The Right Message to the Right People: Developing Effective Crisis Response in Cruise Travel

Purpose The purpose of this study was to provide insights into developing effective crisis responses within the cruise industry. Particularly, this study tested the effects of different crisis responses on individuals’ safety perceptions and cruise travel intentions. This study also tested how individual characteristics; such as past cruise experience and demographic characteristics, may affect the communication outcomes. Originality/Value Using an interdisciplinary approach, this study applied crisis communication theories to a cruise travel context. The findings of this study can be directly applied to develop effective crisis responses for hospitality practitioners, which exemplify the essence of translational research. Relevance of the Topic Although cruise travel is considered as one of the safest mode of travel, traveling by sea is associated with multiple types of risks, including health outbreaks and operational incidents. Managing a tourism crisis response becomes important in this context. The current research stream in hospitality and tourism, however, has not yet fully addressed this topic. Based on a comprehensive analysis of current cruise lines’ practices and relevant literature, this study tested individuals’ reactions after being exposed to different crisis responses. This study also tested the effects of individual variables on the communication outcomes and explored how people process crisis communication messages. Design/Methodology or Approach This study was constituted of two phases. Phase I analyzed current cruise lines’ crisis responses and related literature. The findings of Phase I resulted in the development of a template entitled strategic crisis response (SCR), which explicated how to construct effective tourism crisis response. Phase II conducted a between-subjects experiment and compared the SCR with current cruise lines’ crisis responses regarding their effects on audiences’ safety perceptions and purchase intentions. A series of post-hoc analyses were also conducted to test the effects of individual variables on the communication outcomes. Key Findings The findings of this study revealed that current cruise lines’ responses normally don’t include enough public safety information. The findings also showed that the SCR can lead to stronger safety perceptions and purchase intentions than cruise line’s current response. Additionally, the results showed that individual demographic characteristics influenced the communication outcomes, where the SCR can lead to stronger purchase intentions for the target market constituted of individuals that are over 25 years old and have an annual household income of more than $40,000. Implications for Practice and Policy The findings of this study can directly help practitioners understand cruise tourists’ considerations and produce effective and appropriate crisis responses. The findings indicate that when responding to a crisis, cruise lines should include public safety information, which provides instruction on how individuals can protect themselves during a crisis situation and/or against the risks associated with the crisis. This type of information will be especially useful for the cruise industry’s target market, as they will be more likely to accept the message and maintain stronger purchase intentions even during crisis times

Face Image Modality Recognition and Photo-Sketch Matching

Face is an important physical characteristic of human body, and is widely used in many crucial applications, such as video surveillance, criminal investigation, and security access system. Based on realistic demand, such as useful face images in dark environment and criminal profile, different modalities of face images appeared, e.g. three-dimensional (3D), near infrared (NIR), and thermal infrared (TIR) face images. Thus, researches with various face image modalities become a hot area. Most of them are set on knowing the modality of face images in advance, which contains a few limitations. In this thesis, we present approaches for face image modality recognition to extend the possibility of cross-modality researches as well as handle new modality-mixed face images. Furthermore, a large facial image database is assembled with five commonly used modalities such as 3D, NIR, TIR, sketch, and visible light spectrum (VIS). Based on the analysis of results, a feature descriptor based on convolutional neural network with linear kernel SVM did an optimal performance.;As we mentioned above, face images are widely used in crucial applications, and one of them is using the sketch of suspect\u27s face, which based on the witness\u27 description, to assist law enforcement. Since it is difficult to capture face photos of the suspect during a criminal activity, automatic retrieving photos based on the suspect\u27s facial sketch is used for locating potential suspects. In this thesis, we perform photo-sketch matching by synthesizing the corresponding pseudo sketch from a given photo. There are three methods applied in this thesis, which are respectively based on style transfer, DualGAN, and cycle-consistent adversarial networks. Among the results of these methods, style transfer based method did a poor performance in photo-sketch matching, since it is an unsupervised one which is not purposeful in photo to sketch synthesis problem while the others need to train pointed models in synthesis stage

Historical Development of English Learning Motivation Research: Cases of Korea and Its Neighboring Countries in East Asia. Kim, T. Y. (2021). Springer Singapore, 318 Pages, ISBN: 9789811625121

Considering such intricate history regarding English learning in Korea and its neighboring nations in East Asia, Kim publishes the book Historical Development of English Learning Motivation Research: Cases of Korea and Its Neighboring Countries in East Asia in hope of contributing to L2 motivation research by analyzing Korean students’ English learning motivation not from synchronic but from macro, diachronic viewpoints

Considering the Context to Build Theory in HCI, HRI, and HMC: Explicating Differences in Processes of Communication and Socialization with Social Technologies

The proliferation and integration of social technologies has occurred quickly, and the specific technologies with which we engage are ever-changing. The dynamic nature of the development and use of social technologies is often acknowledged by researchers as a limitation. In this manuscript, however, we present a discussion on the implications of our modern technological context by focusing on processes of socialization and communication that are fundamentally different from their interpersonal corollary. These are presented and discussed with the goal of providing theoretical building blocks toward a more robust understanding of phenomena of human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, human-machine communication, and interpersonal communication

Conjugate gradient-boundary element solution for distributed elliptic optimal control problems

AbstractAn optimality system of equations for the optimal control problem governed by Helmholtz-type equations is derived. By the associated first-order necessary optimality condition, we obtain the conjugate gradient method (CGM) in the continuous case. Introducing the sequence of higher-order fundamental solutions, we propose an iterative algorithm based on the conjugate gradient-boundary element method using the multiple reciprocity method (CGM+MRBEM) for solving the discrete control input. This algorithm has an advantage over that of the existing literatures because the main attribute (the reduced dimensionality) of the boundary element method is fully utilized. Finally, the local error estimates for this scheme are obtained, and a test problem is given to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method

Understanding the Cruise Industry’s Responses to Health-Related Crises: A Case Study Approach

The cruise industry is one of the fastest growing sectors within the tourism and hospitality industry (WTO, 2010). In spite of the increasing popularity, there has been a continued interest in traveling albeit an increased exposure to various types of health risks, such as seasickness, nausea, and foodborne disease (CDC, 2014). Oftentimes these health risks can develop into health-related crises to which both passengers and crew members are vulnerable (Henderson, 2007). The outbreak of health-related crises can exert epidemic effects on the cruise industry and therefore have catastrophic impacts (CLIA, 2014). The direct outcome normally manifests itself as damage to personal health and well-being of the traveler; while indirect outcome can take the form of customer dissatisfaction, impaired brand images of cruise lines, and distorted images of destinations (CDC, 2014; Crimson Hexagon, 2013). To cope with these challenges, scholars have highlighted the importance of crisis management practices as well as effective crisis responses (Coombs, 2014; Ritchie, 2008)

Exploring Residents’ Roles as Risk Insiders in Tourism Crisis Management

The purpose of this study is to explore residents’ roles as risk insiders in tourism crisis management. Particularly, this study used the recent event of Red Tides in Florida as the context and surveyed 969 potential visitors and 460 Florida residents. The preliminary findings indicated that visitors tend to rely on residents for risk related information. Guided by the social identity theory, this study further investigated the main drivers of Florida residents’ information-sharing behavior. The results indicated that both subjective knowledge and social identity influenced residents’ willingness to share risk information with visitors and their actual behavior. Based on the findings, this study further discussed a new research direction that involves residents in tourism crisis management. This study also offers practical implications on how to encourage residents to participate in the information-exchange process in tourism crisis management

Building A Resilient Event Industry: Lessons Learned during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Guided by the theoretical framework of organizational resilience, this study interviewed twenty-six event planners regarding their risk and crisis management related practices and their experiences with the COVID-19 global pandemic. This study conducted thematic analyses to analyze the data. The results showed that organizational resilience was approached through planned and adaptive resilience. Their crisis management practices are influenced by event planners’ personal knowledge, experiences, and expertise as well as their organization’s policy and leadership. When it comes to the case of COVID-19, the concept of organizational residence is mainly reflected through adaptive resilience. It also seems that most resilient organizations have been excellent in communicating and managing customer relationships and creating innovative strategies to generate revenue. Further theoretical and practical implications were provided based on the findings

Promotion Research of the E-Commerce Site in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

This paper first presents the e-commerce website development status of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs); and then studies the ways to promote e-commerce websites in the information age using various research methods. Moreover, it points out the problems in e-commerce websites promotion in SMEs, and puts forward ways and thoughts to settle the problems.