You operate a luxury hotel in Baltimore that famous celebrities rent for extended periods. The daily price is per room is $1,950. Operating costs average $60,000 per day, regardless of the number of rooms rented. Construct a spreadsheet model to determine the profit if 60 rooms are rented. The manager has observed that the number of rooms rented during any given day varies between 50 and 80 (the total number of rooms available).

a.Use data tables to evaluate the profit for this range of unit rentals.

b.Suppose the manager is considering lowering or increasing the daily price by $100. How will profit be affected? (Hint: use a two-way data table).

Once upon a time a new hotel manager, whose staff was responsible for selling banquets and hotel packages, was highly motivated to take advantage of a year-end bonus program for managers. In order to win the bonus, he needed to bring in new business so he decided to initiate a contest for his sales agents. He announced that he would pay $100 to the agent who had brought in the most new clients by the end of the month. He then sat back in his chair to await the results and decide how he would spend his bonus money. While visions of bonuses danced through his head, his sales agents were busily belly-aching for the following reasons:

(1) They were used to working as a team and resented being encouraged to compete against each other.
(2) In the manager's last contest, a new sales agent had reportedly cheated and "stole" new clients from the old-timers.
(3) The winner of the last contest was paid the prize money several months late, only after she had "shaken" it out of the sales manager.
(4) One sales agent's position had been cut, so the agents felt they were already operating beyond full capacity and working extra hours.
(5) The sales manager had not endeared himself to the agents, and they felt he was just using them to get his bonus.
(6) The sales agents felt as if they were being manipulated and perceivd the $100 bonus as an insult.

Not surprisingly, then, the sales agents decided to ignore the contest. The sales manger was angry when he saw the low level of new business at the end of the month and concluded that the agents were lazy. He told them they were unprofessional and complained about them at staff meetings so that soon everyone in the organization had heard about their "laziness." Old-timers who knew better scratched their heads because they remembered how hard the sales agents used to work before the new manager was hired. Within a few months, some of the agents quit and went to work for a competitor.

Questions:

(1) Should this manager go back to school and learn about the theories of motivation? What mistakes did he make?

(2) Which motivation theories apply to this case? Explain your answer. Does Expectancy Theory apply, and if so, how (explain)? What about Reinforcement Theory or Self-Determination Theory? Be sure to explain your answers.

(3) What do you think the sales manager should have done to try to motivate his sales agents? Relate your motivational strategies to the theories that we have discussed in class.

A resort hotel administrator is assigned to conduct performance reviews of the 47 guest services representatives at the resort, and the length of time that the administrator typically spends doing each of these performance reviews is normally distributed with a mean of 63.9 minutes and a standard deviation of 18.4 minutes. The administrator is scheduled to meet with 7 guest service representatives today.

Standard Normal Distribution Table

a. What is the probability that the administrator will spend an average of less than one hour with each of the representatives?

Round to four decimal places if necessary

b. What is the probability that the administrator will spend a total of more than 7.5 hours with all 7 of the representatives?

Round to four decimal places if necessary

c. Within what range of values will the middle 99% of average times spent with each of the 7 representatives fall?

Range:

to

minutes

Round to one decimal place if necessary

d. What is the maximum total length of time the administrator would expect to spend with all 7 guest service representatives today, with a probability of 0.98?

minutes

Round to one decimal place if necessary

Use the SEM formula and show all work.

How satisfied are hotel managers with the computer systems their hotels use? A survey was sent to 400 managers in hotels of size 200 to 500 rooms in Chicago and Detroit. In all, 101 managers returned the survey. Two questions concerned their degree of satisfaction with the ease of use of their computer systems and with the level computer training they had received. The managers responded using a seven-point scale, with 1 meaning "not satisfied", and 4 meaning "moderately satisfied," and 7 meaning "very satisfied".

a. What do you think is the population for this study? What are the major shortcomings in the obtained data?

b. The mean response for satisfaction with ease of use was 5.396. Find the 95% confidence interval for the managers sampled. (Assume the sample SD = 1.75)

c. Provide an interpretation for your answer in part B.

d. For satisfaction with training, the mean response was 4.398. Assuming the sample SD is 1.75, find the 99% confidence interval for the managers sampled.

e. Provide an interpretation of your answer obtained for part D.

The file Hotel Prices contains the prices in British pounds (about US$ 1.52 as of July 2013) of a room at two-star, three-star, and four-star hotels in cities around the world in 2013.

e. Compute the covariance between the average price at two-star and three-star hotels, between two-star and four-star hotels, and between three-star and four-star hotels.

f. Compute the coefficient of correlation between the average price at two-star and three-star hotels, between two-star and four-star hotels, and between three-star and four-star hotels.

g. Which do you think is more valuable in expressing the relation-ship between the average price of a room at two-star, three-star, and four-star hotels—the covariance or the coefficient of cor-relation? Explain.

h. Based on (f), what conclusions can you reach about the relationship between the average price of a room at two-star, three-star, and four-star hotels?

• Check My Work

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Question 7 of 10

Exercise 12.39

The file Hotel Prices contains the prices in British pounds (about US$ 1.52 as of July 2013) of a room at two-star, three-star, and four-star hotels in cities around the world in 2013.

a. Compute the mean, median, first quartile, and third quartile.

b. Compute the range, interquartile range, variance, standard de-viation, and coefficient of variation.

c. Interpret the measures of central tendency and variation within the context of this problem.

d. Construct a boxplot. Are the data skewed? If so, how?

e. Compute the covariance between the average price at two-star and three-star hotels, between two-star and four-star hotels, and between three-star and four-star hotels.

f. Compute the coefficient of correlation between the average price at two-star and three-star hotels, between two-star and four-star hotels, and between three-star and four-star hotels.

g. Which do you think is more valuable in expressing the relation-ship between the average price of a room at two-star, three-star, and four-star hotels—the covariance or the coefficient of cor-relation? Explain.

h. Based on (f), what conclusions can you reach about the relationship between the average price of a room at two-star, three-star, and four-star hotels?

Round Tree Manor is a hotel that provides two types of rooms with three rental classes: Super Saver, Deluxe, and Business. The profit per night for each type of room and rental class is as follows:

Type I rooms do not have wireless Internet access and are not available for the Business rental class.

Round Tree's management makes a forecast of the demand by rental class for each night in the future. A linear programming model developed to maximize profit is used to determine how many reservations to accept for each rental class. The demand forecast for a particular night is 140 rentals in the Super Saver class, 50 rentals in the Deluxe class, and 40 rentals in the Business class. Round Tree has 110 Type I rooms and 110 Type II rooms.

1. Use linear programming to determine how many reservations to accept in each rental class and how the reservations should be allocated to room types.

2. How many reservations can be accommodated in each rental class?

you are a hotel manager, and are considering four projects that yield different payoffs, depending upon whether there is an economic boom or recession. The potential payoffs and corresponding payoffs are summarized in the following table.

Calculating expected value and standard deviation, and explain what is your preferred project if you are risk neutral? Risk averse? If you could combine project C and D together as one project, how is it compared with project A in terms of return and risks? please show working out and formulas

Reid Harper, the manager at Modix Hotel, makes every effort to ensure that customers attempting to make phone reservations do not have to wait too long to speak with a reservation specialist. Since the hotel accepts phone reservations 24 hours a day, Reid is especially interested in maintaining consistency in service. Reid wants to determine if the variance of wait time in the early morning shift (12:00 am – 6:00 am) differs from that in the late morning shift (6:00 am – 12:00 pm). He uses independently drawn samples of wait time for phone reservations for both shifts for the analysis; a portion of the data is shown in the accompanying table. Assume that wait times are normally distributed.

a. Select the hypotheses to test if the variance of wait time in the early morning shift differs from that in the late morning shift.

• H₀: σ₁² / σ₂² = 1, H_A: σ₁² / σ₂² ≠ 1

• H₀: σ₁² / σ₂² ≤ 1, H_A: σ₁² / σ₂² > 1

• H₀: σ₁² / σ₂² ≥ 1, H_A: σ₁² / σ₂² < 1

b-1. Calculate the value of the test statistic. (Round intermediate calculations to at least 4 decimal places and final answer to 3 decimal places.)

b-2. Find the p-value.

c. At the 10% significance level, what is your conclusion?

• Reject H₀, since the p-value is more than α.

• Reject H₀, since the p-value is less than α.

• Do not reject H₀, since the p-value is less than α.

• Do not reject H₀, since the p-value is more than α.

d. Interpret the results at  α = 0.10.

• The variance of wait time in the early morning shift is greater than that in the late morning shift.

• The variance of wait time in the early morning shift is not greater than that in the late morning shift.

• The variance of wait time in the early morning shift differs from that in the late morning shift.

• The variance of wait time in the early morning shift does not differ from that in the late morning shift.