The Cheyenne Hotel in Big Sky, Montana, has accumulated records of the total electrical costs of the hotel and the number of occupancy-days over the last year. An occupancy-day represents a room rented for one day. The hotel’s business is highly seasonal, with peaks occurring during the ski season and in the summer.

Required:

1. Using the high-low method, estimate the fixed cost of electricity per month and the variable cost of electricity per occupancy-day. (Do not round your intermediate calculations. Round your Variable cost answer to 2 decimal places and Fixed cost element answer to nearest whole dollar amount.)

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?

One of the key questions decision makers must ask when considering whether to invest in a new technology is “what will the return on investment (ROI) be?” In other words, will this technology pay for itself, and when?

Consider an amusement park called FunTown. Funtown is a popular amusement park but because of long entrance lines to the park, yearly attendance has been flat (no increase or decrease) for the last 3 years. Unless something is done to alleviate the long entrance lines, attendance is not expected to increase for the next 3 years.

Funtown is considering implementing a handheld scanner system that can allow employees to walk around the front gates and accept credit card payment and print tickets on the spot. With the new scanner system, Funtown anticipates selling 2.4 million tickets in the next year (year 1), with a 4% increase (over the previous year) for the 2 years after that (years 2 and 3). Without the handheld scanner, Funtown anticipates selling 2.4 million tickets per year for the next 3 years.

The handheld scanner system is not without cost. Entrance to Funtown costs 35 dollars. For every ticket sold with the online scanner system, there is an expense of 6% of the ticket price.

It will take a while for the new system to catch on. Funtown estimates that 10% of year 1 attendance tickets will be sold using the online scanner. They also estimate that will grow to 20% and 30% in years 2 and 3 respectively.

Your assignment is to do a 3 year analysis of this proposal and determine if and when this scanner system will pay for itself.

Specifically, you are to calculate the net revenue of Funtown for each of the next 3 years, with, and without the new scanner system, and calculate the difference.

PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

Julie Miller supervisor of housecleaning for Hotel Minto, was surprised by her summary report for March given below.

Julie was disappointed. She thought she had done a good job controlling housekeeping labor and towel usage, but her performance report revealed an unfavorable variance of $12,111. She had been hoping for a bonus for her good work, but now expected a series of questions from her manager.

The cost budget for housekeeping is based on standard costs. At the beginning of a month, Julie receives a report from Hotel Minto’s Sales Department outlining the planned room activity for the month. Julie then schedules labor and purchases using this information.

The budget for the housekeeping was based on 8,000 room nights. Each room night is budgeted based on the following standards for various materials, labor, and overhead:

With 8,900 room nights sold, actual costs and usage for housekeeping during April were:

Required:

You have been asked to re-evaluate Julie’s performance.

Prepare a report to Julie’s boss demonstrating and explaining your findings; including your suggestions for performance evaluation methods and measures in the future.

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.

Arts Centre Parking

The following information is required for Questions 5–8:

It is said that "Australia has one of the world's great opera houses; unfortunately, the outside is in Sydney and the inside is in Melbourne."

The opera house in Melbourne is called the Arts Centre, and it has 250 seats. Demand for a typical opera is Q = 400 – 2P, but there is only demand so long as the opera patrons can park for free beneath the Arts Centre. (Opera patrons are lazy, and don't like to walk. They are also selfish, so each patron drives in a car all by himself or herself.)

There are 300 parking places beneath the Arts Centre, and the parking is owned and operated by the Arts Centre. Suppose there are no other uses for the parking places.

What price do you charge for the opera tickets? Answer is $100

For Questions 6–8 assume that the Arts Centre is very conveniently located in the middle of town, so its parking lot is very popular. They can sell as many parking places as they want for $20 per night. However, a Melbourne city ordinance prohibits them from charging more than $20 per night for parking. The system at the Arts Centre is to allow opera patrons to park for free, if they show their ticket, and to allow a certain number of "outside people" (non-opera-attenders) to park at $20 per night.

Q1) How many parking places do they set aside for "outside people", on an opera night?

Q2) Suppose that the very popular opera "Carmen" is showing tonight. Demand for that opera is Q = 600 - 2P.
How many parking places does the Arts Centre allow "outside people" to use, now?

Q3) Now what is the price of an opera ticket?

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?

ERF Enterprises provides comprehensive AV services to institutions in the State of Colorado. Their customers fall into 3 categories - Hospitals, Schools and Hotels

ERF's Executive Vice President of Operations, Jennifer Murray, has noted that the Hotel business, while profitable, seems to take a lot of ERF's support resources

Ms. Murray has asked for your support in getting a better picture of the profitability of each of the 3 lines of business

She provides the following data on the support activities of ERF for a 12-month period

The average support-resource consumption by category is provided below:

Excluding the cost of support, the average profitability of each category is given below:

Q1. Provide Ms. Murray with a an activity-based analysis of the profitability of each category of customer

Q2. After reviewing the data and analyses, what advice may be given to service personnel to improve profitability of the category with the lowest profit (after support cost)?

Is there some unusual explanation for high activity levels which could be further investigated? What creative questions could be asked?          

The Appalachian Bear Center (ABC) is a not-for-profit organization located near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. ABC’s programs include the rehabilitation of orphaned and injured black bears, as well as research and education about Appalachian black bears. ABC provides the most natural environment possible for rehabilitating black bears before their release back into the wild. Katie Settlage performed a study to learn more about the Appalachian black bear population in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She and a team of researchers used a sample of 68 black bears in the park and took measurements such as paw size, weight, and shoulder height.

Answer the following questions based on this data. As always, you must show all work and formulas used in order to receive full credit. Round all decimals to three places unless otherwise noted.

1. In the sample of 68 bears, 40 were males. Construct an 80% confidence interval for the population proportion of bears that are males and write a statement interpreting the interval. (12 points)

Questions 2 and 3 refer to the following information regarding the 28 female bears from the study. For these 28 female bears, the sample mean is 75.679 cm and the sample standard deviation is 7.592 cm. Assume the data is normally distributed and the sample is randomly selected.

2. Use the female sample to make an interval estimate of the mean shoulder height of female bears. Construct the confidence interval estimate using a 95% confidence level and make a statement interpreting this interval.

3. Using a 99% level of confidence, construct the confidence interval for the population standard deviation based on the female data and make a statement interpreting these intervals.