Hospitality & Tourism Cluster Exam Overview

• The Hospitality and Tourism Cluster Exam is for different events like Hospitality and Tourism Professional Selling Event (HTPS), Hospitality Services Team Decision Making Event (HTDM), Hotel and Lodging Management Series Event (HLM), Quick Serve Restaurant Management Series Event (QSRM), Restaurant and Food Service Management Series Event (RFSM), and Travel and Tourism Team Decision Making Event (TTDM).
• Posting the contents of the exam on a website is a copyright violation.
• This exam was exclusively developed for DECA's 2023-2024 Competitive Events Program by the MBA Research and Curriculum Center.

Project Management and Communication

• Share lessons learned with relevant stakeholders after a project is done.
• Identify the needed resources in the planning stage before the project starts.
• Employees can develop stronger professional relationships by adhering to a company's chain of command due to frequent communication with their superiors.
• A hotel guest has the right to clean and sanitary conditions in their rooms and common areas.
• Some cultures rely heavily on nonverbal communication to get their messages across that are known as high-context cultures.
• A freight forwarder organizes the shipping of goods in international transactions, acting as an intermediary between a business and a transportation company.
• It is important to avoid committing to more work than one can handle, to give the best effort to every project.

Financial Statements and Risk Management

• Cash flow statements summarize the cash entering and leaving a company which is important to investors.
• Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) identifies and prepares for hazards with an organization's daily activities, finances, and objectives with natural disasters that damage company warehouses being an example of operational risks.

Emergency Evacuation and Customer Expectations

• Every emergency evacuation plan should include a specific chain of command.
• Businesses in the hospitality and tourism industry can address changing customer expectations by keeping up with the latest developments and trends in order to anticipate and meet expectations.

Presentations and Ethical Behavior

• Practicing is the best way to prepare for an oral presentation.
• Demonstrating ethical behavior helps form positive relationships.
• Private property include land, jewelry, buildings, and clothing.

Risk Management

• Risk management identifies, analyzes, and treats risks and uses risk control as a way to treat identified risks.
• A very common motive for travelers is to escape from the stress of their daily lives and to relax.

Marketing

• Geolocation software enables a business to track its opt-in customers' physical location and to send targeted promotional content to the customer in real time.
• Automation is the use of technology to control a process which increases efficiency.

Identity Theft and Statistics

• Identity theft occurs when someone obtains and uses another person's information (e.g., credit cards) without their consent and secure web browsers should be used.
• Descriptive statistics are used to summarize and interpret the vast amounts of numeric information (mean, mode, median, range etc).

Accounting and Cash Controls

• Increased technology use in accounting has numerous benefits, including faster and more accurate reporting and enhanced business insights.
• Proper authorization is a cash control in which only certain people are authorized to handle cash or make cash transactions on behalf of the company.

Influences

• Conner prefers the current method of doing things, demonstrating a bias for the status quo.

Operating Expenses

• The expenses involved in running a business makes up its operating expenses.

Data Collection

• Facts and figures collected specifically for the problem or project at hand are primary data and can be collected through observations, focus groups, or surveys.

Communication and Pricing

• Communicating value means sharing the positive benefits a product delivers.
• To be successful in the hospitality and tourism industry, one should have good attention to detail and demonstrate enthusiasm.
• Tour packages offer customers a hassle-free way to experience destinations while understanding its target market and should be curated with its users in mind.
• The editing process involves checking for typos, run-on sentences, and capitalization errors.
• A slogan is a memorable phrase used to advertise a product or brand.

Tourism

• The Anderson family value of the outdoors can be met by visiting The Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
• Viability is defined as the long-term value of choices and actions (UNWTO).
• Dividing customers by their actions and behaviors, such as travel frequency and spending habits, is an example of behavioral segmentation.

Tourism Resources

• Hotels are secondary tourist resources where locations or attractions that were specifically built to attract tourists.

Business Structure

• In a divisional structure, an organization is broken down into units.

Travel and Estate Planning

• Businesses should communicate regularly with their travel suppliers to get travel discounts.
• A power of attorney is an essential document that authorizes a person to take over financial matters if you are incapable.

Product Life Cycle

• Products move through the following stages of the product life cycle: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.
• It is important for businesses to compare customers' credit cards to their identification.

Quality Assurance

• Quality assurance is an organization-wide system that businesses use to ensure that products meet quality standards.
• Key Account Management (KAM) increases customer loyalty and trust.
• An intermittent production process is one in which production periodically stops and restarts when the products are not in demand all year long.
• If a customer becomes angry, employees should remain calm and listen closely to them.

Storing Information

• Physical records need office space to be stored.

Marketing Elements

• The first step to developing a sales proposal is to conduct market research.
• Interdependency involves people relying on each other to accomplish a task.
• One of the best ways a business can anticipate its customers' needs is by knowing their customers.

Communication Styles

• Leads to constructive dialogue if you show respect to other people and viewpoints.
• To search for cities called Orange, Natasha should use the minus sign to exclude results that are related to oranges as fruit.
• You should have an in-person conversation in order to convey your thoughts and undertones clearly.
• One should take inventory of its digital assets before steps can be taken to protect them.

Business operations

• Invoices are formal, printed records of a sale that includes all necessary information of sales.

Sales and Marketing

• Marketing for hospitality and tourism, offers discounts or rewards to incentivize customers to shop at the business.
• A good practice during peak season is to Hire seasonal staff.

Group Discussions

• In a group discussion, it's important to politely disagree.

Business Operations

• Salespeople use prospecting sources to build prospect lists to garner customers.
• Candice's motive for travel is to learn, as she wants to immerse herself in the history and culture of the destination.
• Repeating orders back to show customers they are being heard in order to maintain the customer.
• Secondary product promotion stimulates demand for a specific brand of product.

Communication and Company Culture

• Self-confidence, optimism, caution, and more help tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity.
• Employees should have the necessary skills and knowledge to provide excellent customer service for companies in the hospitality and tourism industry.

Business Operations

• A target market is the particular group of customers a business seeks to attract, where marketers group customers by their similarities to see who the target is and pinpoint who to attempt to draw in.
• Recreation, amusements, and attractions employees are responsible for ensuring customers have a great time while visiting parks, recreation areas, and other special attractions.
• Identifying business objectives is the first and most important step to building a distribution strategy.
• A database holds a collection of information to use to retrieve needed customer and/ or business sales.
• Guerrilla marketing includes any promotional techniques that are unconventional, low-cost, and focused on attracting attention.

Information Suppression

• Censorship refers to the suppression or prohibition of speech, books, news, films, TV, or other information that are considered obscene, harmful, politically unacceptable, or offensive.

Product Extension

• A product extension is the strategy of placing an established product's brand name on a new product within the same category.

Tacit Knowledge

• Tacit knowledge is gained through personal experience with knowledge codification transforming tact knowledge into explicit knowledge.
• Boundaries help the process of decision criteria to help pick the appropriate choices that lead to achieving a goal.

Business Reports

• The most important information is in the body.
• Contacting medical personnel is the most important thing to do after administering first aid.
• Natural landscapes are primary areas for tourism.
• An effective rate is the average percentage a merchant pays to process a credit card transaction.
• Variablity of service is offered due to people of different skillsets.
• Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy that involves paying a third party to promote the brand for money.