This study investigates how perceived green quality signals shape tourists’ trust and intentions to choose green tourism services. Drawing on Signaling Theory, Trust Theory, and value-based perspectives, the study examines how Perceived Green Marketing Quality (PGM) influences Green Trust through multiple first-order green evaluation mechanisms, conceptually grouped into internal and external pathways. A quantitative approach was employed using SPSS 27 and SmartPLS 4. Data were collected from 388 domestic tourists in Vietnam using purposive convenience sampling, with respondents required to have prior exposure to green tourism services. The results show that PGM significantly enhances Green Trust both directly and indirectly through Environmental Values, Clarity of Green Claims, Usefulness of Green Information, Green Word-of-Mouth Credibility, Perceived Green Economic Responsibility, Positive Green Emotions, Perceived Green Transparency, and Perceived Green Ethical Responsibility. Green Trust has a strong positive effect on tourists’ intention to choose green tourism services, while Green Involvement significantly strengthens the trust-intention relationship. The findings extend green tourism research by showing that different green sustainability signals contribute unequally to trust formation and that trust serves as a central mechanism linking green evaluations to behavioral intention. The study also provides practical implications for developing credible, transparent, and verifiable green communication in sustainable tourism.
This study addresses the ongoing debate on whether Information Technology (IT) alone can enhance hotel performance by examining its role in combination with internal organisational resources. Although prior research has explored the link between IT and performance, findings remain inconsistent, with some studies showing positive impacts while others highlight limited or no effects. This indicates a gap in understanding the mechanisms through which IT generates sustainable competitive advantage in the hospitality industry. Grounded in the Resource-Based View (RBV), this study proposes and tests a comprehensive model that integrates IT with Organisational Learning (OL) and Organisational Culture (OC) to explain how these intangible resources interact to influence hotel performance. Data were collected through a survey of 295 hotel professionals in Brazil and Portugal between 2016 and 2017, and the proposed model was tested using Structural Equation Modelling (AMOS 23.0). The results reveal that IT has both direct and indirect effects on performance, with OL playing a partial mediating role. OC positively influences IT and OL but impacts performance only indirectly, through OL. These findings demonstrate that IT alone does not guarantee performance improvement; its value depends on its alignment with other organisational resources. This study contributes to the literature by empirically linking IT, OC, and OL in a single model, providing a nuanced understanding of how technology, culture, and learning complement each other to drive performance. For practitioners, the findings offer guidance on how to strategically integrate IT initiatives with organisational capabilities to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.
Sustainability communication in tourism remains challenging, as messages often lack clarity and do not connect meaningfully with audiences. However, less is known about how Spanish speakers in Spain cognitively and affectively represent sustainability, tourism and hospitality. This study provides a lexical-affective mapping of Spanish speakers’ associations with four key terms: “ sustainability” , “ sustainable” , “ tourism” , and “ hospitality” . The methodology uses a Free Word Association Task (FWAT), directional associative strength, affective estimates of valence and arousal, and Social Network Analysis (SNA). Results show that “ sustainability” and “ sustainable” are primarily associated with environmental content. These associations are generally positive but low in arousal, and their associative networks overlap only partially. “ Tourism” shows a broader and more ambivalent semantic-affective profile, combining leisure-related meanings with critical associations (e.g., crowding). In contrast, “ hospitality” is mostly linked to interpersonal values rather than industry-related meanings, suggesting cultural-linguistic polysemy. The combination of associative structure, affective characteristics, and network analysis provides a lexical-affective map of how Spanish speakers represent these terms. These findings provide a diagnostic basis for future communication design and experimental testing and can support the development of public communication that uses these terms in ways that are clearer and more accessible to non-expert audiences.
Responsible tourism increasingly aspires to move beyond mitigating harm toward net-positive restoration, yet how destinations reconcile protecting fragile socio-ecological assets with actively regenerating them remains poorly understood. This study reframes that challenge through organizational ambidexterity: the capacity to pursue exploitation (refining existing resources, routines, and protective controls) and exploration (discovering novel restorative practices and value) simultaneously. Semi-structured interviews with 18 Vietnamese tourists across insular Con Dao and montane Ha Giang were analysed using a codebook (coding-reliability) form of thematic analysis. Four themes were developed: circular resource management, community-driven ecological restoration, perceived regenerative tourist engagement, and place-based cultural-ecological integration. Participants reported regenerative contributions where destinations were perceived to hold exploitative and exploratory logics in balance, drawing on established flows, traditional knowledge, and routine consumption while trialling new waste-to-value loops, adaptive conservation, and co-production of ecological value. Because the evidence base is tourist testimony, destination-level claims are advanced as participant-informed interpretations rather than verified capabilities. From these four themes the study derives five ambidextrous mechanisms, advanced as propositions for future testing, and offers a sensitizing framework for context-sensitive responsible-tourism strategies.
Service failures (SFs) represent an inevitable reality in package tourism due to provider interdependence and sustained frontline contact. As experiential ambassadors, tour guides (TGs) play a pivotal role in service failure recovery (SFR). This study examines how TG profiles -combining physical attractiveness (PA) and gender-are associated with tourists’ evaluations of service failure recovery (SFR). Employing methodological triangulation, this study combines a scenario-based survey ( N = 134) and an eye-tracking (ET) experiment ( N = 26) to investigate tourists’ explicit evaluations and gaze-based visual attention to outcome failure recovery (OFR) and process failure recovery (PFR). Across both studies, the attractive-female profile rather than unattractive-male guide profile in the outcome failure scenario was associated with higher SFRS, TGS, and tour firm recommendation intention (TFRI). However, these profile advantages attenuate during process failures (PFs) and do not extend to deeper behavioural commitments, such as service failure forgiveness (SFF) or avoidance of negative word-of-mouth. Descriptive gaze patterns reveal that while attractive visual cues capture longer visual attention duration, implicit visual fixation does not directly translate into conscious post-recovery approval. Overall, the findings position frontline appearance as a context-dependent profile cue rather than a universal determinant of service recovery, while demonstrating the value of comparing explicit evaluations with gaze-based attention measures.
