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.
The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is substantially transforming service design in the hospitality and tourism sector. Despite extensive discussion about the potential benefits of AI in this field, consumers' reactions to human-designed services compared with AI-designed services have not been sufficiently explored. Drawing on stereotype theory, this research proposes that human- and AI-designed services elicit divergent consumer responses under different innovation-driving contexts. Specifically, consumers respond more positively to human-designed services in market-driven innovation contexts, whereas they favor AI-designed services in technology-driven innovation contexts. Through three empirical studies, this research demonstrates a significant interaction effect between design sources and innovation drivers on consumer response, mediated by perceived uncertainty. The findings not only enhance theoretical understanding of AI's role in service design and new service development, but also provide practical guidance for hospitality and tourism firms on whether to disclose AI design in design of new services.
Artificial intelligence (AI) offers a powerful means of envisioning the future impacts of tourism destinations. Through two rounds of focus group discussions, three experimental studies, and two supplemental studies, this research conceptualized and evaluated two types of loss-framed AI narratives using both text and visuals: deprivation of a positive future and presence of a negative one. Our results demonstrate that AI narratives depicting the presence of a negative future are more effective in motivating tourists to support heritage preservation than those illustrating the deprivation of a positive future due to evoking fear. Furthermore, this research indicates the critical moderating role of temporal distance, revealing that AI narratives describing the presence of a negative future intensify fear and enhance tourists' support for preservation in distant future scenarios. However, distant future narratives mitigate these observed effects. Our findings provide valuable implications for designing impactful conservation campaigns to promote sustainability in tourism.
This research examines how social distance and how attentional allocation responses to surprise shape accommodation choice. We argue that surprise redirects attention toward the features of the offering, making relational considerations more influential. Across three online experiments and one laboratory eye-tracking study, we find that consumers are more willing to choose accommodations for socially close others, and that surprise intensifies this tendency by increasing attention to the unexpected. Eye-tracking data provide convergent evidence that surprise-driven attention underlies these effects. The findings integrate social distance theory with attentional allocation to offer a cohesive framework for understanding decision-making under uncertainty in hospitality settings. We also outline managerial implications for designing surprise-based offerings that align with relational contexts.
This study investigates sound features' impact on user engagement in destination marketing short-form videos. Using acoustic scene analysis and the theory of interactive media effects, the research focuses on key audio metrics: chroma, zero-crossing, root mean square, onset strength, tempo, and pitch. Analysing a dataset of 11,451 reels across 141 countries, the findings reveal that acoustic complexity and onset strength negatively correlate with engagement metrics, while rhythmic and slightly louder and human-narrated audio may enhance user interactions, particularly in dynamic themes. As for nature-related themes, lower complexity and reduced onset strength are favoured, whereas louder audio may disrupt the intended peaceful atmosphere. Overall, this study contributes to the growing recognition of auditory cues in digital tourism.
People tend to support social initiatives when they feel a psychological connection to the beneficiaries. This tendency often leads hospitality firms to prioritize social initiatives that appeal to customers over those that address the most urgent needs. While previous research has explored situations where people have pre-existing connections to beneficiaries, few studies have examined whether intentionally creating perceived closeness can achieve similar effects. This study explores whether linguistic framing using personal pronouns ("they" vs. "we") can increase perceived closeness toward beneficiaries and, in turn, boost customers' willingness to engage in social initiatives. Across two experiments, Study 1 found that using inclusive pronouns ("we") enhanced perceived closeness to beneficiaries, which subsequently increased engagement intentions. Furthermore, Study 2 demonstrated that this pronoun framing effect was moderated by an individual's power distance beliefs, the extent to which they perceive hierarchy when services are framed as exclusive. The pronoun framing effect was significant only among those with low power distance beliefs. These findings advance our theoretical understanding of how psychological distance can be strategically reduced through language used in campaign messages. They also offer practical guidance for hospitality managers seeking to design communication strategies that foster more meaningful and sustained customer engagement in social initiatives.
The existing literature reveals a lack of research on conflict and coordination mechanisms in family travel. This study extends generational theory by qualitatively examining real travel experiences among three-generation Chinese families. The findings identify conflicts arising from differences in perspectives, decision-making, preferences, and health concerns. These conflicts are managed through five coordination mechanisms: compartmentalized coordination, rotational responsibility, strategic compromise, consensus building, and authoritative decision-making. By applying intergenerational theory and social exchange theory, this research deepens the understanding of how Chinese families navigate intergenerational dynamics during travel. It contributes to the literature by highlighting culturally embedded coordination patterns that maintain harmony and ensure collective satisfaction in family travel contexts. It also offers practical implications for developing targeted marketing strategies for family-oriented tourism products.
Videos are an effective tool for destination marketing. Despite being an essential technical feature, when and how video motion influences destination advertising effectiveness remains unclear. This research employs a mixed-method approach to investigate how video motion type (slow vs. fast) influences destination advertising effectiveness, while considering the destination type (nature-based vs. urban). Survey results illuminate a lay belief that nature-based (urban) destinations are associated with a slow (fast) pace, subsequently shaping consumer responses toward slow- versus fast-motion videos. Specifically, insights from a semi-structured interview, three online experiments, and a field study in a social media platform with 33,080 video plays reveal that slow motion is better suited for nature-based destinations, whereas fast motion is more effective for urban destinations. Perceived fit is identified as the mechanism driving such congruity effects.
Crowdfunding has become a vital financing option for early-stage restaurant ventures, yet many campaigns fail to meet their funding goals. As competition intensifies, understanding what drives campaign success is critical. This study examines how corporate social responsibility (CSR) orientation affects reward-based crowdfunding outcomes and how risk communication moderates this relationship. Logistic and OLS regressions were used to analyze 1,777 U.S. Kickstarter restaurant campaigns for a proposed inverted U-shaped relationship between CSR and funding outcomes. Results revealed that moderate CSR engagement improves performance, while excessive CSR emphasis leads to diminishing returns. However, when project descriptions communicate higher levels of risk, the relationship shifts toward a U-shape, with stronger CSR orientation improving funding outcomes under uncertainty. This study advances understanding of CSR in crowdfunding by showing its non-linear effects and the role of risk, providing clear guidance for entrepreneurs to design more effective campaigns.
This paper introduces monster theory as a novel theoretical lens to conceptualise climate change within tourism studies. It argues that climate change represents a "hyper-monster," a vast, systemic entity whose presence reveals the tourism industry's deepest anxieties and challenges it with an existential crisis. Drawing on the monster theory's core theses, the paper analyses how climate change embodies societal fears and threatens tourism's future. It explores how this monster is born of global (in)difference and systematic injustice, controls the boundaries of what is possible for global travel, and paradoxically generates contradictory demands, such as "last chance tourism." By framing climate change as a hyper-monstrous force, the paper presents a novel analytical framework for tourism and its (un)sustainability in the Anthropocene.
Hotels are lodging establishments whose primary goal is to provide guests with comfort and safety during their stay. Yet, the emergence of scripted hotels (e.g., the Star Wars hotel and the Hollow Hotel) has redefined the accommodation experience by turning ordinary lodging establishments into themed outings with endless adventurous encounters, while engaging guests in role-playing scripted scenes. This research works to explore the impact of scripted gamification on hotel selection intention from the perspective of edgework theory. Results from two experimental studies, a survey, and two qualitative studies show that scripted gamification exerts a positive influence on guests' hotel selection intention, mediated by a heightened level of perceived enjoyment and customer engagement. Furthermore, sensation seeking works as a boundary condition that facilitates the role of gamification. This study provides valuable insights for both researchers and practitioners, facilitating a deeper understanding of the potential benefits of integrating game-like scripts within the accommodation business.
