Service Innovation and Venture Sustainability of Three-Star Hotels in South-South, Nigeria

The study investigated the relationship between service innovation and the economic, social and environmental sustainability of three-star hotels in South-South Nigeria. The research was conducted with a positivist philosophy and correlational survey design, based on the Resource Based View, Dynamic Capabilities Theory and Sustainability Theory. The population consisted of 129 three-star hotels with more than 10 years of operation. A census of the hotels was conducted and 387 respondents were purposively selected from the finance, human resources and operations or facilities departments of the hotels. An expert validated structured five-point Likert scale questionnaire was used to collect data. The instrument had an overall Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.791, which is acceptable, and 81.9 per cent of the questionnaires administered were usable. Descriptive statistics and Pearson's product-moment correlation at the 0.01 level of significance were used to analyse the data. The results showed that service innovation had significant positive relationships with economic sustainability (r = 0.233, p < 0.01), social sustainability (r = 0.235, p < 0.01), and environmental sustainability (r = 0.297, p < 0.01), respectively, but the relationships were weak, modest, and moderate, respectively. Thus, all three null hypotheses were rejected. The study found that service innovation plays a significant role in the sustainability of hotels, but its impact is still limited. It suggested that service innovation should be coupled with process innovation and marketing innovation, employee training, enabling technologies, and policies and feedback systems oriented towards sustainability and customers to improve the long-term economic, social and environmental performance of hotels.