Religious Servicescape: Does Convenience Matter for Revisit Intentions and Positive Word of Mouth?

Umrah is an optional holy ritual that is highly rewarded when performed in the month of Ramadan. Hence, managing such an event is a challenging mission facing stakeholders. However, limited studies have examined the quality of services provided in the Umrah site (i.e., the Holy Mosque in the city of Makkah, Saudi Arabia) from the pilgrims’ perspective. The current study examines the influence of religious servicescape on service convenience and investigates whether service convenience matters to pilgrims. Further, the study tests the role of religious attractiveness (i.e., of the Kaaba) on pilgrims’ behavioural outcomes (i.e. intention to revisit and Positive Word of Mouth (PWOM). A Mixed-method approach is followed to collect rich data (i.e., quantitative and qualitative). The findings demonstrate that religious servicescape has a critical impact on service convenience. The results also show that service convenience is also a significant mediator between servicescape and PWOM. However, service convenience does not mediate the relationship between religious servicescape and intention to revisit. Consequently, service convenience in the religious context matters to pilgrims and the service provider. Further, Kaaba attractiveness creates a ‘halo’ effect

Tourism risk assessment: An empirical examination

The paper reports an investigation into risk assessment by local and international tourists at Australian holiday resorts. A cross-regional comparison suggests there are significant differences in risk assessment..

Capabilities, innovation and competitive advantage

This special issue was aimed at advancing the literature examining the role of capabilities in innovation-based competitive strategy. Whilst the innovation literature has over the years moved away from its 'product innovation' pre-occupation to capture the role of other forms of innovation in value creation, the capability view has progressed from its 'rigid' or 'static' view to a 'dynamic' view in an effort to capture market dynamism. Despite the recent theoretical advancements the dynamic capability view still lacks a strong empirical base. Contributors to the capability literature over the recent years have adopted multiple research methods to capture capabilities that include cross-sectional designs, case studies and longitudinal studies. Within this backdrop, the articles that were selected for this special issue covers both conceptual and empirical approaches to examine the relationship between capabilities and technical and non-technical innovations and performance outcomes. This essay provides a future research agenda to advance this promising research field. It highlights the need for clearer conceptualizations and development of measures of dynamic capabilities, environmental conditions that underpin the development of dynamic capabilities within the firm and research into the much debated relationship between dynamic capabilities and competitive advantage and organizational performance

Differentiate or die or be \u27stuck in the middle\u27 and survive!

&ldquo;The reality is that traditional (marketing) implementation approaches have failed&hellip;&rdquo; (Dobni et al., 2001, p. 402) Nevertheless recent research still seeks to identify relationships between Porter&rsquo;s marketing strategies, implementation and performance (Kumar et al. 1997; Teach and Schwartz, 2000). Although each study included the Porter&rsquo;s strategy types none actually classified business units into ideal differentiators, ideal cost leaders and combination differentiation cost leaders to conduct &ldquo;implementation-performance process&rdquo; comparisons.This study has made a contribution to the study of marketing implementation and marketing performance by separating and comparing strategies such as ideal differentiation, ideal cost leadership, and combination (differentiation/cost leadership) strategies with the &ldquo;stuck in the middle&rdquo; marketing strategy type.A key implementation finding was the importance of paying high salaries to attract the best employees when implementing either a differentiation strategy or a combined (differentiation/ cost leadership) strategy. However for the other six implementation tools, the findings support Kelliher and Perrett (2001, p.421) whose findings &ldquo;do not indicate a clear relationship between business strategy and the approach to HRM.&rdquo;A key performance finding was that differentiation is the best strategy in terms of marketing performance while cost leadership is the worst performing strategy. Both differentiation and the combination strategy (differentiation/cost leadership) outperformed cost leadership.<br /

The determinants of anxiety in air travel: an exploratory study

Not available

Organizational innovation : relationship with functional strategies and organizational performance

Abstract not available