Research on the Perception of Employees with Regard to their Contribution to Creating Competitive Advantage in Luxury Hotels in Bucharest

The competitive advantage of a company brings together the unique elements and attributes that it owns and exploits them in order to set apart significantly from its competitors. Advantage benefit sources are multiple, and a combination thereof leads to a series of unlimited opportunities for strengths diversification against the competitors. One of the most valuable sources is the employees, whose contribution is vital to gaining competitive strengths. This paper aims to investigate the perception of the employees of the luxury hotels in Bucharest regarding their own contribution to the creation of the competitive advantage. The research was conducted using a questionnaire applied to people with work experience in 4- or 5-star hotels in the capital city, regardless of the position held, and was based on three main objectives. The first set goal was aimed to test the hypothesis according to which employees are the most important source of competitive advantage, but this was not fully confirmed by the respondents. The second hypothesis refers to the fact that all positions held within a luxury hotel can contribute to the creation of the competitive advantage, which is unanimously confirmed by the interviewees. The third objective of the research was to discover how the employees of the luxury hotels in Bucharest assess their own contribution to the creation of the competitive advantage within the hotel where they work; The conclusion for the proposed objective was that they assess on average their own contribution with a grade of 8 out of 10. The implications of this article may be found in other researches that could, for example, address the competitive advantages of luxury hotels in other cities worldwide, compared to those in Bucharest or the differences between luxury hotels in Bucharest and those located in other large cities in Romania, in terms of competitive advantage.