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Type of Submission

Refereed Article

Abstract

In many hospitality and tourism programs students are usually required to take only the most basic finance course. This can leave them drastically under prepared for real world situations. Hospitality and tourism is the world’s single largest industry and probably one of the industries most affected by foreign exchange movements. This exposure to foreign exchange movements is magnified by the discretionary nature of hospitality and tourism spending, making the profitability of hospitality providers very sensitive to changes in the exchange rate. This paper explores the effect, if any, of a change in the dollar value of the following five currencies – UK Pound, Euro, Canadian Dollar, Japanese Yen and Mexican Peso, on the hotel occupancy in 7 major U.S. tourist destinations – Orlando, Los Angeles, Washington DC, New York, Orlando, San Francisco, Miami and Las Vegas. We utilized exchange rate data from Oanda Foreign Exchange website http://www.oanda.com/convert/fxhistory , and Hotel Occupancy data for all destinations other than Las Vegas provided by Smith Travel Research. http://www.smithtravelresearch.com/smithtravelresearch/ Occupancy data for Las Vegas was collected from Las Vegas Visitor Profile site prepared for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority by GLS Research.

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