Drawing upon the study of three Thai hotel chains, this research sets out to explore why these chains seek to deliver their products and services beyond the traditional boundaries of domestic markets and to investigate how factors in the environment of foreign countries and Thai hotel chains affect their decisions when they expand into new overseas markets. Once they had been identified, an attempt was made to determine if any relationship existed between these factors and choice of entry mode when the hotel chains in question attempted expansion into new international markets and chose one entry mode over others. This research has utilised the transaction cost approach (TCA) which insists, regarding hospitality organisations' modal choice, that organisations manage their assets -and' thus shape organisational structure - through a cost-benefit comparison of external market-based activity and internalising these activities within the organisations (Litteljohn et al., 2007). Moreover, the TCA has been widely used in studying international business and is particular useful in analysing and explaining various entry mode decisions in a more in-depth manner. Thus, the TCA helps to predict entry mode for hotel firms and identifies a number of determinants related to entry mode choices as the starting point for building the conceptual framework of this research. Additionally, this study adopted an exploratory study approach in investigating the internationalisation specifics of the three Thai hotel chains, and the semi-structured interview was the research method used. The findings suggest that there is a relationship between environmental elements and entry modes. In particular, the variables that emerged from the findings were found to be significant, such as support from local financial institutions, buying power of consumers, the role of the parent firm's owner. Therefore, this study attempts to develop and adjust Jones et aI's (2004) framework by adding some extra variables and entry modes that could not be captured in the existing literature but emerged into the framework from the findings. Also, this research provides new empirical evidence and extends the boundaries of existing knowledge in the developing-country internationalisation literature, especially as regards Thai multinationals and the internationalisation of Thai hotel chains.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:490523 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Dulyaprugs, Junjura |
| Publisher | Oxford Brookes University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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