The antecedents of memorable tourism experiences: The development of a scale to measure the destination attributes associated with memorable experiences

Providing visitors with memorable tourism experiences (MTEs) is important for achieving success in the highly competitive tourism marketplace. To support destination managers, this paper developed a scale instrument that conceptualizes the attributes of destinations associated with MTEs. Following a rigorous scale development procedure, this study identified a 10-dimensional construct that affects MTEs. The data support this dimensional structure of the attributes of destinations affecting MTEs and the internal consistency and the validity (i.e., content, construct, convergent, and discriminant) of the scale. The theoretical and managerial implications of the study's results are discussed.     

Measuring the shopper's attitude toward the point of sale display: Scale development and validation

In Europe alone, marketers invest several hundred million of Euros in marketing activities at the point of sale every year. A prominent role is assigned to display promotions. However, despite their large practical importance, surprisingly, there is no measure to pre-evaluate different displays and their design facets so that the display which reached the best pre-evaluation results may be identified and, if poor rated facets were found, those may be altered before production and rollout of the display in question. Therefore, this paper develops and validates a scale to measure the shopper's attitude toward a point of sale display reflecting all relevant facets of a display from the shopper's point of view. Examination of the scale led to satisfactory results in terms of reliability, validity, and its predictive power for purchase intention. Summarizing, the scale can help to improve display designs prior to rollout, thus, enhancing the efficiency of display promotions.     

Effects of Booking.com's new scoring system

Booking.com provides a massive database compiling millions of reviews about thousands of accommodations worldwide that hotel managers and academics have extensively consulted during the past decade. In 2019–2020, however, the famous website changed several aspects of its methods of calculating hotel scores, the most important one being a change from its peculiar 2.5–10 scale to a more conventional 1–10 scale. Such novelties may cause changes in hotel scores that do not reflect changes, if any, in customer satisfaction. This article offers an initial investigation into the nature and consequences of those changes that professionals and academics should consider to avoid errors in future studies that involve using Booking. com's database.     

Five scale challenges in Ecuadorian forest and landscape restoration governance

The forest and landscape restoration (FLR) targets set as part of the Bonn Challenge draw attention to the governance arrangements required to translate national FLR targets into local action. To achieve the targets, actors at multiple levels of the governance scale aim to influence relevant processes on the ecological scale. In this article, we focus on the scale challenges relating to the implementation of Ecuador’s restoration targets, by analysing the implementation of the 2014–2017 National Forest Restoration Plan in the montane Chocó Andino and Bosque Seco landscapes. From 54 semi-structured interviews, a document review, and geographical data analysis, we identified two temporal (i, ii) and three spatial scale challenges (iii, iv, v): i) Political cycles mismatch with FLR timelines; ii) Planning horizons mismatch with FLR timelines; iii) National restoration objectives mismatch with decentralised land use planning realities; iv) The governance level of existing FLR efforts mismatches with the level receiving restoration funds; and v) Tensions exist between the spatial dimensions of biodiversity and water-related restoration efforts. The findings highlight that more attention must be given to scale-sensitive governance to make the process in which national FLR targets are translated into local action more effective.     

Hotel environmental management initiative (HEMI) scale development

Owing to a lack of construct reliability and validity of environmental management measurements, advancements in understanding hotels’ environmental management practices have been somewhat limited. The goal of this paper is to propose a uniform and parsimonious scale that captures Hotels’ Environmental Management Initiative (HEMI) with the most common three dimensions in the hotel industry: environmental resource conservation efforts, environmental policy and training, and environmental public relation efforts. After the refinement of the initial items, the scale was confirmed with cross-cultural data obtained from full-time hotel employees in two Asian countries. The twenty-one item HEMI scale demonstrated a satisfactory level of content, convergent, discriminant, cross, and criterion-related validity. The proposed HEMI scale will serve as a useful tool for future hospitality scholars who would like to further explore the impact of hotels’ environmental management initiatives on employees’ attitudes and behaviors toward the environment and their environmental performance.     

组织韧性内涵、维度及测量

组织韧性反映组织在面对困难和挑战后的复原能力，是企业可持续成长领域研究的关键问题。近年来,学术界对组织韧性研究逐渐关注，但对于组织韧性内涵、维度及测量方法仍缺乏共识。基于已有组织韧性理论，通过对文献的系统梳理和对企业实践者的半结构化访谈，提炼出组织韧性内涵及维度，并开发相应的测量量表。利用二次大规模问卷调查数据进行探索性因子分析与验证性因子分析，实证结果表明，开发的测量量表具有较高的信度与效度，能够很好地反映组织韧性内涵及维度，弥补已有组织韧性研究测量量表的缺失，为后续开展中国情境下组织韧性研究提供参考。     

Productivity changes in pre-crisis Western European banks: Does scale effect really matter?

Insofar as the completion of the Single Market for Financial Services, it has presented new challenges for European Banking industries. In this study, we use a recently developed generalized metafrontier Malmquist productivity index (gMMPI) to provide insights on productivity growth. We extend the gMMPI to broaden the index's capacity by decomposing various sources of productivity change in the metafrontier context. The sample contains commercial banks from 12 Western European countries prior to the recent financial crisis. A key advantage of our extension is that it introduces the role of scale effects. The empirical results show that an average bank's productivity growth arises mainly from technical changes and scale effects. Moreover, smaller and larger banks grow faster than medium ones. In addition, conservative banks tend to grow faster. These findings suggest that a more competitive and integrated financial market induced by financial deregulation is indeed able to improve banks’ productivity.     

The medical tourism index: Scale development and validation

Medical tourism is an estimated $100 billion dollar industry. Despite the increasing number of people, companies and countries involved in medical tourism, we know very little about the key drivers and how countries are perceived as medical tourism destinations. The purpose of this paper is to present the Medical Tourism Index, a new type of country-based performance measure to assess the attractiveness of a country as a medical tourist destination. We followed a rigorous multi-steps scale development procedure by using four empirical studies based on 4995 respondents. The MTI is a multidimensional construct with 4 dimensions (country, tourism, medical costs, medical facility and services) with 34 underlying items. Our results show the MTI allows to measure meaningful differences between countries, not only on an aggregated level but also on each sub-indexes. It provides a useful tool for the various stakeholders to measure and manage their medical tourism destination brand.     

Analysis of tourism information sources using a Mokken Scale perspective

This study contributes to the analysis of information sources as a determinant of the travel decision-making process. It focuses on the use of Mokken Scale Analysis (MSA) as a new methodological approach to detect unidimensional hierarchical scale in the analysis of information sources. The paper shows how MSA can be applied in the tourism field. Findings reveal two different scales (active and passive information search scales) for classifying information sources in tourism. Variations in the scales are revealed, taking socio-demographic and travel behavioural variables into consideration. The conclusions clearly explain the implications for tourism marketers and make recommendations for future research.     

Are some Indian banks too large? An examination of size efficiency in Indian banking

In this paper we use data from the years 1997–2003 to evaluate the size efficiency, as distinct from scale efficiency, of Indian banks. Following Maindiratta [Maindiratta A (1990) J Econ 46:39–56] we consider a bank to be “too large” if breaking it up into a number of smaller units would result in a larger output bundle than what could be produced from the same input by a single bank. When this is the case, the bank is not size efficient. Our analysis shows that many of the banks are, indeed, too large in various years. We also find that often a bank is operating in the region of diminishing returns to scale but is not a candidate for break up.