Platform-based food delivery exposes gig workers to unstable pay and delivery times. Drawing on Conservation of Resources theory, this research examines how pay and time volatility contribute to drivers’ emotional exhaustion and responses toward restaurant partners. Study 1 used two experiments and found that both forms of volatility increased emotional exhaustion. Study 2 used a two-wave survey. Pay and time volatility and emotional exhaustion were measured at Time 1; perceived organizational support and desires for avoidance and revenge were measured at Time 2. Emotional exhaustion mediated the relationships between both forms of volatility and these outcomes, while organizational support weakened the indirect relationships. The findings identify time volatility as a distinct resource threat condition and show how support from delivery platforms may reduce the relational consequences of resource instability. Together, the studies connect unstable working conditions with drivers’ well-being and intentions toward restaurant partners.
Waiting is an inevitable part of service encounters, and estimated wait times can shape customers’ expectations and queue-entry decisions. Scenario-based experiments showed that fine-grained estimates increased expectations of being served sooner than communicated, thereby reducing balking, with this effect more pronounced under the interval format. In contrast, coarse-grained interval estimates were less effective in encouraging queue entry. The professionalism of delivery also influenced responses. Unprofessional delivery increased balking when wait times were presented as coarse-grained point estimates, partly by lowering expectations of prompt service. These findings demonstrate that both the numerical structure and interpersonal delivery of an initial wait-time estimate shape customers’ decisions to join a queue. Although expectations may later change as updated information becomes available, the initial estimate remains consequential because it influences whether customers enter the waiting process. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Although arrogance is typically frowned upon in interpersonal interactions, it may signal unobservable competence. Prior research offers limited insight into when and why brand arrogance generates positive rather than negative consumer responses. Consequently, we conducted three vignette-based, between-subjects experiments with Prolific participants. Across studies, we manipulated arrogant messages, brand expertise, and brand biography (top dog vs. underdog), measured consumer underdog tendency, and tested their effects on competence and visit intention using regression-based moderated mediation analyses. Study 1 shows that arrogant messages increase competence when the brand has high expertise. Study 2 reveals that arrogant messages increase (vs. decrease) competence of top-dog (vs. underdog) brands. Study 3 finds that consumers low in underdog tendencies perceive greater competence after reading arrogant messages. Integrating signaling theory and congruity theory, this research shows that arrogant messaging can signal competence, but only under specific brand and consumer conditions.
This study investigates how room rate disparity across Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) influences consumers' switching behavior and perceptions of hotel brand integrity. Employing a scenario-based experimental design with a sample of 430 Chinese consumers, we explored how price differences interact with loyalty status, price trajectory information, and brand consistency. Our findings reveal a complex non-linear inverse sigmoid relationship between rate disparity and channel switching. Contrary to expectations, loyalty membership did not reduce switching intent or increase discount thresholds. Moreover, rate disparity triggered brand integrity concerns, with brand doubt consistently exceeding switching intent. While price trajectory information did not change switching intentions, it increased the discount needed to induce switching, suggesting that consumers' price expectations influence sensitivity. These results advance theory by introducing a new and empirically supported non-linear model of channel switching and linking pricing inconsistency to diminished brand perception. Practically, the findings offer guidance on strategic discounting, brand management, and OTA design.
In today’s dynamic tourism and hospitality sector, the relationship between customers and frontline employees plays a decisive role in organizational success. This study applies self-awareness theory to delineate the dual pathways through which customer positive expression influences employees’ organizational behavior and personal development. Using a dual-method design, we conducted an online experiment with 708 participants and a three-wave field survey involving 1,159 frontline hotel employees across Pakistan, China, and the United States. The findings reveal that customer positive expression enhances organizational citizenship behavior by increasing employees’ public self-consciousness, with this effect being stronger among employees with an extrinsic career orientation. Moreover, customer positive expression fosters self-development behaviors by elevating private self-consciousness, particularly for employees with an intrinsic career orientation. Multi-group analysis revealed no significant cultural differences across the three countries, suggesting the model’s cross-cultural generalizability. These results advance theoretical understanding of customer–employee dynamics, and provide practical insights for managers to tailor intervention strategies based on employee career orientations, leveraging customer positive expression as a driver of both employee development and organizational performance.
Travel promises well-being yet carries the risk of misadventures. This study examines why and how tourists label an entire trip as a “failure,” shifting the focus from isolated destination attributes to holistic mental accounting evaluations of negative travel experiences. Using grounded theory and crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis applied to primary and secondary data collected from Chinese tourists, we identify eight types of tourist mental accounts—four income‑enhancing (functional, emotional, social relationship, symbolic value) and four loss‑mitigating (monetary, time, physical, risk)—alongside three mental accounting strategies (hedonic editing, self‑actualization needs, and luck conservation mind), and categorize nine configurational pathways into five travel failure types: consumption dispute, tight budget burden, negative interaction, symbolic value gap, and unexpected event. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the determinants of travel failure and offers practical insights for tourism operators and destination managers seeking to optimize the travel experience.
Drawing on psychological reactance theory and the persuasion knowledge model, this research investigates how combinations of non-personal, semi-personal, and personal communication influence hotel guests’ psychological responses and sustainable behavioral intentions. A pretest and two experiments ( N = 713) were conducted. The pretest confirms the distinctiveness of the three communication strategies. Study 1 shows that combining non-personal and personal communication enhances participation intention compared with non-personal communication alone and the combination of non-personal and semi-personal communication, with psychological reactance partially mediating this effect. Study 2 reveals that although the all-three-strategy mix generates the highest psychological reactance, its indirect effect on participation intention through reactance is moderated by hotel type. Particularly, stronger negative indirect effects emerge in budget hotels than in luxury hotels for certain communication comparisons. The research advances sustainability communication research by demonstrating that the effects of mixed communication strategies depend on communication intensity and service context.
Drawing on Gestalt psychology, simplicity, and psychological ownership theory, this study examines the impact of face count in travel influencers’ Instagram photos on social media engagement. A multi-method approach is used, including face recognition analysis and experimental design. Findings reveal that increasing the number of faces can decrease user engagement, whereas the feeling of others’ ownership mediates this effect. This paper offers a novel perspective on the growing literature on faces by considering the number of faces as a continuum, rather than limiting the focus to specific facial features or viewing face presence as a simple binary (either present or absent).
Tourists’ Pro-Environmental Behavior (PEB) is critical for sustainable tourism. While service robots are being increasingly adopted in tourism, their impact on PEB, compared with that of human services, remains unclear. Drawing on Social Exchange Theory and Norm Activation Theory, this study examines how service modes (robots vs. humans) influence PEB through dual mediating mechanisms of social distance and personal norms, moderated by interaction type (task-oriented vs. relationship-oriented type) and destination support (instrumental support vs. emotional support). Four experimental studies reveal that compared with robot services, human services enhance PEB more effectively by reducing perceived social distance and strengthening personal norms. Relationship-oriented interaction amplifies the disparity in social distance between human and robot services, whereas emotional support widens the gap in personal norms between human and robot services. These findings advance the theoretical understanding of service mode effects on PEB and offer practical insights for designing tourism services that promote sustainability.
This paper explores the under-theorized role of serendipity in qualitative tourism and hospitality research. Traditionally associated with tourists’ chance experiences, serendipity is reframed here as a methodological force in the research process itself. Drawing from interpretivist and grounded theory traditions, the paper proposes a recursive framework illustrating how researchers encounter, reflect on, and respond to unexpected insights in their fieldwork. Four case studies demonstrate how emergent themes, ranging from occupational stigma to reversed culture shock, reshaped original research questions and deepened theoretical contributions. These serendipitous turns highlight the value of intellectual flexibility and reflexivity in qualitative inquiry. The paper also outlines how serendipity can enhance trustworthiness and be transparently integrated into the methodology section of academic writing. In doing so, it invites an orientation toward a methodology of emergence; one that legitimizes improvisation, fosters researcher curiosity, and embraces the generative potential of the unexpected in hospitality and tourism studies.
This study examined the color effects on hotel consumers' psychological perceptions and decision-making regarding sustainable hotels. Three scenario-based between-subjects experiments were conducted. Study 1 used a 2 & times; 2 design and surveyed 400 participants online. The results show that cooler and lighter-colored photographs of hotel rooms enhanced consumers' perceptions of environmental friendliness in sustainable hotels. With 800 participants, Study 2 found that perceptions of environmental friendliness triggered by cooler and lighter colors significantly increased individuals' booking intentions and their willingness to pay a price premium. Study 3, with 800 survey responses, demonstrated that lay rationalism moderates the effects of color on booking intention and willingness to pay a price premium. This research contributes to nudging theory and color psychology. Practical implications highlight the importance of strengthening consumers' perceptions of environmental friendliness and increasing bookings through effective color application.
Artificial intelligence (AI) deployment in tourism and hospitality customer touchpoints has reached a point where its standardization no longer suffices to meet the growing demand for local, culturally relevant experiences. To address this gap, this study aims to introduce and conceptualize “AI Localization,” as well as to develop a measurement scale. From a communication perspective, AI localization is defined as the extent to which AI incorporates local cultural elements and disseminates local symbols through various carriers at customer touchpoints. Next, a three-dimensional scale—comprising speech modulation, persona profiles, and visual signifiers—is developed, clarifying the “carriers” within this concept. This work expands the AI design literature by shifting the focus from standard functionality to AI’s distinctive role in conveying cultural and local value. Practically, it suggests that managers use AI localization to highlight local distinctiveness, thereby improving customer acceptance, and provides tools for assessing and enhancing AI localization.
This study employs longitudinal process tracing to examine overtourism in Barcelona (1986-2025), tracing its trajectory from an industrial port to a global tourism hub. Drawing on 45 evidentiary units, Bayesian updating, and Collier's (2011) diagnostic tests, we validate seven causal mechanisms: infrastructure lock-in, regulatory gaps, digital amplification, cultural commodification, resident resistance, governance fragmentation, and biopolitical erosion. These mechanisms interact through path-dependent feedback loops under neoliberal urbanisation, generating housing crises, cultural erosion, and social conflict. Challenging linear destination life-cycle narratives, we propose the Cascade Amplification Framework, a five-layered model designed to mitigate overtourism and offer transferable insights for other urban tourism destinations facing similar pressures.
As social media influencers (SMIs) have been embedded in tourism marketing, a comprehensive understanding of their marketing outcomes is crucial for both academia and industry practitioners. Grounded in social influence theory, this study develops a theoretical framework of SMIs’ three-dimensional characteristics to scrutinize prior research. Employing a mixed-method approach integrating meta-analysis with BERTopic analysis, this study synthesizes findings from 62 empirical studies to elucidate the effectiveness of social media influencer marketing strategies. The results indicate that SMIs’ characteristics can be categorized into three dimensions (i.e., informational, normative, and value-expressive influence characteristics), which shape tourists’ behavioral intentions and destination-related dissemination effects through the sequential psychological mechanism of identification and internalization. Additionally, message content, education, and cultural background moderate these effects. These findings not only extend the academic understanding of SMIs and their marketing outcomes in the tourism and hospitality industry, but also offer practical guidance for designing effective marketing strategies.
Corporate carbon management in the hospitality and tourism industry is gaining prominence, yet limited attention has been directed to the issue of carbon greenwashing (CG), wherein corporations mislead stakeholders by overstating their sustainability practices. Such misrepresentation undermines global decarbonization efforts. Grounded in costly signaling theory, this study investigates the relationship between CEO social status and CG tendencies in the hospitality and tourism industry. Using comprehensive data from the Carbon Disclosure Project, our study discovers a notable relationship between CEO social standing and a corporation’s propensity to engage in CG, which is moderated by institutional influences such as environmental norms, judicial systems and accounting standards. Our findings advance the literature on carbon management, business ethics, and social psychology, and provide implications for reducing misleading claims of sustainability, thereby promoting genuine environmental action and allowing decarbonization initiatives to progress.
Despite increasing scholarly attention, research on mixed emotions in hospitality and tourism remains fragmented and theoretically underdeveloped. This review synthesizes 49 peer-reviewed articles to provide an integrated overview. Prior research has largely focused on external stimuli or narrowly defined cognitive evaluations as antecedents, offering limited insight into why similar contexts elicit different mixed emotional responses. Although both positive and negative outcomes have been documented, underlying mechanisms remain insufficiently theorized. Drawing on appraisal theories, we advance a framework built on three tenets: (a) mixed emotions can be classified as conflicting or additive according to appraisal-emotion patterns; (b) both individual appraisals and contextual cues jointly shape the emergence of mixed emotions; and (c) outcomes depend on appraisal tendencies, with coping strategies such as emotion-focused or problem-focused regulation mediating potential behavioral inhibition effects. We conclude by identifying key directions for future research and outlining managerial implications for tourism and hospitality.
Responding to the recent advances in circular economy (CE) initiatives in the hospitality industry, this paper explores the factors influencing employee CE-participation. Hospitality employees' CE perceptions and participation are rarely examined, although employee behavior plays a critical role in successful implementation of CE-initiatives. Based on the transactional theory of stress, employees' cognitive appraisal and job crafting, organizational facilitating behavior (OFB), and employees' CE-participation were tested. Data were collected from hotel employees who work or recently worked for properties that are engaged in CE-initiatives. Challenge appraisal and job crafting towards strengths had a significant influence on employee CE-participation. OFB served as a partial moderator in combination with job crafting as a mediator. Hospitality organizations should facilitate and challenge employees to enable their job crafting and ensure CE-participation. Theoretical contributions are presented and discussed.
Understanding the differences between the projected and perceived images of destinations plays a critical role in destination marketing and the fulfillment of tourists' expectations. However, existing research still lacks a systematic explanation of the network-level differences in destination image, and tends to overlook the underlying influence mechanisms among its factors. Using Macau as a case study, this research develops a decision-making model to deepen the understanding of interrelationships among destination image factors, and to explore the structural network differences between images. To achieve this, the research employs Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), quadrant analysis, and the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method. This study offers a systematic perspective to narrow the gap between the projected and perceived image. The results enable DMOs to gain deeper insights into tourists' needs and perceptions, as well as to identify the key factors shaping destination image, and the internal influence relationships among its components.
Cartoon-style illustration destination advertisements have become widely used in tourism marketing. However, there is limited research on when and why such advertisements enhance travel intentions for different types of destinations. Drawing on construal level theory and dual process theory, this study indicates that aligning cartoon-style illustration (vs. photograph) advertisements with hedonic (vs. utilitarian) destinations increases tourists' preferences by activating affective (vs. cognitive) processing. The study further suggests that these effects are intensified when the advertising language is abstract. A series of four studies, comprising a field experiment and three laboratory experiments, provide convergent evidence supporting these hypotheses. These findings not only enrich the literature on print and destination advertising but also offer practical guidance for travel agencies on effectively utilizing cartoon-style illustration advertisements.
We investigate a novel bias in online rating systems, "memory bias," arising from the temporal gap between consumption and review publication. Through an analysis of 753,806 hotel reviews and a randomized experiment, we find: (1) Memory bias has a greater spillover effect on perceived performance than on expectations, boosting ratings. (2) The marginal influence of memory bias on online reviews demonstrates a U-shaped relationship with time. (3) Over time, the variability in memory bias gradually diminishes. (4) Memory bias in online reviews arises from individuals accessing different types of knowledge over time, mediated by the level of concreteness in the accessed information. These insights deepen our understanding of memory bias and provide valuable implications for stakeholders in tourism and hospitality.
