Management accounting practices in the Greek hospitality industry

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to report the level of adoption and the benefits derived from traditional and contemporary management accounting practices in the Greek hospitality industry. Design/methodology/approach - An empirical survey via questionnaires was conducted on a sample of 85 leading hotels in Greece. Descriptive statistics on the adoption level, the relative benefits and future emphasis of individual practices provide the basis for discussion. Findings - The adoption rates for many recently developed practices were very satisfactory. Overall, traditional management accounting techniques (e.g. budgeting practices, profitability measures, product profitability analysis, customer profitability analysis absorption costing, and nonfinancial measures for performance evaluation) were found to be more widely adopted than recently developed tools. It is concluded that traditional management accounting is very much alive and well. Many hotels intended to place greater emphasis on more recently developed techniques in the future, particularly activity based costing techniques (activity based costing, activity based budgeting, and activity based management), balanced scorecard and benchmarking. Research limitations/implications - The study, examined a large array of items since, as with all surveys, it is possible that respondents may have misinterpreted some elements. Second, the findings of this study should be interpreted bearing in mind that the survey included the largest Greek hotels and not the general population of hotel enterprises. Finally, this research was limited to the Greek hotel sector. Originality/value - The survey provides a unique detailed examination of the management accounting practices and an indication of future trends.