Facing the Differences between Franchising and Company Ownership. An Empirical Investigation of a French Hotel Chain

This paper aims at comparing the performance of company-owned hotels and franchised hotels within a plural form chain. In this perspective, the main advantages of mixing both: franchising and company ownership within a same chain are reminded before establishing the following hypothesis: franchised units perform better than company-owned units. The empirical study of more than 300 hotels belonging to a same chain, through basic statistics but also a Data Envelopment Analysis, does not provide any support to this hypothesis. And at the contrary, company-owned hotels are more efficient than the franchised ones. A discussion of this contradictory result allows to highlight the contributions, limits and perspectives of this research