Strategic responses by European airlines to the Covid-19 pandemic: A soft landing or a turbulent ride?

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has dramatically affected the aviation industry. This paper investigates how 20 European airlines communicated their crisis messages during the pandemic by employing Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) to airline responses. This qualitative study consisting of a systematic review and content analysis, examined 7237 messages from social media channels and press releases posted between December 1, 2019, and May 25, 2020, when the crisis unfolded worldwide. The results indicate that the airlines primarily emphasized instructing and adjusting crisis communication strategies. Further, Twitter replaced Facebook as the primary communication channel. This study provides insights on how airlines can and should communicate crisis-related messages amidst a severe pandemic. The study concludes with the implications of these findings and recommendations for airline stakeholders moving forward.     

Testing the differentiated impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on air travel demand considering social inclusion

The economic downturn and the air travel crisis triggered by the recent coronavirus pandemic pose a substantial threat to the new consumer class of many emerging economies. In Brazil, considerable improvements in social inclusion have fostered the emergence of hundreds of thousands of first-time fliers over the past decades. We apply a two-step regression methodology in which the first step consists of identifying air transport markets characterized by greater social inclusion, using indicators of the local economies’ income distribution, credit availability, and access to the Internet. In the second step, we inspect the drivers of the plunge in air travel demand since the pandemic began, differentiating markets by their predicted social inclusion intensity. After controlling for potential endogeneity stemming from the spread of COVID-19 through air travel, our results suggest that short and low-density routes are among the most impacted airline markets and that business-oriented routes are more impacted than leisure ones. Finally, we estimate that a market with 1% higher social inclusion is associated with a 0.153%–0.166% more pronounced decline in demand during the pandemic. Therefore, markets that have benefited from greater social inclusion in the country may be the most vulnerable to the current crisis.     

How is the Asian economy recovering from COVID-19? Evidence from the emissions of air pollutants

This study examines how economic and social activities in Asia were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, using the emissions of various air pollutants as representative measures of those activities. Our review of emissions data suggests that the amount of air pollutants emitted decreased in most subnational regions from 2019 to 2020. We also determined that economic and social activities have restarted in some regions in many countries. Moreover, we conduct regression analyses to identify the types of regions that restarted earlier. Regional characteristics are distinguished by employing a remotely sensed land cover dataset and OpenStreetMap. Results reveal that in the case of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) forerunners, economic and social activities in cropland, industrial estates, accommodations, restaurants, education, and public services have not yet returned to previous levels.     

Show me your mobile and I will tell you who you are: Forecasting consumer compassion and altruism behaviour through smartphone type and usage

Smartphones, as an integral part of human life, can now assist researchers in forecasting human behaviour patterns. Recently, the spread of COVID-19 increased people's reliance on their smartphones, and the resulting lockdown revealed them engaging in a variety of pro-social or virtue-based behaviours. Using the extended self-theory, previous research examined the effects of objects on the human mind and cognitive behaviour in order to identify behavioural segments in smartphone markets. Subsequently, scholars examined smartphone-based (iPhone vs. Android) virtue traits such as honesty and humility. However, other virtues such as compassion and altruism have received little attention in this regard. Thus, this study aims to bridge this gap by analysing the predictability of consumers' compassion and altruism in relation to their smartphone type (iPhone vs Android) and usage. A total of 509 completed questionnaires were received from participants in the United States, Europe, and Asia. According to the findings, iPhone users are more compassionate and altruistic than Android users. This study offers implications for marketers, retailers, and brands in developing strategies based on smartphone user behaviour.     

The origins and creation of the tourist hotel industry in Spain from the end of the 19th century to 1936. Barcelona as a case study

The aim of this paper is to analyse the origins of the hotel industry dedicated to tourism in the city of Barcelona, one of the most important tourist centres in the western Mediterranean. From the 1888 Universal Exposition to the 1929 International Exposition, and even later, we find several initiatives to set in motion an incipient tourist system which was truncated by the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936. In this system, we will here focus on the hotel industry based on the fact that at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the majority of hotel establishments were not focused on tourism. It was only with the tourist development experienced by Barcelona during these decades that one can also speak of the birth of one of the most important tourism hotel offerings, both in Spain and Western Europe.     

Uncovering crowdsourcing in tourism apps: A grounded theory study

Even though crowdsourcing emerges as a new business principle of many successful tourism apps, its underlying mechanism in tourism remains unexplored. This research note explores this topic with a qualitative design through interviews with stakeholders involved in a crowdsourcing tourism app, Gold Medal Tour Guide. Applying the grounded theory, researchers propose a framework of crowdsourcing in tourism apps consisting of six themes and 15 subthemes. The framework identifies the drive of crowdsourcing and discusses the complexities and contradictions in multi-stakeholder collaboration. The contextual impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the crowdsourcing phenomenon are also examined. The findings provide practical implications for tourism destinations to take advantage of the crowdsourcing mechanism for sustainable operation and development.     

The immediate and subsequent effects of public health interventions for COVID-19 on the leisure and recreation industry

Public health interventions to combat COVID-19 can be viewed as an exogenous shock to the economy, especially for industries—such as leisure, recreation, and tourism—that rely heavily on human mobility. This study investigates whether and how exactly the economic impact of government public health policies varies over time. Focusing on the leisure and recreation industry, we use data for 131 countries/regions from February to May 2020 and employ generalized difference-in-differences models to investigate the short- and longer-term effects of public health policies. We find that stricter policies lead, on average, to an immediate 9.2–percentage-point drop in leisure and recreation participation. Even so, that industry recovers in about seven weeks after a COVID-19 outbreak in countries/regions that undertake active interventions. After thirteen weeks, leisure and recreation involvement recovers to 70% of pre-pandemic levels in a place that actively intervened but stagnates at about 40% in one that did not.     

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from the U.S. restaurant industry

The current study examines how the effect of COVID-19 on U.S. restaurant firms’ stock returns varies according to the firms’ pre-pandemic characteristics by employing three firm-level dimensions (financial conditions, corporate strategies, and ownership structure). Employing 795 firm-year observations obtained from annual reports and other databases, this study found that restaurant firms with past characteristics of larger size, more leverage, more cash flows, less ROA, and more internationalization are more resilient to stock declines reacting to COVID-19 than otherwise similar firms. Whereas, dividend, franchising, institutional ownership, and managerial ownership did not show any significant moderating effect on the relationship between COVID-19 and stock returns. This study sheds light on the research topic by providing insights into drivers of restaurant firm’s stock returns during the COVID-19 shock. Future studies can employ the variables and method used in the current study to extend the understanding of the issue.     

Sensing the virus. How social capital enhances hoteliers’ ability to cope with COVID-19

In this study, we propose a broad conceptual model that incorporates social capital dimensions and problem-solving routines to understand the determinants behind hotel managements’ perception of and ability to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic—and thus, to innovate their service offering. We provide empirical support for the notion that, due to uncertainty about reopening after lockdown, the hospitality sector has found existing problem-solving routines to be of little use. Although the local community has been unable to form a shared vision around the pandemic, hoteliers have nevertheless relied on their network of relationships to sense the crisis and find their own ways to adapt. Interestingly, we find that overreliance on trustworthy relationships can diminish the ability to sense a crisis objectively. Our results not only shed light on sensemaking in the hotel industry, but also grapple with the theoretical nature of sensemaking as a socially constructed process.