The place of staff in mid-range hotel operations in France: the effects of staff engagement at work on quality perceived by customers.

Summary In a competitive environment and constantly evolving lifestyles and consumption patterns, the hotel offer and the services developed around accommodation and catering as offered today no longer always guarantee either the attractiveness or the profitability necessary for the sustainability of the sector's business model. The modeling of a "new" hotel industry is necessary in order to meet customer expectations while taking into account operating costs and constraints, particularly "hotel service" which plays a determining role in the production and distribution processes of the service as well as in the quality perceived by the customer. The determinants of hotel operational performance have evolved through different cycles transforming the "modern" into the "traditional".This thesis begins by exploring these evolutions in mid-range hotels in France through a field study conducted in twelve hotels as well as at the headquarters of the AccorHotels group in France. This step, questioning the future of the mid-range hotel industry in France, raised research questions about the importance of personnel in the production of mid-range hotel products and services in our society, and more broadly about human capital (in the microeconomic sense) in the hotel industry. We thus decided to explore the links between personnel and hotel operational performance. The latter is composed of economic results, quality perceived by customers and parameters related to the hotel context. Based on an in-depth study of all methodologies and measures of human capital, we chose to measure it via employee commitment at work, using a sample of 146 mid-range hotels (representing 3,740 employees) of the AccorHotels group in France. We also measured, for each of these hotels, a set of contextual data (size, location, customer mix, level of digitalization, renovations, ...), operating income (Earnings Before Interest Taxes), revenue per available room (RevPar), and a measure of customer perceived quality (Reputation Performance Score).This thesis shows the existing links between operating income per room, customer perceived quality, and employee work engagement. This thesis shows that, as a significant antecedent of guest perceived quality (itself an antecedent of operating income), employee work commitment is a key determinant of better performance for mid-range hotels in France. To go further, the identification of a typology of hotels based on these links makes it possible to simultaneously obtain a global and segmented vision of the mid-range hotel industry in France and the role of employees in the acquisition of high performance by type of hotel.