Causes of delay in hotel refurbishment projects in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Hotel industry is one of the major contributors of the income to the country. During the closure of the hotel for refurbishment, it defimtely loses its revenue as well as cost incurred in paying their staff. When refurbishment takes an additional time affects seriously to the income. market and regular customers.There is no previous study to identify causes aftecting the delaymg of hotel refurbishment proJects in Sri Lanka. Therefore analyzing of the delaying of causes for hotel refurbtshment proJects is vital to address these issues and to protect the hotel industry in Sn Lanka. This research was conducted to find out causes of delay in hotel refurbishment proJects in Sri Lanka by focusing on actions and inactions of project participants. which delay refurbishment projects. This research identifie,. a list of 75 predetermined factors in 5 categories i.e. causes pertinent to cltents, consultants, contractors. project condition, and external causes the principle factors contributed to construction delays in hotel refurbishment projects. In particular, a questionnaire survey with 52 representatives of cltents. contractors and consultants was conducted in order to obtain their professional Judgments about the relative importance of the factors of construction delay related to the hotel refurbishment projects.Respondents (52) included Hotel managers, Engineers, Contractors, Sub Contractors and Consultants (Electical and Mechanical Consultants). The relative importance index (RII) was calculated to indicate the relative importance of a contributing factor to the refurbishment delay . Delaying causes was categorized and ranked them in order to identify the most significant causes. The Spearman rank correlation coefficient was calculated to get the correlation between the ranks of delay factors made by the two project parties i.e. consulting engineers and contractors.The results revealed that constdenng the overall perception of three responding groups the principle delaying causes were: (1) lneffective project manager in the relevant project (2) lack of coordination with contractors (3) financial problems of the contractor (4) incomplete project documents given by the consultant and (5) delaying of the Items supply by the client. Identification of those critical delaying factors and other findings of this research would help improvement in the efficiency and productivity towards a better implementation of hotel refurbishment projects in Sn Lanka.