Using segmentation to compete in the age of the sharing economy: Testing a core-periphery framework

Airbnb has emerged as a credible competitive threat to the hotel industry. Consequently, hotel brands are having to rethink the experiences they provide to customer in an increasingly competitive environment. Despite these trends in the industry, experience-related research that examines and informs these developments remains under-represented in the hospitality and tourism literature. The present study offers a systematic approach to examine the potential differences in experiential consumption in the accommodations industry. Using a multiple-group analysis approach, it examines the moderating effects of individual characteristics and situational factors on the nature and dynamics of experiential consumption in the accommodations industry. The findings of the study culminate in the core-periphery framework of the hospitality consumption experience that can provide a relevant theoretical lens for future research into the different sectors and types of experiences within the hospitality and tourism industry. The study also outlines important implications for the hotel industry’s strategic experience design initiatives, from the standpoint of product development, the segmentation, targeting and positioning (STP) process, and marketing communications.     

BayesRec: Personalize search ranking with customer attribute-level willingness-to-pay using heterogeneous booking choice data

The ongoing travel restrictions owing to the COVID-19 shutdown continue to impact the hospitality sector. This pause on travel has led to a bigger regime shift in the customer's preferences for hotel selection. Therefore, this study aims to help understand customers’ evolving preferences by assessing the customers’ attribute-level willingness-to-pay (WTP) to tailor the booking experience. Furthermore, the study accounts for customers’ behavioral heterogeneity and decision choices while estimating WTP. The proposed approach utilizes multi-stage online modeling: (i) Segmentation to create behavioral customer cohorts; (ii) Hierarchical Bayesian modeling to estimate customer-level WTP; and (iii) Multi-criteria decision optimization to rank-optimize the hotel alternatives by leveraging the assessed attribute-level WTP. This continuous assessment provides personalized hotel recommendations and enhances customer’s booking experience, thereby allowing hotels to accelerate revenue recovery and aid in proactive demand generation for the next wave of travelers in a post-COVID economy.     

The well-being and subjective career success of workaholics: An examination of hospitality managers’ recovery experience

Workaholism and its influence on hospitality managers’ recovery experience, well-being, and subjective career success was examined. Participants were hospitality managers in the hotel, foodservice, airline, and tourism industries in the United States. Data was collected at two time points and the results show that hospitality managers’ recovery experience has a positive relationship with well-being and subjective career success. Furthermore, the positive relationship between recovery experience and job satisfaction and the positive relationship between recovery experience and career satisfaction were found to be stronger for people who are high in workaholism. Theoretical and practical implications based on the results are discussed.     

Constraints to attracting new hotel workers: A study on industrial recruitment

The global hospitality and tourism industry is not only burdened with high turnover rates but also may soon be in the throes of a labor shortage. As such, a better understanding of industry employment perceptions has become a critical issue for hospitality managers. Of particular concern are the perceptions of those potential employees that do not have prior employment experience in the hospitality industry. Accordingly, the purpose of this research is to consider perceptions of hotel employment among the segment of the potential employee population that has no current or past experience working in hotels. Per the tenets of Constraint Theory, perceptions of pay, promotion opportunities, work-to-life conflict, and workplace-induced isolation are proposed to significantly affect potential employees’ attitudes toward hotel employment. In turn, these attitudes are proposed to affect both intention to apply for hotel work and the intention to recommend applying for hotel work to others.     

Understanding Motivations and Acceptance of Location-Based Services

Location-based services (LBS) provide new opportunities for consumer convenience, just-in-time access to information, and services based upon the context of one’s location. Using a hotel/resort industry context, this study examines the impacts of LBS usage motivations on customers’ intentions and the moderating effects of age, gender, and experience on the relationships between motivations and intentions. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used to analyze data collected from 398 hotel/resort customers owning smartphones. The results reveal the importance of utilitarian and social values in a customer’s adoption of LBS. This study provides practical significance to hospitality operators looking to deploy this type of technology to enhance the guest experience and revenue generating opportunities.     

Discrimination of hotel employees: The role of heteronormativity and political exclusion

This study explores customers’ service evaluations based on the service provided by a hotel frontline employee with different sexualities, manipulated as effeminate or masculine. Study participants were randomly assigned to respond to a video with either an effeminate or masculine hotel employee that mimics a hotel check-in experience and after are asked to evaluate check-in service. The results suggest that participants who hold stronger heteronormative beliefs are more likely to discriminate against effeminate hotel employees when evaluating the service they provided. This effect persists for the social conservatism of the participants. The study also identified a joint effect of social conservatism and political exclusion. Without tapping into sexual orientation, this study contributes to the hospitality literature by introducing sexuality and heteronormativity and adds more content to queer studies. It also suggests the need for more protection policies, management awareness, and training regarding hotel frontline employees from a diversity management perspective.     

The role of language in the online evaluation of hospitality service encounters: An empirical study

In an increasingly global travel market, hospitality services encounters involve growing interactions between providers and customers often belonging to different nationalities and cultures and speaking different languages. Extant hospitality management literature has explored the influence of language on service evaluations mostly in offline settings. This study innovatively captures the effect of the language used in online hotel reviews on online consumer ratings in two distinctively different destinations located in culturally different countries: Italy and Russia. Based on almost half a million Booking.com online reviews written by hotel guests in Moscow and Rome, we illuminate if and to what extent domestic vs. foreign language use affects online customer satisfaction. We find that the use of domestic language exerts a positive impact on online ratings in both countries. Implications for hospitality practitioners and managers, developers and managers of online review platforms, and customers of hotel services are discussed.     

The effects of cognitive,affective, and sensory attributes on hotel choice

Over the past decade, experiential marketing has been the focus of many hospitality and tourism studies. Yet the existing literature does not provide experimental evidence of the incremental effects of affective and sensory attributes on the choice of hospitality service and destinations. This study attempts to provide some such evidence by using discrete choice modeling to examine the differential effects of cognitive, affective, sensory attributes on hotel choice. Bayesian D-optimal design based on JMP 8.0 was used to create a discrete choice experiment. Consumer hotel choice was predicted using random parameter logit (RPL) models. These results demonstrate that when customers choose a hotel, they consider not only cognitive attributes (e.g., price, service and food quality, and national brand), but also affective (e.g., comfortable feeling and entertaining) and sensory (e.g., room quality, overall atmosphere) attributes. The results also demonstrate the incremental value of adding affective and sensory attributes to a choice model when compared to a model using only traditional cognitive attributes. The data suggest that hotel managers can effectively differentiate their properties by incorporating affective and sensory attributes in their promotions. Moreover, the findings provide hotel managers with important insights into new product development and marketing communications strategy.     

Hotel attributes and overall customer satisfaction: What did COVID-19 change?

The effect of hotel attributes on customer satisfaction has been well studied in hospitality literature. However, the importance of hotel attributes for customer satisfaction may change due to the prevailing global pandemic given (1) the negative health consequences of the disease, (2) the guidelines and advisories issued by health agencies, and (3) wide media coverage of the pandemic. These factors can affect the importance that customers attach to different attributes. To date, there have been no studies analyzing these changes, and this study fills the gap by conducting a structural topic modeling-based analysis of hotel reviews before and during the pandemic. The results contribute to the literature by identifying new attributes and providing concrete evidence that attribute prevalence has changed in response to the pandemic. The results also lead to practical recommendations for increasing customer satisfaction in the hospitality industry during the prevailing disaster.     

Virtual reality is so cool! How technology innovativeness shapes consumer responses to service preview modes

Today’s hospitality brands often gain a competitive advantage through being cool and employing cutting edge technologies. Virtual Reality (VR) is one of the most novel tools to advertise brands, introduce new products/services, and draw customers. Despite the marketing potential of VR, there is scant research revealing the psychological processes associated with the use of VR as a cool technology. To bridge the gap in the current literature, this research examines how consumers with different degrees of technology innovativeness respond to marketing of hospitality brands through three main service preview modes: VR, static images, and 360° tour. The findings from a lab experiment show that as consumers’ technology innovativeness increases, VR boosts self-brand connection that consequently elevates their visit intentions toward the hotel brand. The findings from this study would help hospitality marketers better target their efforts at a specific consumer segment.     

Service recovery evaluations: GLBT versus hetero customers

Although Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GLBT) customers have been acknowledged as a growing market segment in the hospitality and tourism industry, our understanding with regard to their perceptions of service encounters barely exists. During service encounters, outcome quality and process quality are generally understood as being the two main components of service evaluations. Yet, two competing theories (fairness heuristic and two-factor theories) suggest opposite patterns of interaction effects of the two qualities. This study examines the effects of outcome and process qualities on GLBT and heterosexual customers’ evaluation of service recovery in a hotel setting. Our findings, based on 374 respondents, suggest that the effects of process quality are more pronounced when outcome quality is favorable, thus supporting the two-factor theory. Also, GLBT customers’ overall recovery evaluation is more positive than heterosexual customers’. Implications of these findings for service managers are discussed.     

Responses to COVID-19: The role of performance in the relationship between small hospitality enterprises’ resilience and sustainable tourism development

Tourism is one of the hardest-hit industries by the global pandemic of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). Small tourism enterprises have been heavily affected and have had difficulty in business recovery. This research is an early attempt to explore the direct impact of small hospitality enterprises’ resilience on sustainable tourism development as well as indirect impact through performance. A pre-tested questionnaire survey was self-administered to owner-managers of small hospitality enterprises in Greater Cairo, Egypt. The results of structural equation modeling (SEM) using AMOS showed a positive, direct, and significant impact of resilience (planned and adaptive) on sustainable tourism development and indirect influence through performance. The results of the multi-group analysis showed that enterprise type has a significant effect on the results, where restaurant owner-managers expressed more resilience than their hotel counterparts. Several theoretical (for scholars) and practical implications for tourism policy-makers and owner-managers have been discussed and elaborated.     

Evaluation of hotel brand competitiveness based on hotel features ratings

Understanding the competitiveness of hotel brands is important for hotel managers to shape their brands and initiate effective marketing strategies and business developments. However, evaluating hotel brand competitiveness is challenging due to the complexity of information involved. A hotel brand often comprises many hotels with different performances. Hotel brands are also evaluated against multiple hotel features, thereby making the application of traditional evaluation techniques impractical. This paper introduces a novel technique for automatically evaluating the competitiveness of hotel brands based on probability distribution and earth mover’s distance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method by conducting a case study that involves major hotel brands in Hong Kong. The proposed method can be applied in various contexts and can help researchers and managers evaluate the competitiveness of hotels as well as other branded products in the hospitality and tourism sectors.     

Online travel purchasing: A literature review

Over the past two decades, there has been an increasing focus on the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), as well as the impact that they have had on the tourism industry and on travelers’ behaviors. However, research on what drives consumers to purchase travel online has typically been fragmented. In order to better understand consumers’ behavior toward online travel purchasing, this article offers a review of articles that were published in leading tourism and hospitality journals, the ENTER proceedings, and several articles from other peer-reviewed journals, found on the main academic search databases. The antecedents of online travel shopping found are classified into three main categories: Consumer Characteristics, Perceived Channel Characteristics, and Website and Product Characteristics. Finally, this study identifies several gaps and provides some orientation for future research.     

The impact of customers’ prior online experience on future hotel usage behavior

Service experience model stipulates the importance of service experience in increasing satisfaction, price acceptance, revisit intentions, etc. It has been extensively tested and validated in hotel management studies. However, the online service experience which, in these days, precedes the physical service experience has not be considered together in most hotel service experience studies. In hotel management literature, studies on online experiences are largely segregated from physical service experience model. In this study, prior online experience model is proposed which includes online experience preceding the physical service encounter, and a survey is administered. Result indicates the strong influence of online experience as a leading construct of the service experience model in hotels. Online experience strongly conditions the customers’ perception of physical service experience and, also, provides good ground for price acceptance. Interestingly, the influence of physical service experience on price acceptance seems to be rather alleviated with online experience, indicating the important role the online experience plays in managing customer perception on hotel service experience. Hotel management needs to pay close attention to their customers’ online experience beyond simple esthetics as the online experience seems to influence all the subsequent components of hotel service model.     

Nonverbal communication in hotels as a medium of experience co-creation

Although the Service-Dominant Logic literature hinted on the importance of nonverbal language for value co-creation, nonverbal communication as an experience co-creation component has not been explicitly addressed in either hospitality and tourism or general management context. Through the constructivist lens, this research focuses on kinesics, which is the most noticeable component of nonverbal communication, in hotels as a medium of experience co-creation in the guest-employee dyad. Four video-elicitation focus groups, with 12 hotel employees and 12 guests, found reciprocity (mutual recognition, insight exchange, expectation formation) and engagement (customized attention, relationship building, a sense of affinity) as two major dimensions of kinesic experience. Furthermore, employees' imperative and guests' complacent cues act as value triggers, contributing to experience co-creation between guests and employees. Based on empirical results and related literature, the framework of experience co-creation centred on kinesics is proposed; practical implications regarding frontline employees’ nonverbal communication competencies are discussed.     

Job standardization and service quality: The mediating role of prosocial service behaviors

Service quality has been recognized as a major topic in the tourism and hospitality industry. Although previous literature has examined the relationship between job standardization and service quality, the mechanism underlying this relationship remains a black box. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between job standardization and service quality, and to clarify the role of prosocial service behaviors. Survey data from 336 customer-contact employees and 404 customers in Taiwan indicate that job standardization positively affects role-prescribed service behavior and extra-role service behavior of customer-contact employees, in addition to the service-quality perception of their customers. Extra-role service behavior also positively affects service quality. By contrast, the effect of role-prescribed service behavior on service quality is not significant. In addition, prosocial service behaviors mediate the relationship between job standardization and service quality. Managerial implications and future research directions are discussed in this study.     

Web reviews influence on expectations and purchasing intentions of hotel potential customers

The objective of the paper is to study the impact that hotel guests reviews posted on consumer-generated websites have on the consumer decision-making process and service expectations.An experimental study has been conducted to test the hypotheses and the research question. 349 young adults were involved in an online survey that asked to imagine searching for a hotel and reading other customers’ reviews of a hypothetical chosen hotel. Three scenarios were created by studying a few comments posted by customers on the main websites used by tourists.Results show a positive correlation between both hotel purchasing intention and expectations of the customers and valence of the review. On the contrary, the presence of hotel managers’ responses to guests’ reviews has a negative impact on purchasing intentions.The study enriches the stream of research on word-of-mouth in the hospitality industry and analyses a new operational problem for lodging managers. Hotels should reply to online customer reviews or not?     

Can taking charge at work help hospitality frontline employees enrich their family life?

Managing work-family interface has been a key issue for hospitality employees. By integrating the literature on thriving at work into the work-family enrichment model, this study proposes taking charge as a resource-generating behavior that employees could undertake to enrich their family life. Using data collected on two occasions from frontline employees and their supervisors in a hotel in China, we find that those who take charge are more likely to experience thriving at work, which helps them improve the quality of their family life. Furthermore, working under a leader facing high role ambiguity augments this relationship. The study findings advance current work-family enrichment literature, and also carry important practical implications for promoting employees’ work-to-family enrichment in the hospitality sector.     

This hotel is family-run! Enabling positive consumer response via perceived hospitableness

Family-run businesses are key players in the hotel industry and provide accommodations in many tourism regions such as the Austrian Alps. To date, research has failed to see the family firm status as a source of competitive advantage for the hospitality industry, despite often being used in practice to attract customers. Through the theoretical lens of signaling theory, this study therefore conducted experiments using fictitious hotel websites with participants from a German online panel (Austria’s largest incoming market) to investigate the effectiveness of family firm brand signals. The results confirm positive effects of communicating the family firm image on consumer response such as word-of-mouth, willingness to pay a price premium, and booking intention. We highlight that this effect is explained by perceived hospitableness. As such, we demonstrate that hotels can capitalize on their unique status by communicating their family firm image.