Flying to Quality: Cultural Influences on Online Reviews

Customers increasingly consult opinions expressed online before making their final decisions. However, inherent factors such as culture may moderate the criteria and the weights individuals use to form their expectations and evaluations. Therefore, not all opinions expressed online match customers’ personal preferences, neither can firms use this information to deduce general conclusions. Our study explores this issue in the context of airline services using Hofstede’s framework as a theoretical anchor. We gauge the effect of each dimension as well as that of cultural distance between the passenger and the airline on the overall satisfaction with the flight as well as specific service factors. Using topic modeling, we also capture the effect of culture on review text and identify factors that are not captured by conventional rating scales. Our results provide significant insights for airline managers about service factors that affect more passengers from specific cultures leading to higher satisfaction/dissatisfaction

Systematic Review of Smart Tourism Research

In recent decades, smart tourism has been attracting attention from practitioners and scholars. The current study used multiple analysis methods to conduct a systematic review of 124 related articles on smart tourism. Qualitative analysis was conducted to identify 10 categories of smart tourism articles. Results showed that the largest proportion focus on the influence of technology on tourists’ perceptions, behaviors, and experiences. Co-occurrence analysis was performed to investigate the development trend of keywords used by academics in the last five years, while co-authorship (country) analysis was conducted to examine the collaborative relationship between different countries. The research regions, industries, methods, and theories applied in these articles were also analyzed. Theoretical and practical/managerial implications, as well as future research directions, were provided

The Cross-Level Effect of Shared Leadership on Tourism Employee Proactive Behavior and Adaptive Performance

Shared leadership has emerged as a new style that has been proven to contribute to employee performance. However, the underlying mechanism of shared leadership on employee performance and its possible correlates have not received sufficient academic attention in the literature. To narrow the related research gaps, the current study aims to establish a multi-level framework incorporating shared leadership, team reflexivity and employee performance, and examined the cross-level mediation mechanism between shared leadership and adaptive performance. A questionnaire survey consisting of 301 valid employees’ samples from 31 work teams in the hotel industry in China validated the proposed model. Multilevel analysis with Mplus was applied. The current study found that shared leadership positively influences team reflexivity, and share leadership influences employee’s adaptive performance through proactive behavior. The current study sheds light on the role of shared leadership in tourism organizations. The practical implications regarding how to improve the organizational environment to enhance productivity are further discussed

Barriers for the Sustainable Development of Entertainment Tourism in Macau

Entertainment tourism is attracting attention from the industry and the academics. This study aimed to discover the barriers for the development of entertainment tourism in Macau from the industry’s perspective. A qualitative research approach was used to collect data from the entertainment tourism industry. Results show that policies and regulations, economy, marketing, management, government attitude, expertise and manpower, facilities and attractions as well as infrastructure problems are the main barriers for the development of entertainment tourism. Implications and suggestions for entertainment tourism practitioners are provided

Perceived discrimination in the context of high and low interactions: evidence from medical and general tourists

This study explored the antecedents and consequences of perceived discrimination of tourists. Both general and medical tourists, who represent contexts of low and high interaction with service providers, respectively, were interviewed in-depth regarding their travel experiences in Hong Kong. The critical incidence approach was applied to identify unfair treatment and other relevant factors. Similarities and differences were found between the discriminatory experiences and antecedents of medical tourists and general tourists. The findings indicate that some unfair treatments were subsequently attributed to discrimination; because of their unique travel motivations, medical tourists more easily attributed unfair treatment to discrimination. Moreover, four groups of factors were identified as antecedents to perceived discrimination: cultural, employee, tourist and situational factors. The results suggest that the relationship between perceived discrimination and post-visit behavioral intentions is moderated by the perceived value of the trip. The practical implications of our findings are discussed

Cultural conflicts or cultural cushion

The current study explores antecedents of perceived discrimination of tourists, which is an under-researched area in tourism. A questionnaire survey was conducted with 248 Chinese and 240 Caucasian tourists in Hong Kong to validate the proposed model. The introduction of intercultural competence reconciled competing research streams regarding the roles of cultural distance in forming the anticipated discrimination of tourists which leads to their perceived discrimination. The current study reveals that the positive or negative effect of cultural distance is contingent on the intercultural competence of tourists. Additionally, power distance and relative group status collectively explain their anticipated discrimination. Practical implications regarding minimization of the perceived discrimination of tourists were offered

An empirical study of anticipated and perceived discrimination of mainland chinese tourists in Hong Kong: the role of intercultural competence

Mainland Chinese tourists constitute the largest portion of tourists in Hong Kong. As such, they are crucial to the tourist industry in Hong Kong. However, some of their dissatisfactory travel experiences do not receive adequate attention from either tourism practitioners or tourism scholars. The current study hopes to fill this research gap through an examination of the factors contributing to both anticipated and perceived discrimination of Mainland Chinese tourists. A questionnaire was distributed to 248 Mainland Chinese tourists in Hong Kong. Multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) was performed to examine the factors causing variance in anticipated and perceived discrimination. The findings reveal that, when past discriminatory experiences of either self or friends/relatives and the number of visits were controlled for, the intercultural competence of tourists had a significant effect on anticipated and perceived discrimination. Tourists who are more interculturally competent are less likely to anticipate and perceive discrimination. Practical implications are discussed in relation to how to reduce tourists\u27 anticipated and perceived discrimination

Exploring the travel behaviors of inbound tourists to Hong Kong using geotagged photos

Insight into tourist travel behaviors is crucial for managers engaged in strategic planning and decision making to create a sustainable tourism industry. However, they continue to face significant challenges in fully capturing and understanding the behavior of international tourists. The challenges are primarily due to the inefficient data collection approaches currently in use. In this paper, we present a new approach to this task by exploiting the socially generated and user-contributed geotagged photos now made publicly available on the Internet. Our case study focuses on Hong Kong inbound tourism using 29,443 photos collected from 2100 tourists. We demonstrate how a dataset constructed from such geotagged photos can help address such challenges as well as provide useful practical implications for destination development, transportation planning, and impact management. This study has the potential to benefit tourism researchers worldwide from better understanding travel behavior and developing sustainable tourism industries

Motivations and experiences of Mainland Chinese medical tourists in Hong Kong

Medical tourism has been developing very rapidly in recent years and Hong Kong has emerged as a new medical tourism destination. The purpose of the study is to explore the motivations and experiences of a sample of medical tourists in Hong Kong and hence semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with obstetric patients from Mainland China. The findings indicate that one of the most important reasons for their traveling to give birth in Hong Kong was to avoid China’s ‘One Child’ policy. Variations in staff attitudes were also found among different hospitals and even in the same hospital. The findings also suggest that perceived discrimination by the medical tourists emerges in the form of less favourable service and less information sharing

Website interactivity and brand development of online travel agencies in China: The moderating role of age

The purpose of this study was to propose a theory-driven model to understand the relationship among social website interactivity, brand experience, brand choice, price premium, and buying intention within the context of online travel agencies (OTAs) websites. The moderating role of consumer age was also investigated. Results suggested the inclusion of social website interactivity in the design of OTA websites enhanced branding elements, which influenced customers\u27 willingness to pay the price premium and to return in the future. The strength of the relationships among these constructs varies across young consumers (aged between 18 and 25) and older consumers (aged above 25). Moreover, results suggested that social website interactivity influenced price premium and buying intentions through brand experience and brand choice. This study offers specific theoretical and practical implications