Statistics Without Tears: Quantitative Analysis and Forecasting in Hospitality & Tourism

Through his years of teaching hospitality and tourism management and working with many of the country's leading consumer product and service firms, Professor Stanley I. Buchin understands the importance of using the right methods to discern meaningful information out of numbers. In Statistics Without Tears: Quantitative Analysis and Forecasting in Hospitality and Tourism, he presents a different approach to statistical analysis that avoids the headaches of math-intensive techniques in favor of graphics and computer programs, while still maintaining a rigorous approach to the analysis. The textbook launches into descriptive statistics by asking the question, are we measuring the right things? He examines what data is currently available to hospitality managers about their operations and what this data means (STAR reports). But one can begin to steer away from all that by displaying measurements with visual graphics such as pie charts and bar graphs, which are easier for most people to comprehend than mind-numbing lists of numbers. And there is a better way of summarizing measurements, too: Why not take advantage of computer software like Excel to make sense out of the standard data descriptors: mean, median, mode, variance, and standard deviation? With these tools in hand, the book tackles techniques for sales forecasting such as time-series analysis, correlation analysis, and exponential smoothing, as well as for cost forecasting, particularly by looking at regression analysis to estimate costs at different levels of business activity. New directions in forecasting are also introduced, including exponentially weighted regression, the professor's own personally developed technique. Drawing from his extensive academic and professional background, Professor Buchin's approach to teaching statistics analysis in Statistics Without Tears is bound to become standard text for courses in quantitative methods in all the best hospitality administration programs. Also available is an online Instructors Manual, which contains the following information: suggested course syllabus, PowerPoint slides outlining each chapter, answers to the problems at the end of each chapter, four sets of review problems and answers to these review problems, three suggested quizzes and a final examination, including answers to the quiz and final examination problems. Instructors who wish to get a copy of the Instructors Manual should contact the author at sbuchin@bu.edu.