Abstract
In this paper, outsourcing refers to ‘contracting out hotel’s work to external providers’. An exploratory study was conducted using Critical Incident Technique (CIT),as it is highly effective at eliciting constructs from respondents that may not have previously emerged in the literature. The study contributed to an analysis of outsourcing based on the Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) framework, widely used by researchers to interpret organizational reality In the hotel sector, outsourcing has been dominated by the utilisation of the strategic approach, thus theapplication of TCE to hotel outsourcing is still at the infancy stage. The objectives of the CIT study reported here were to verify TCE variables and to identify new variables, if any, that influence outsourcing decisions in the hotel industry.