This study, grounded in four sociopsychological theories—attention restoration, nostalgia, push–pull motivations, and bottom-up spillover—investigates the relationships among tourist subjective well-being, destination attributes, perceived destination competitiveness, and destination loyalty in island destinations, focusing on revisitors. Distinct from prior research, subjective well-being is positioned as an outcome of destination loyalty, advancing a loyalty-to-well-being pathway centered on revisitors’ long-term engagement. Results show that island destination attributes significantly enhance perceived destination competitiveness and destination loyalty. Destination loyalty directly predicts subjective well-being and mediates the effect of destination attributes on well-being, underscoring loyalty-building as a pivotal strategy for cultivating sustainable tourist well-being. Collectively, the findings reorient destination marketing toward leveraging loyalty to elevate well-being, positioning it as a practical lever for long-term satisfaction and competitive advantage
This research adopted a more-than-human perspective to examine how free-roaming cats shaped the tourism experiencescape at Houtong Cat Village in Taiwan. Its mixed-methods design integrated field observations and interviews with automated analysis of 14,167 online reviews and 8,515 photographs. Across the datasets, cats’ unmanaged movement and behavior appeared to shape visitors’ movement, emotional engagement, and perceptions of the space. Visitors’ sense of the site’s authenticity was not tied to heritage structures alone, but was negotiated through the interplay of mining history, the cats’ presence/actions, commercial activity, and welfare ethics. To account for these findings, this note proposes the concept of multispecies relational authenticity, which locates authenticity neither in the tourist’s inner state nor in object-based heritage, but rather in the relationship between visitors and nonhumans. In the case of Houtong, that relationship notably included how the cats were cared for or mistreated while tourists were present. A divergence between datasets was also observed: unlike the reviews’ text and our interview data, the photographs elided welfare concerns, suggesting an aestheticized tourist gaze that filtered out ethically complex realities. As well as contributing to more-than-human research on peri-urban synanthropic destinations, these findings can usefully inform how destination managers interpret visitor satisfaction data.
Visual storytelling increasingly shapes how destination marketing organizations (DMOs) engage audiences on social media. This study investigates how the linguistic and visual characteristics of DMO Instagram posts influence user engagement. Drawing on dual coding theory and processing fluency theory, we analyze 2,598 image-based posts from 33 Indian DMO accounts. Using deep learning-based image analysis and computer-assisted linguistic assessment, we examine how multimodal content characteristics shape user engagement. Image features are extracted with Google Cloud Vision API and clustered using Word2Vec with latent semantic analysis. Caption language is coded using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count framework. Negative binomial regression examines how these features affect likes and comments. The findings show that lexical complexity reduces both likes and comments, while first-person singular pronouns increase engagement, and collective “we” language decreases it. Positive emotion mainly increases likes, whereas tentative language stimulates comments, and certitude language decreases engagement. Past focus language generates different engagement outcomes depending on the visual context and engagement metric. The study contributes by showing that DMO Instagram engagement is theme-specific and metric-specific. It further reveals a fluency–dialogue trade-off in which cues that support passive liking may not equally stimulate active commenting.
The COVID-19 emergency reshaped work perceptions worldwide, exacerbating employee turnover, particularly in tourism and hospitality. While often examined from a traditional human resource-based perspective, this issue requires examining mechanisms through which employees can be attracted, satisfied, and retained. This study adopts an internal marketing perspective and offers a new application of the theory of consumption values (TCV), viewing employees as internal customers and examining the values driving employment choices within tourism and hospitality. Eighty-one in-depth interviews were conducted, providing insights into TCV values (i.e., social, conditional, functional, epistemic, emotional). Findings highlight workplace collaboration and relationships as social value, and work-life balance and flexibility as conditional value. A novel theme, transformative value, emerged when employers foster openmindedness and identity building. Besides its theoretical contribution, the study offers recommendations for improving employee attraction and retention in tourism and hospitality
This article explores the connections between job satisfaction, affective commitment, and turnover intention among hotel employees in Spain and Türkiye. In order to compare how these relationships differ between Turkish and Spanish employees, the study draws on Hofstede’s cultural theory and Social Exchange Theory (SET) to explain the exchange relationships in the workplace. We conducted a questionnaire survey to gather data from 270 hotel employees, including 132 from Spain (November–December 2023) and 138 from Türkiye (January 2024), working in three-, four-, and five-star hotels across Spain and Türkiye. We employed SmartPLS for multigroup analysis (PLSMGA) and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), while SPSS was utilized for descriptive analysis. The findings indicate that affective commitment is significantly influenced by relationships with superiors and satisfaction with the reward system, but not by physical conditions or relationships with colleagues. Turnover intention is negatively impacted by affective commitment. The findings offer actionable, culture-specific HR insights for multinational hotels.
