Although the hotel industry has witnessed the widespread acceptance of chain operations, the extant research on the relationship between the chain operations and the financial performance has provided mixed results. The main reason for the contradictory findings can be attributed to the subject variability. In fact, existing studies focused primarily on an individual chain property and its financial performance. Addressing such methodological shortcoming of the previous research, this study targeted the hotel chain companies and assessed their performances from the perspective of operational efficiency using the Data Envelopment Analysis. The results indicated that the hotel chain companies, particularly large scale hotel companies, shows better performance than the independent hotel companies in terms of technical efficiency, pure technical efficiency, and scale efficiency.
