United States

Introduction: Focusing on the COVID-19 months (from March 2020 until June 2021), this study explores the changes in consumer spending behavior within the hospitality &amp; tourism sector and investigates what changes will remain post COVID-19. The study interviewed consumers and managers to understand their behavioral adapations in accessing hospitality and tourism services amid COVID-19 and discussed the implications on business strategies.

Methods: To collect data on consumer spending behavior, the researchers first conducted in-depth interviews with 15 consumers in the United States. These interviews served as a basis for the development of an online survey that has been administered through Qualtrics. To investigate the adaptation strategies amid COVID-19, the researchers have interviewed 15 business representatives from the US hospitality sector. The interviewees have been identified through a snowball sampling method. The data collected through the interviews have been analyzed using NVivo, while data collected through the survey have been analyzed using the SPSS software.

Expected Results:Consumers are expected to emphasize cleanliness and sanitation practices and social distancing measures. They are also expected to have become more open to digital services and more sustainability-driven. Businesseses will most likely maintain in the long term some measures adopted during the pandemic, including digital services and new sanitation protocols. Other business adaptation strategies (e.g., mandatory mask requirements) would likely remain only for a limited period of time.

Discussion: This study is a practical contribution to hospitality and tourism businesses. Using the interview technique and qualitative analysis, we expect to collect in-depth information from a small number of people, which could help explain specific behaviors of consumers or businesses. The research would also provide theoretical and empirical understanding of consumers’ new spending behavior amid and post COVID-19. The findings would shed light on how hospitality and tourism businesses should design their post-pandemic adaptation strategies.

TOUR 2021

Consumer spending and hospitality and tourism businesses’ adaptation amid COVID-19: A qualitative research

consumer spending

tourism

hospitality

covid-19

Dear Delegates, 

On behalf of the organizing committee at UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management and Elsevier, I have the greatest pleasure to welcome you to the **6th World Research Summit for Tourism and Hospitality: Resilience, Adaptability, and Innovation.** 

Though we cannot host you this year owing to Covid-19 at our beautiful resort-like campus in Orlando, Florida, we believe this virtual and live-streamed conference will provide an interactive, dynamic, and shared international platform for global academics and practitioners to discuss how to enhance research applications and knowledge management through resilience, adaptability, digital intelligence, innovation, and smart knowledge in bringing our industry and research back to normal. This summit particularly offers unique opportunities to unfold and embrace various repercussions of COVID-19 pandemic with various stakeholders, including academic researchers, industry professionals, and government officials, through dialogues on how to better utilize research outputs for the benefits of the industry, in a resilient, intelligent and innovative way. 

I hope you will agree that we have put together a wonderful program including keynote speeches, panel discussions, concurrent presentations, poster sessions, and best paper recognition and award ceremony. We hope you will take advantage of these activities and engage yourself with great learning and sharing opportunities during the two days of the Summit. Thank you for joining us and we look forward to our discussions! 

Sincerely, 
Dr. Youcheng Wang 
Dean and Preeminent Chair Professor

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This conference provides an interactive, dynamic, and shared international platform for global academics and practitioners to discuss how to enhance research applications and knowledge management through resilience, adaptability, digital intelligence, innovation, and smart knowledge in bringing our industry and research back to normal. This summit particularly offers unique opportunities to unfold and embrace various repercussions of COVID-19 pandemic with various stakeholders, including academic researchers, industry professionals, and government officials, through dialogues on how to better utilize research outputs for the benefits of the industry, in a resilient, intelligent and innovative way.

Introduction: Focusing on the COVID-19 months (from March 2020 until June 2021), this study explores the changes in consumer spending behavior within the hospitality & tourism sector and investigates what changes will remain post COVID-19. The study interviewed consumers and managers to understand their behavioral adapations in accessing hospitality and tourism services amid COVID-19 and discussed the implications on business strategies.

Methods: To collect data on consumer spending behavior, the researchers first conducted in-depth interviews with 15 consumers in the United States. These interviews served as a basis for the development of an online survey that has been administered through Qualtrics. To investigate the adaptation strategies amid COVID-19, the researchers have interviewed 15 business representatives from the US hospitality sector. The interviewees have been identified through a snowball sampling method. The data collected through the interviews have been analyzed using NVivo, while data collected through the survey have been analyzed using the SPSS software.

Expected Results:Consumers are expected to emphasize cleanliness and sanitation practices and social distancing measures. They are also expected to have become more open to digital services and more sustainability-driven. Businesseses will most likely maintain in the long term some measures adopted during the pandemic, including digital services and new sanitation protocols. Other business adaptation strategies (e.g., mandatory mask requirements) would likely remain only for a limited period of time.

Discussion: This study is a practical contribution to hospitality and tourism businesses. Using the interview technique and qualitative analysis, we expect to collect in-depth information from a small number of people, which could help explain specific behaviors of consumers or businesses. The research would also provide theoretical and empirical understanding of consumers’ new spending behavior amid and post COVID-19. The findings would shed light on how hospitality and tourism businesses should design their post-pandemic adaptation strategies.

technical paper

The purpose of this study is to explore the Generation Y (Gen Y) segment’s understanding of green hotels in Singapore. The study concentrates on the preferences of green hotel attributes and evaluates guests’ willingness to pay a premium to stay in green hotels. The hotel industry’s main purpose is to deliver comfortable services/supplies (e.g. hot water, food, drinks, linens, and swimming pool). In the process, there is excessive consumption of water, energy, non-recyclable, goods, and natural resources, thus directly or indirectly harming the environment (Han et al., 2011). Among all generational segments, Gen Y comprises more than 25 percent of the world’s population (Bilgihan et al., 2013). Millennial individuals born between 1979 and 1994 are classified as Generation Y, aged between 24 and 39 (Talbott, 2012). Gen Y is the segment with strong views about environmental issues (Jang, Kim & Bonn, 2011). Many companies are focusing on Gen Y individuals and converting them to potential consumers due to their significant purchasing power (Parment, 2013). They use social media and are well-versed with the internet by uploading content frequently (Bolton, et al., 2013).

The study employed a qualitative approach by using purposeful sampling to select ten participants for semi-structured interviews. This study shows that Gen Y’s willingness to stay in a hotel is highly related to location and price. It delves more in-depth to provide recommendations to hotels on improving their green initiatives and marketing strategies. The result of this study also shows that guests were accepting of paying slightly more for green attributes.

Gen Y’s preferences and willingness to pay towards green attributes hotels

There is a great interest in storytelling for tourism experience development. An objective of storytelling is to engage people (Gabriel, 2000) by sparking emotions. Storytelling involves loading tourism experiences in a way that engages visitors’ emotions.Emotions are regarded as core building blocks of an experience (Bastiaansen, et al., 2019). It is assumed that an experience involving emotional engagement through storytelling should translate into a memorable experience. Zak (2015) asserts that emotions and identification lead to empathy, then to narrative transportation and better recall of the story. However, little is known about how storytelling in tourism experiences leads to emotions and memories.

In this study, we compared the emotional impact and the memories of a (tourism) experience withoutstorytelling(mainly providing facts and information) to onewith storytelling(using specific storytelling techniques).

The Van Gogh Heritage Foundation is currentlyredesigning three Van Gogh visitor centers located in the south of the Netherlands where Van Gogh spent most of his life. For two locations, we wrote a factual “non-story” version, and an emotional “story” version of certain events that took place in Vincent’s (early) years. We then created four 6-minutes videos, consisting of images, and a voiceover.

Forty participants had their brain activity (EEG) and skin conductivity monitored while watching two of the four videos. Participants were asked to evaluate the videos immediately afterwards. One week after the experiment, 26 participants were interviewed about their memories of the videos.

Results show that the “stories” led to a significantly higher level of narrative transportation than the “non-stories”. Furthermore, the “stories” lead to empathy for certain story’s characters, and to stronger and more vivid memories.

The presentation will include theoretical and managerial implications. We will show how the outcomes have found their way into the redesign of the visitor centers.

Storytelling and tourism experience: Emotions around, and memories of "stories" and "non-stories" regarding Vincent Van Gogh

In recent decades there has been a dramatic increase in research related to experience management. The desired outcome for firms adopting this concept is to create memorable experiences. Memorability has translated well to the hospitality and tourism industry as it requires a process of staging services and using products as props to create a memorable experience (Kim et al., 2012; Pine & Gilmore, 1998). Memorable experience research has also found salience in the wine context (Saayman & van der Merwe, 2015). However, different business models have begun to emerge that have not been thoroughly investigated, such as urban wineries. This study examines the moderating effect of winery setting on memorable tourism experiences (MTEs) and its outcomes by surveying a sample of U.S. residents, over 21, who visited an urban winery in the past two years. Respondents answered questions from a self-administered online questionnaire and a two-step approach utilizing CFA and SEM was used for analysis (Anderson & Gerbing, 1988). Preliminary results suggest significant relationships between MTEs, affective commitment, and satisfaction. In addition, the relationship between satisfaction, commitment, and loyalty in urban wineries differed based on prior visits to rural wineries. This study provides insight into memorability and its outcomes in the wine tourism context. It shows how visitation to a rural winery can affect perceptions of urban wineries. Creating memories is essential for urban winery practitioners and seeking out first-time winery visitors should be a strategic goal to ensure success. Full results will be presented at the conference.

Urban vs rural: The effect of winery setting on memorability, affective commitment, satisfaction, and loyalty

As the direct or indirect interactions between a customer and a service encounter (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016), customer experience has been the focus of hospitality literature for decades. However, current literature has primarily focused on examining experience at a single service encounter, while little attention is paid to the overall customer experience across different touchpoints (i.e., pre-purchase, during purchase, and post-purchase) (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016). Applying memory-dominant logic (Harrington et al., 2019) and customer experience quality framework (Kuppelwieser & Klaus, 2021), the purposes of this study are to a) investigate the effects of multiple touchpoints of a customer experience journey on individuals’ subjective well-being and repurchase intention, and b) assessing the mediating role of memorability.

Data was collected using the Qualtrics consumer panel in May 2021. The targeted participants were those who had traveled away from home and stayed in a full-service hotel in the past 12 months. A total of 359 valid responses were collected. The measurement model and structural model were assessed respectively using AMOS 27. In addition, common method variance tests were performed, and the results suggested it was not a major concern.

Results suggested that all three touchpoints (i.e., pre-purchase, during purchase, and post-purchase) contribute to hotel customers’ memorability of their getaway, which subsequently influences customers’ subjective well-being and enhances their repurchase intention. Results further supported the mediation role of memorability. This study was the first to model the dynamic nature of customer experience in the hospitality industry, which provides a comprehensive and holistic understanding of customer experience, further enriching the literature. The study also provides potential strategies of customer experience design to hotel operators.

Constructing a memorable hotel stay: A dynamic customer experience journey approach

The risk of disruption to Travel and Leisure firms has been given so far little attention in the academic literature and the scarce related evidence is mostly drawn from conventional market-based frameworks comprising stock returns. In this paper, we consider the shape and dynamics of default probabilities of US Travel and Leisure firms to make inferences regarding their interconnectedness and determinants. However, instead of focusing on one single maturity of the credit default swap (CDS), such as the 5-year, we consider the joint dependency of the various factors of the CDS curves to capture potential heterogeneity in the interconnectedness of default risk across the level, slope, and curvature of the CDS curves, respectively reflecting the long-, medium- and short-term factors. The data is daily from January 1, 2017 to March 19, 2021, which allows us to study the full sample and covid-19 outbreak periods, and the employed methods involve the generalized variance decomposition through which the interconnectedness of default risk across various horizons is uncovered in a dynamic fashion. The results show that the long-term default risk (level factor) exhibits a higher level of connectedness than the short-term and middle-term default risks (slope and curvature, respectively). The credit risk spillover across all horizons increases during covid-19 outbreak period, indicating credit deterioration and vulnerability of the system to a possible clustered default during the pandemic. Further analysis involving the determinants of default connectedness indicates that the government stringency index increases the future credit risk spillover in the short- and medium-term, whereas the US stock market volatility increases the future credit risk spillover in the medium- and long-term. Those findings matter to investors and policymakers seeking to refine their means to monitor systemic vulnerability in the US Travel and Leisure industry.

Dynamic credit default swap curves of tourism firms, covid-19, and determinants

Introduction

Seniors that shape today’s marketplace are healthier, have higher education, longer life expectancy, and more purchasing power than ever before. By adopting the Biopsychosocial (BPS) model from healthcare research, the current study attempts to provide a clearer insight for understanding senior residents’ subjective wellbeing and Eudemonia. More specifically, this study aims to (1) examine the impacts of biological, psychological, and social factors on sense of community (SoC) and wellbeing; (2) to test the impact of SoC on residents’ wellbeing; and (3) to investigate the mediation effect of SoC.

Methods

The population of interest was defined as residents in senior living facilities. The target sample was defined as people who are 55 years old and above and who have lived in senior living facilities for more than one month. A convenience sampling method was used. Participants were employed from Amazon Mechanical Turk. A total of 160 surveys were collected and 122 surveys were retained for data analysis. Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling was employed for data analysis.

Results

The results showed that senior residents’ social support and lifelong learning significantly influenced their SoC, and that the SoC had a significant impact on senior residents’ subjective wellbeing. Additionally, SoC fully mediated the relationship between social support and SWB and partially mediated the relationship between lifelong learning and SWB.

Discussion

This study expanded the BPS approach in senior living studies by examining the antecedents and consequences of senior residents’ SoC. It also found predictors of senior residents’ subjective wellbeing and eudaimonia, enriching the studies related to seniors’ quality of life and successful aging. The study revealed SoC as a critical factor that connects senior residents’ personal experiences and their wellbeing, especially bridging seniors’ social-related factors (i.e., social support and lifelong learning) and their subjective wellbeing.

Understanding senior residents’ wellbeing: A biopsychosocial approach

Introduction:Air travel has been severely impacted by COVID-19 and recovery to pre-COVID-19 levels is predicted to take time. Millennials are an age group that had pre-COVID-19 more frequent holiday flyers than any other age group and carries – compared to elder age groups – a low risk of severe COVID-19 infections. It is therefore an interesting target group for airlines for recovery. The study identifies self-reported changes in flying behavior, travel motivations and travel fears of millennials after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods:The sample comprised 260 millennial travelers. Data was collected during May 2021 in Germany. Certain travel restrictions were still in place, such as mandatory quarantines for high-risk destinations, negative test prior to boarding and mask wearing during flight.

Results:A positive and significant relationship between the number of flights taken between March 2020 and today and the number of flights taken on average a year before COVID-19 (0.517) exists. Frequent travelers were more likely to feel safe traveling during the pandemic (0.271) and to fly during the next 6 months. Significant differences were found between males and females and particular motivations to travel post-COVID-19 (i.e., happiness, self-fulfillment, create new memories).

Discussion:Travel motivation of millennials often stem from a sustainability perspective. We investigate the motivations related to leisure, health & safety concerns. Airlines can target marketing to this age group and address fear of protection against infection. Price sensitivity of millennials has not changed, a desire for flexibility is visible. Finally, the findings of the present study suggest that gender-specific marketing strategies are warranted. The study findings point to the wider social implications of COVID-19 on the tourism industry. Limitations arise because respondents were predominantly female (68 %), university educated and did not belong to any COVID-19 risk group.

Will the experience of COVID-19 change flying behavior of millennials?

This study, first, investigates how much economic growth is required to offset the adverse effect

of an increase in inequality on extreme poverty for El Salvador and Guatemala. This trade-off between inequality and growth is quantified using the inequality-growth trade-off index procedure (IGTI). It measures how much growth in income will be required to offset a 1% increase in inequality, with extreme poverty remaining unchanged. Second, focusing on the elasticity of extreme poverty with respect economic growth at the sectoral level, the study establishes the direct dynamic elasticity of poverty with respect to tourism development. Coefficient estimates are determined by the two stage least square procedure. In phase two, coefficient estimates are determined by the fully modified least square procedure. This study uses El Salvador and Guatemala official time series data.



The IGTI is greater for Guatemala (nearly 2.832) than El Salvador (1.481). Focusing on Guatemala, it means thatan increase of 1% in the Gini index will require an economic growth rate of nearly 2.83% in order that the incidence of extreme poverty remains unchanged. Results clearly suggest that a strategy of inequality reduction will have greater payoff for poverty reduction in Guatemala than a similar strategy for the case of El Salvador. The contribution of El Salvador tourism (-0.484) to extreme poverty reduction is relatively higher than the corresponding measure for agriculture (-0.313). The same can be said about Guatemala tourism (-0.581) and agriculture (-0.264). Therefore, sector growth having the highest impact on poverty reduction is country specific. Assuming investments similar to those of past years, it would take a much smaller investment in tourism to achieve a substantially higher rate of extreme poverty reduction in El Salvador and Guatemala. These methods provided insights into developing targeted investment policies and strategies to achieve higher rates of poverty reduction.

Economic growth, inequality and poverty: Tourism dynamics in Central American countries

The current globalization scenario and new consumer behavior require organizations to act more responsibly. In this sense, organizations implement corporate social responsibility practices based on pre-established guidelines. The research purpose is to understand whether CSR practices applied by the service sector are based on organizational culture. In addition, this study aims to identify which UN sustainable development goals are majorly being applied by organizations in the service sector. The article will also analyze the results using a hospitality lens since the research applied in-depth interviews with professionals responsible for CSR, human resources, and sustainability departments of hospitals, universities, and hotels. Hospitality is fundamental to these sustainable actions since organizations provide a welcoming environment for all stakeholders to interact and establish relationships. In this work, a possible new hospitality bias was identified, which is hospitality in the professional domain. The research is qualitative and exploratory and was conducted through literature review, in-depth interviews, and content analysis. Secondary data from sustainability reports published by the companies studied were also used. After data collection, the authors performed a content analysis using Bardin's technique (a priori and a posteriori categorization of themes), comparative tables were also made. The research identified that CSR practices implemented in organizations are based on the triple bottom line and seek to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals proposed by the UN agenda. The investigated organizations bring the stakeholders closer to their planning and encourage the co-creation of actions. Stakeholders proactively seek these organizations to form partnerships and engage in sustainable actions as well. The results also show that universities are the institutions that manage to address more development goals in their CSR actions.

A study of the relationship between organizational culture, CSR and SDG: A hospitality perspective

Purpose– The objective of the present study is to propose a comprehensive tourist ethnocentrism model by exploring the influence of tourist ethnocentrism on support for tourism development (STD), whether respondents perceived tourism as one having a positive effect in the local economy (ENP), and their intentions to travel domestically in the future.

Design/methodology/approach-An online survey created in Google Forms was employed to collect data for the present study. A convenient sample of Israeli respondents who are 18 years of age or older took part in the study. A total of 204 usable questionnaires were collected over the month of January 2021.SmartPLS was employed to test the proposed conceptual model and hypothesized relationships.

Findings-Findings suggest that tourist ethnocentrism is positively associated with support for tourism development. The study findings suggest that this relationship is moderated by gender. Furthermore, residents scoring high on the tourist ethnocentrism scale are more likely to associate tourist activity with positive contribution to the local economy. Finally, a positive relationship was observed between tourist ethnocentrism and intentions to travel domesticallydespite the risk associated with travel.

Originality/value–Thecurrent investigation contributes to the literature by proposing a model conceptualizing the influence of tourist ethnocentrism on both the attitudes and behavioral intentions of residents.

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