaff off of their assigned tables and was not perfectly efficient. Rowan refused to get licensed to sell alcohol or to serve it and was subsequently fired for insubordination. Rowan then sued for the failure of the hotel to accommodate her religious beliefs. How should the court rule and why?

Royal Park Ltd is an existing company that has issued previously 300,000 ordinary shares of $8 each and 100,000 5% preference shares of $15 each.

On 1^st January 2019, Royal Park Ltd offered to issue an additional 250,000 ordinary shares for $11, payable in two installments:

• $7 initially on application;
• $4 payable based on calls as required.

Applications for 400,000 shares were received by the closing date of 30^th January 2019.

On 10^th February 2019, shares were allotted, and a refund was made to unsuccessful applicants.

Directors announced on 30^th June 2019 a profit after tax of $900,000.

On 7^th July 2019, the board of directors during the Annual General Meeting announced that the company will pay preference dividends and ordinary dividends of 6.2 cents per fully paid equivalent share from retained earnings.

On 3^rd August 2019, payment was made for dividends declared.

Required:

a) Prepare the general journal entries to record the information above.                   

Narrations are NOT required.

Record the following transactions in the journal of Capital Project Fund and
Governmental Activities. (You must prepare the journal form using Excel)

1. A capital projects fund issued $10,000,000, 5 percent bonds for $10,100,000 to finance the
construction of a little league baseball park. Premiums received are to be used to service the
debt issue.

2. The Parks and Recreation Special Revenue Fund transferred $300,000 for use in construction.

3. A construction contract was awarded in the amount of $10,200,000.

4. A bill was received from the contractor for $5,100,000

.
5. The contractor bill is paid, and 6% retain is withheld.

6. The park renovations were completed and the final bill of $5,100,000 was received. The
contractor bill and retained are approved for payment in full. Total construction expenditures
were allocated as follows: $960,000,000 to building, and the remainder to equipment.

7. The capital projects fund temporary accounts were closed, and the capital projects fund was
closed by transferring remaining funds to the debt service fund for use in debt repayment.

Case 4

When Disney opened its $4.4 billion Euro Disneyland outside Paris, concerns over the park’s impact on French culture were expressed. To begin with, the French dedicate Sundays only to family outings. In addition, they are unaccustomed to snacking and eat promptly at 12:30, which creates bottlenecks at parks and restaurants. Disney learned that French employees objected to providing the friendly greetings and smiles expected of all amusement park workers. They then hired multilingual employees from all over Europe because Disney’s goal was to attract people from all countries of Europe. A complaint of European investors was that rigid U.S. management style did not take into account the values and customs of the people it intended to attract. For example, Europeans often bring their own lunches and do not spend money at the park’s gourmet restaurants and hotels. The park initially lost money after it opened in 1992. Discuss the course of action Disney could take to accommodate the values and customs of the people it hopes to attract.

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