Guest satisfaction & dissatisfaction in luxury hotels: An application of big data

In order to understand the pivotal attributes of luxury hotel service in Malaysia, this study analyses big data in the form of online reviews, as available in TripAdvisor. The content analysis, which was performed using the word frequency analysis has revealed that the main themes of luxury hotel service quality include hotel-related attributes, room-related attributes, staff-related attributes, travel-related attributes, and possible outcomes. The critical incident technique has also been performed to examine the antecedents and outcomes of hotel guests’ satisfaction and dissatisfaction. In this study, quality of rooms and interaction with employees have been determined as major drivers of customers’ word of mouth and revisit intentions. This study contributes with an empirical analysis of particular features of textual context and discussion of the concept of luxury service in the developing countries has been largely neglected so far.     

Managing supply chain relationships in the hospitality services: An empirical study of hotels and restaurants

Limited research examines the effects of interorganizational trust and interdependence on the relationship quality between supply chain partners in the hospitality services. It is also not well understood how the interorganizational joint team manages the relationships between hospitality firms and their suppliers. Drawing on the social exchange theory and the resource dependence theory, we propose a model and hypotheses to articulate the mediation effect of joint teamwork on the relationships between interorganizational trust, interdependence, and relationship quality. We rigorously analyze survey data from hotel and restaurant procurement managers. Our findings confirm that interorganizational trust and interdependence have significant effects on joint teamwork. Meanwhile, the teamwork mediates the effects of interorganizational trust and interdependence on relationship quality. Our work enriches the understanding of supply chain relationships in the hospitality services, and provides meaningful insights for the hospitality firms to manage supply chains. Finally, we conclude our work with suggestions for future research.     

Motivation of internationalization and a moderating role of environmental conditions in the hospitality industry

As internationalization has been widely implemented throughout the tourism industry, it is important to understand what motivates a firm to internationalize its business. Thus, this study examines the motivation for internationalization based on the neoinstitutional theory. This study employs a hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to test the proposed hypotheses, using the annual firm-level data of the tourism industry, and finds that tourism firms including casinos, hotels, and restaurants are demotivated to diversify their international expansion into different countries as their competitors increase the scope of countries in which they operate. However, if a firm perceives its competitors as speeding up the process of internationalization, that firm will also increase the pace of internationalization. In addition, this relationship between competitors and focal firms' internationalization varies according to environmental conditions (i.e., dynamism, complexity, and munificence). The findings of the study contribute to the internationalization and tourism literature.     

The Airbnb paradox: Positive employment effects in the hospitality industry

The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which Airbnb supply affects employment in the hospitality, tourism, and leisure industries. Accordingly, we analyzed the effects of Airbnb supply on various sectors in the hospitality, tourism, and leisure industries in 12 major metropolitan statistical areas in the United States for the period between July-2008 and February-2018. The results showed that Airbnb supply positively affects employment in all sectors of the hospitality, tourism, and leisure industries. The magnitudes of these effects are not only statistically but also economically significant. Although prior studies have showed that Airbnb has an adverse impact on hotels' financial performance measures, our results show that employment in the hotel sector increases with increased Airbnb listings. While this outcome might be contradictory to the general conjecture, such evidence calls for a comprehensive investigation of Airbnb's overall economic impact. Research and practical implications are further discussed.     

Restaurant membership fee and customer choice: The effects of sunk cost and feelings of regret

Membership marketing is highly prevalent in today's restaurant industry. The purpose of the study was to examine the joint effects of membership fees and competition on customer choice, willingness to join other programs and feelings of regret in a restaurant setting. Using a 2×2×2$2\times 2\times 2$ experimental design, the study found that the effect of sunk cost and mental accounting do exist. Moreover, high levels of regret were detected when a higher membership fee was paid and when the competition provided superior service or a lower membership fee. However, when the membership fee was low, customers were more reluctant to go to another restaurant that offered a membership program. Marketing implications for restaurateurs are discussed.     

The role of social identification and hedonism in affecting tourist re-patronizing behaviours: The case of an Italian festival

Since the 1990s Europe and other continents have been organising a significantly larger number of festivals with the objective of stimulating tourism and exploiting potential economic opportunities. The prominence of these events has led to intense competition between festivals in attracting visitors and it has become important to analyse factors which might influence attendees’ retention. Drawing on existing literature on retail and service sectors, this study aims to identify the role played by emotions, hedonism, satisfaction, and social identification in mediating the effects of environmental factors on attendees’ re-patronizing intention. This study includes an on-site survey of 449 visitors attending an Italian festival gaining in popularity, and analyses data using a structural equations model. Results suggest that hedonism and social identification are key-facilitators between environmental cues and attendees’ re-patronizing intention.     

Measuring delightful customer experiences: The validation and testing of a customer delight scale along with its antecedents and effects

The construct of customer delight has captured the attention of scholars and managers alike. Nevertheless, its definition and measurement vary across scholarly literature and several quantitative scales were developed before extensive qualitative research on customer delight, which provided further clarification on the nature of this construct, was even conducted. Consequently, the present research draws upon the conceptual and qualitative work in the field to validate a survey instrument in order to measure customer delight. The authors collected data in four major service industries—hotel, restaurant, retail, and theme park. Following the five-stage scale development and validation approach, the researchers then refined a customer delight scale. The scale was found to have appropriate levels of validity and reliability. Finally, the authors proposed and tested the antecedents and consequences of customer delight using structural equation modelling. The proposed scale allows managers to measure the incidence of customer delight in their organizations.     

Determinants of Hotels and Restaurants entrepreneurship: A study using GEM data

The objective of this work is to assess the influence of certain factors on the likelihood of being a Hotels and Restaurants (H&R) entrepreneur. The factors evaluated are demographic and economic variables, variables related to perceptions of the environment and personal traits, and variables measuring the individual's intellectual and social capital. The work uses logistic regression techniques to analyze a sample of 33,711 individuals in the countries participating in the GEM project in 2008. The findings show that age, gender, income, perception of opportunities, fear of failure, entrepreneurial ability, knowing other entrepreneurs and being a business angel are explanatory factors of the probability of being an H&R entrepreneur.     

Towel reuse in hotels: Importance of normative appeal designs

Laundry is a major factor in hotel fresh water use. Pro-environmental appeals to encourage tourists to reuse towels and bed linen have received much attention in the literature, though findings have remained inconclusive. This paper presents the results of a large field experiment with 21,000 observations in seven hotels catering to the sun, sand & sea leisure tourism market in Gran Canaria, Spain. Findings suggest that comprehensive message designs can increase towel reuse by 6.8% and bed linen reuse by 1.2%, compared to existing in-room messages. Results also show that nationality, age, length of stay, repeat visits, temperature, and hotel standard influence participation levels. The field experiment confirms that normative appeals can trigger significant behavioural change. Evidence suggests, however, that social norm generation may be a more promising avenue to changing behaviour than norm adherence.     

The role of food service in tourist satisfaction

The paper is based on empirical investigation carried out amongst a 341-sample population visiting the Black Sea resorts of Romania in August 1997. The purpose of the study was to investigate the role and importance of food service in tourist satisfaction and to note any differences in satisfaction levels between regional groups. Analysis of the findings revealed that significant differences existed between three tourist groups’ satisfaction perceptions of value for money, quality of food, number of dishes, standard of food service, variety of dishes, presentation of food and speed of service in general; and of bread, coffee, meat and soup in particular. Overall results further indicated that quality of food, value for money, variety of dishes, attractiveness of surroundings and presentation of food were the attributes that most affected the overall food service experience in Romania. The paper concludes that food service is an important contributor to tourist satisfaction and that there are significant differences in satisfaction levels with food service between eastern and western European, and Romanian tourists.     

The role of explanations and metadiscourse in management responses to anger-reviews versus anxiety-reviews: The mediation of sense-making

Management response (MR) has become a popular intervention for hotels to manage customer reviews on social media platforms. This article introduces two important linguistic features of MR content—metadiscourse and explanation—and investigates their effectiveness in addressing negative reviews. It also examines how hotels customize MRs using different linguistic features according to different emotions in reviews. Based on a field investigation of large-scale TripAdvisor data and an experimental study, we demonstrate that explanations outperform metadiscourse for anxiety-reviews, whereas metadiscourse is more effective than explanations for anger-reviews. Moreover, their relative effectiveness is mediated by consumers’ sense-making process. Using explanations for anxiety-reviews and metadiscourse for anger-reviews facilitates sense-making, whereas using explanations for anger-reviews and metadiscourse for anxiety-reviews impedes it. This research enriches current understanding of MR effects and provides the hospitality industry with important guidelines for formulating effective MRs and social media marketing practices.     

The tourist guide: The origins,structure and dynamics of a role

The two lines of origin of the modern tourist guide are the pathfinder and the mentor. These are the antecedents, respectively, of the leadership and the mediatory spheres in the guide's role. Since each has an inner and an outer directed aspect, four major components of the role are distinguished: the instrumental, social, interactionary, and communicative. The dynamics of development of the role from the Original to the Professional Guide is represented as a transition of emphasis from the instrumental to the communicative component. Aside from this main line of development, two new role types have differentiated: the Animator and the Tour-leader, emphasizing, respectively, the social and the interactionary components. The Original Guide's function is to produce attractions in the marginal regions of the ecological tourist system, while that of the Professional Guide is to reproduce the attractions in the central regions of the system.     

Changes in tourist personal values: impact of experiencing tourism products and services

This study examines how tourist personal value networks are constructed, and examines whether the structure of such networks differs if experience or consumption of tourism products or services influences the importance of these personal values. Through laddering and implication matrix, the abstraction score of each value can be computed and its position within the value structure identified for constructing a personal values network. By comparing the structure of the personal values network before and after traveling experience, the researchers found that tourists may hold identical values but assign them different degrees of importance, changing the value network structure. Thus, marketers targeting before-the-trip tourists should emphasize that their products or services meet tourist desires for “imaginative” and “an exciting life” and can help tourists achieve a feeling of “freedom.” If marketers targeting tourists who have just come back from a trip, they should emphasize the “cheerful” feelings of the trip and project an image of “happiness” and “freedom” to attract tourists and satisfy their desire for “inner harmony.” This finding not only provides marketers with information regarding tourist cognitions, but also helps marketers to effectively formulate marketing strategies.     

Promoting service-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors in hotels: The role of high-performance human resource practices and organizational social climates

Integrating social exchange and information processing theories, this study examines the influence of high-performance human resource (HR) practices on service-oriented organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) through two climates—justice climate and service climate. This field study of 1133 customer contact employees and 119 human resource managers from 119 hotels in Taiwan has shown that social climates of justice and service mediate the influence of high-performance HR practices on service-oriented OCB. The study demonstrates that high-performance HR practices affect employees’ cognition on how they are treated by hotels and what service behaviors are expected, which in turn can positively influence collective service-oriented OCB.     

The role of trails in the creation of tourist space

ABSTRACT

Trails and routes are increasingly ubiquitous features within the tourism landscape and although their role and usefulness as applied tourism products has been analysed, they remain under-theorised within the academic literature. This article addresses this gap by exploring the role of trails within the socio-cultural construction of space. In particular, the potential function of trails in creating themed, static spaces is analysed and the concept of museumisation is employed to further illustrate the capacity of trails to reconfigure spaces within specific cultural framings which may exclude local identity and yet are consumed by the unquestioning visitor. However, the article goes on to use more recent paradigms such as tourism’s performance turn and the associated concept of embodiment to further explore the trail’s potency in promoting a more engaged, multi-vocal and sensory experience of place. Using these contemporary approaches to the role of the tourist and the cultural construction of place, the article employs a range of examples to argue for the efficacy of trails as flexible, interpretive tools that allow a multiplicity of stories to be told and encourage visitors towards a more engaged interaction within the spaces through which they tour.     

The role of nostalgia-evoking stimuli at nostalgia-themed restaurants in explaining benefits,consumption value and post-purchase behavioral intention

This study focuses on nostalgia-evoking stimuli at nostalgic restaurants and their influence on customers’ consequent evaluation and post-purchase behavioral intention. Through in-depth interviews and a survey, the present study identified a factor structure of nostalgia stimuli that includes four dimensions and 18 items. Then, nostalgia stimuli, benefits, consumption value and post-purchase behavioral intention were incorporated into the model. Among the important results, the hypothesized relationships between nostalgia stimuli and epistemic, emotional and nostalgia-seeking benefits were partially supported. The benefits sought from dining in a nostalgic restaurant positively lead to consumption value, which further has a positive effect on post-purchase behavioral intention. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for capitalizing on nostalgia management in the hospitality industry.     

Analysis of international tourist arrivals in China: The role of World Heritage Sites

This paper analyzes the determinants of international tourist arrivals in China, especially for World Heritage Sites and various kinds of travel spots. Utilizing annual provincial panel data over the 2000–2005 period, the empirical results suggest that key determinants include the relative income, population in the original country, cost of travel, and tourism infrastructure. In addition, World Heritage Sites are also found to be significant in explaining the numbers of international tourists and have a greater tourist-enhancing effect. Other famous tourist sites rated 4A- and 3A-class are also attractive to foreign tourism. Moreover, cultural rather than natural sites attract more interest among foreign tourists, because China is internationally renowned for its long-standing historical and cultural assets. Finally, the importance of the determinants of the demand for tourism varies from country to country.     

Reconciling unsatisfying tourism experiences: Message type effectiveness and the role of counterfactual thinking

While attracting new tourists is an important issue in destination marketing, it is also imperative to manage tourists' experience post-trip, particularly in cases of unsatisfying experiences. Yet, the questions of how to rectify unsatisfying tourism experiences received little attention in tourism scholarship. In the present research, we investigated the effectiveness of different forms of marketing messages and the role of counterfactual thinking in the ability of a marketing message to improve tourists' attitudes towards the destination and intentions to recommend, when a tourism experience was not up to tourists' satisfaction. A scenario-based experiment was conducted with 480 respondents. The results showed that user-generated messages and the messages employing emotional appeal were more impactful than destination-generated or rational messages. Respondents who engaged in downward counterfactual thinking, that is imagining the situation in which their experience could have been worse, was shown to have a greater positive effect on unsatisfied tourists.     

The influence of collectivism in restaurant selection: A sentence completion experiment

In a between-subjects experimental design, Korean-Americans and U.S. born non-Koreans were asked to watch a virtual tour of a restaurant and then complete the following sentence: “This restaurant is a good place to go when….” Findings indicate that the Korean-Americans were much more likely to finish the sentence with a collective phrase than the non-Koreans. Moreover, those Korean-Americans utilizing an integration pattern of acculturation were more prone to demonstrate a collective mindset in the sentence completion task than those employing an assimilation pattern of acculturation.