The structure and the sociology of scientific collaborations are receiving increasing interest, especially in a world characterized by complex problems, dynamic growth of knowledge, and specialized ...areas of expertise. The primary objective of this study was to explore the patterns of collaborations in tourism research community. To this end, the authors apply social network analysis on co-authorship data obtained from top three tourism journals. The analysis revealed that even though the tourism researcher network is large and complex, it is dispersed in the form of several core groups of researchers who sometimes act as nodes in the network. Further, significant network characteristics, and the sociology behind their significance are presented and discussed.
Crisis management, disaster recovery, and organizational continuity are critical areas of competence for managers of individual businesses and entire destinations. For large-scale problems, crisis ...management may be a critical factor that determines the sustainability and success of a destination. In this article, the authors develop a framework that incorporates knowledge management principles to enhance the effectiveness of crisis management and planning for the hospitality and tourism industry. In addition, the authors develop a crisis typology based on the perceptions and knowledge needs of Philadelphia-area lodging operators. Subsequently, the authors apply the framework to envision the design concept of a knowledge-enabled crisis management system that can better support the crisis management and preparedness of a regional hospitality and tourism industry.
The senior tourism market has received increased attention as the importance of this market segment becomes more evident. However, limited efforts have been devoted to understanding psychological ...aspects of senior tourists. The primary objectives of this research are to investigate seniors' affect and travel motivation as well as interrelationships between these two constructs and to discover the effects of affect and motivation on travel intentions of seniors aged 65 or greater. Using Taiwanese seniors as the study sample, the authors identify “novelty seeking” as the most important travel motivation factor from five extracted factors. It is also found that both positive and negative affective states have significant impacts on travel motivations and that only positive affect is significantly related to future travel intention. Among motivation factors, novelty-seeking not only can be stimulated by affect but also arouses travel intention. The findings of this exploratory study provide empirical support to understand psychological aspects of senior travelers.
The rapid development of social media has challenged event managers to rethink how this trend will shape traditional marketing practices. Given the rise of these technologies, the current breed of ...special event “fan” has started to take advantage of and venture into this social space for possible benefits. For event managers, the fundamental issue becomes how to uncover the process through which special event consumers come to accept social media marketing. This paper reviews social media marketing literature, the characteristics of event marketing, and highlights the emotional aspect of social media applications. An extended TAM (technology acceptance model) is adopted to explain the mechanism by which social media marketing influences attitudes toward Facebook event pages. The authors find that users’ emotions exhibited on the Facebook event page do have a significant impact on the perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived enjoyment of such social media marketing. However, only the last construct significantly influences users’ attitudes and intentions toward an event. Implications and insights were provided to event practitioners and were discussed accordingly.
The main purpose of this paper is to conceptualize virtual tourism in the mobile context. Through the concept of telepresence, the typology of virtual experience can be explained by two dimensions: ...vividness and interactivity. The authors first discuss virtual experience in terms of several categories ranging from verbal-based to animated interactive experience. Based on these categories, various mobile applications are then identified to complete the typology. Finally, practical discussions are provided with examples to illustrate various mobile services that facilitate virtual experiences and the application of the mobile-mediated virtual experience to tourism with consideration of the destination marketing organization's innovativeness and consumers' needs for mobile usage.
Recent web technology advancement has enabled online customers to express their concerns and negative experiences about the hotel services over the Internet. This exploratory study attempts to ...provide some insights into this recent phenomenon by analyzing self-selected hotel customers' online complaints recorded on a specialized complaint forum,
eComplaints.com
. A content analysis of those e-Complaints in 18 problem categories revealed that online customers were mostly unhappy with fundamental service failures (i.e., declined service quality and rude employees) in the hotel service encounter. Surprisingly, only one in every five e-Complaints received a response from the hotel company in the identified top-five complaint categories. The authors further used text-mining software to identify most frequently complained keywords and examine their relational associations. Business implications of the research findings were also discussed.
Intellectual relationships and collaboration networks are the basis for the development of a knowledge domain. The visual representation of such “knowledge networks” contributes to the overall ...understanding of intellectual collaborations in a particular knowledge domain. Based on the co-authorship data from recent journal publications over a period of five years, the authors applied social network analysis to explore the network structures and identify their network properties in the hospitality research domain. The analysis revealed the core and peripheral networks where the power law distribution was observed on the pattern of publishing academic papers. The overall network was further examined by nine research streams in both “global” and “contextual” views to understand a broad variety of the collaboration patterns of hospitality researchers.
Information and communications technologies (ICTs) have transformed the business and social landscape of tourism industry. Tourism organisations in such a dynamic environment must reinvent their ...cultures and strategies to survive and create sustainable competitive advantage. In this context, the concept of a 'knowledge based destination' is gaining popularity within the domain of policy-making and strategic regional development. The authors elaborate this new perspective and explore its relevance to the tourism industry. The analysis of qualitative data collected through focus groups revealed various social, economic and technical factors that are essential for the evolution of a 'knowledge based destination'. The authors argue that deploying innovative ICTs and enabling information infrastructures play an important role in this developmental process. This research aims at stimulating a discussion on role of innovative technological applications for the future of a destination along with the resultant policy and research implications.
Major international hallmark events, especially the Olympic Games, represent a significant opportunity for marketing tourism to the host country. Due to the scale and importance of the event, the ...coordination between the Olympic organizing committee and the destination marketing organization of the host country becomes a knowledge-intensive and exceptionally complicated task. Analyzing on-site interview data collected from top executives of the two major organizations involved in the 2004 Summer Olympic Games (ATHOC and GNTO), this research achieved two objectives: (1) extracted and organized the tacit knowledge from both organizations to discover major issues concerning the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, and (2) identified the strategic alignment issues between the domains of Olympics planning and destination marketing and proposed a conceptual framework for the future Olympic host countries.
•Examines the relationship between brand knowledge and non-financial performance in Taiwan green restaurants.•Integrates green restaurant brand attitude as a mediating variable.•Brings new focus on ...the dimension of green restaurant brand attitude.
The restaurant business has been increasingly recognized for its ability to help mitigate many negative environmental impacts. To develop a competitive advantage, green restaurants may adopt an innovative branding strategy. Marketing management recognizes that understanding brand attitude is critical for marketing strategies. Studies have examined the relationship between brand knowledge and non-financial brand performance. However, it remains unclear how the green restaurant brand attitude affects this relationship.
This study aims to fill this research gap by identifying the composition and structure of the brand attitude in Taiwan’s green restaurants and examining the mediating effects of brand attitude on the relationship between brand knowledge and brand performance. The findings of this study broaden and deepen the current knowledge of the role of brand attitude in Taiwan’s green restaurant industry. In practice, it is suggested that green restaurant management should develop well-known brand knowledge to form brand attitudes and foster brand performance.
