Personnel as a driver of hotel company innovative development: approaches to determining the role and management methods

The role of innovation in the tourism and hospitality industry cannot be overestimated. This is both a driver of development, and a competitive advantage, and a guarantee of the company’s stability in the face of global challenges. However, today it is difficult to calculate the share of Russian hotel companies that can be considered innovative. Not all managers fully understand the essence of the term “innovation”; many believe that innovative development requires an investment of funds and is difficult for many hotels. On the other hand, the experience of research in the field of innovation shows that a significant role in the hotel enterprise innovative development is played by a human resource, including ordinary employees who work with customers. After all, they understand customer requests, difficulties and problem areas in the process of servicing, and as a rule, one way or another, they try to look for solutions to emerging problems. However, due to the limited knowledge and skills in the field of innovation management, they do it intuitively, at the everyday level, and the improvements they offer, which could become a direction for innovative development, remain only a useful life hack. To assess the understanding of the role of ordinary personnel as a driver of innovation and the need for their additional training, as well as to identify the readiness of the top management of hotels to innovation, we have developed a questionnaire and conducted a survey of 140 hotel managers. Along with the main survey, we asked managers to assess possible industry innovation development trends in the in the near future. The survey covered 124 enterprises, mainly medium and small businesses, and showed the dependence of understanding of the ways and possibilities of innovative development, as well as drivers of innovation in hotels, on the size of the enterprise, its location, the qualifications of top managers and the management model of the company.