What do the performances of a hotel business depend on? This fascinating question is the focus of the present article. Starting from the analysis of 67 studies it emerged that the answers lie above all in the businesses themselves (74.6%). Strategy is often used as an independent variable, together with production processes and marketing levers. The analyses are prevalent carried out above all at country level. 92.5% of the papers use evidence drawn from European, North and Central American and Asian countries; six nations were taken as the basis for 73.1% of the papers examined. The present paper shows the strong link existing between the type of evidence used, research design (sample, kind of data, number of years), the choice of dependent and independent variables, thereby identifying three different research styles: European, American and Asiatic.