Purpose -How do we measure the success of a hotel business? What factors determine performances? This paper seeks to explore the responses which researchers and practitioners have given to these questions in the last 20 years. Design/methodology/approach -The paper is based on the analysis of 152 contributions and uses the balanced scorecard as a model to rationalize the main streams of research. Findings -The analysis of literature shows the gradually assumed importance of the balanced scorecard as a satisfactory performance measurement system. The findings related to the determinants of results are instead highly complex and far-reaching. The determining factors are generally looked for within the enterprise. Four main functional research fields have been identified (strategy, production, marketing and organization) and for each one main research goals, findings and open questions are defined. The horizontal axis of the balanced scorecard (customer perspective, strategy and process perspective) is the area of greatest research (over half of the papers). This evidence appears in line with the structural features of the hotel business and with the importance held, respectively, by customer relations and the protection of the efficiency of management processes.Research limitations/implications -The paper shows the main weaknesses and strengths in previous research design in terms of: dependent and independent variables, sample and data sources. At theoretical level, the current research is strongly based on six countries (69 percent of the sample). Given the profound diversity of national contexts, researchers focusing on internal determinants should use external control variables more extensively. Furthermore, some recent subfields appear very fragmented especially in terms of independent variables used. Originality/value -The paper identifies research streams and gaps in the field of hotel performance.

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Tourism systems have been considered more and more in the light of complexity and chaos theories. Most of the work done in this area has highlighted the reasons and the issues for this approach. A steadily growing strand of the recent literature uses it to overcome the problems of a reductionist and mechanicistic view considered unable to provide a full understanding of the structural and dynamic characteristics of tourism systems and specifically of tourism destinations. This paper continues this approach and provides a series of quantitative methods to assess the dynamics of nonlinear complex tourism systems. Design/methodology/Approach: The time series used in the paper contains data collected from a sample of 23 large (four star) hotels located in Milan, Italy. For each structure daily data of occupancy, average room rate and RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Room) were recorded for the period 2006-2009. The daily distributions of these observations are highly skewed, therefore the median of the daily values were considered. This results in three series of 1461 points per type (occupancy, room rate and RevPAR). Findings: The data confirm the complex nature of the destination system and its tendency towards a chaotic state. Additionally, high stability and long memory effects are detected. The outcomes and the implications of this analysis are examined. Research implications: A comparison of the values obtained leads to the conclusion that the series under study has a detectable level of nonlinearity, even if it does not reach the pure chaoticity of the Lorenz attractor. A first conclusion is that, as qualitatively assessed in many similar studies, the tourism destination is a complex system with a tendency to become chaotic. Originality/value: The picture obtained with the analyses conducted can be summarized by saying that the system under study exhibits an unequivocal complex nature. It tends towards a chaotic stage but does so at a slow pace. The stability of the system is quite high: it might be able to resist well transient shocks, but once led into one direction, its long memory characteristics tend to keep it on the resulting path.