Operational performance analysis of the hospitality industry in the Sultanate of Oman

The present study aims to provide reliable measures of efficiency of the hospitality sector in the Sultanate of Oman besides investigating technical sources of operational inefficiency. The investigations will be conducted from two different perspectives. First, the current system used by the Ministry of tourism to assess hotels performance will be evaluated. Second, new models, based on state of the art approaches, will be developed taking into consideration the Omani context. Furthermore, these models aim to evaluate the ground of a confrontation of the quality of hotel services with the available assets. Therefore, the research focus of this study is two-fold: (1) set a frame for hospitality benchmarking in the Sultanate of Oman, based primarily on relative efficiency evaluation of hotels. (2) provide policy makers with potential alternatives for sector improvement through identifying specific operating factors to explain efficiency variations. To the best of our knowledge, there is no previous study on this specific topic in the context of the Sultanate of Oman.