How to stimulate employment growth in the Greek hotel industry

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to estimate the intensity of employment in the Greek hotel industry in order to determine how the availability of different facilities in each hotel affects the number of employees and to examine how each firm adjusts its number of employees due to exogenous changes in demand and prices. A unique and confidential primary data set of 3324 Greek hotels, administered between 2008 and 2010, was used and a generalized linear mixed model was implemented. The empirical results indicate that the guest capacity is the strongest factor contributing to employment, but perhaps of greater importance for policymakers are the results regarding hotel quality, whether measured generally by class of hotel and price, or more specifically regarding the provision of restaurants, shops, gyms and conference facilities.