Managerial Perspective of Learning Process on the Performance of Registered Hotels in Nyeri County, Kenya

Abstract

Tourism and Travel sector is essential in growing the economies and social well-being of nations. One of the sub-sector in the center of advancing this course is hotel industry as it plays a major supportive role of ensuring comfortable stay for the visitors through meeting their gastronomical, lodging and other related auxiliary needs. However, the industry is usually faced with performance issues both from internal and external influences such as economic crisis and sparling operation costs. Itthus adopts strategies to improve on its performance and mitigate on emerging issues and challenges. Value co-creation is one of such strategy which aims at promoting collaboration among parties involved in direct interactions so as to generate mutual value. It comprises different components among them the learning process where parties involved in value co-creation learn from each other thereby enriching the entire process. However most of researches in this area have focused on education sector possibly due to affinity between learning and education. It is such gaps that has informed the current study whose objective is to explore from a managerial perspective the effect of learning process on the performance of registered hotels in the Nyeri County. The research specifically focused on the sections of hotel that are deemed to be directly involved with the customer: F&B, Room Division and Sales and Marketing. The study used a descriptive research design and had a target population of the 61 registered hotels in the county of which only those with bed capacity of 25 and above (34 hotels) were considered as practically, they were the ones expected have been implementing the strategy. Census method was adopted in selecting the sample size due to the low number of registered hotels while purposive sampling was utilized in picking the respondents from the selected hotels. Questionnaires were used for data collection and were piloted to ensure validity and reliability during data collection. The Cronbach‟s Alpha coefficient for the instrument was 0.802 which was above 0.7 thus ascertaining that the instrument was reliable for the data collection process. Data collected was analyzed descriptively and inferentially with the aid of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Diagnostic test was carried out before multiple regression analysis was carried out to measure the relationship between the dependent variable and independent variables. The findings indicated that learning process(β1 = 0.533 p< 0.05) had a positive relationship with significant effect on the performance of registered hotels and explained 45 per cent variance of the performance. Based on these findings, learning process was found to have a significant positive effect on the performance of registered hotels in Nyeri County thus concluding that hotels that

promoted the process were likely to have better performance outcomes as this would maximize value co- creation activities.