Application of Lean Principles in Five-Star Hotels in Egypt

The hospitality industry faces the challenge to decrease or eliminate their costs and to be more efficient in the near future. In recent years, the hospitality industry showed growth continuously, applicability to implement Lean in the hospitality and tourism sectors to improve productivity and service quality. Nevertheless, the literature review highlighted there are little hotels and tourism organization implemented Lean in their operation. Reason for that, Lean technique used in a single department of the establishments, which lead to missing the overall approach of Lean.
Globally, the implementation of Lean techniques has proven to be successful in improving quality while reducing turnaround times and costs within the hospitality industry. There appears to be limited publicly available current research regarding Lean implementation in Egyptian hotels, leading to the motivation for this study. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to identify the application of Lean principles in Cairo five-star hotels in Egypt.
This research adopted a quantitative approach to achieve the aim, objectives. A questionnaire was used for data collection. 72.5% was the average response rate. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS, version 16) program was used for analysing data. The results indicated that awareness and knowledge of the hotel participants about Lean term not clear for them and they did not know its meaning. The results showed that hotels did not implement Lean principles in their operations. A major contribution of this research is related to enhance the understanding of Lean principles. This research added to the growing Lean principles literature through its review of the previous academic research, generation of new ideas and interpretation of rich data collected from the different sources.