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The purpose of this study is to ascertain the effects of place attachment on brand loyalty. This study further ascertains whether the effects of emotion-based attachment on brand loyalty are stronger for customers who have a positive experience with a restaurant brand. Additionally, the authors investigate whether emotion-based attachment mediates the relationships between identity-based attachments, place dependence and brand loyalty in the restaurant setting.

The authors administered the questionnaire to customers (diners) of restaurants in Ghana, and they were completed via a paper and pencil/pen approach. The authors tested their hypotheses using structural equation modeling.

The findings show that identity-based and emotion-based attachment enhances brand loyalty within a restaurant setting. The results also show that place dependence attachment promotes emotional bonding with restaurant brands. The study's findings also show that place dependence attachment does not have a direct and positive significant effect on brand loyalty except when an emotional response is produced.

Place attachment studies in a restaurant setting are rare. This study thus contributes to the place attachment literature in restaurants setting.

This study aims to explore the role of restaurant experienscape in affecting diners' emotions and satisfaction with solo dining, considering the moderating role of solo dining willingness and public self-consciousness (PSC).

In total, 403 Korean customers who had dined alone at restaurants in the past three months participated in this study. Structural equation modeling, including multiple group analysis, was conducted to examine the hypotheses.

The dining atmosphere influenced solo diners' positive emotions but not their negative emotions. Responses from other guests and the interactional fairness of employees affected solo diners' negative emotions but not their positive emotions. Food sensory influences both positive and negative emotions. This study found that PSC significantly moderated the effect of the dining atmosphere on positive emotions, and solo dining willingness significantly moderated the impact of food sensory on positive emotions.

This study suggests that restaurant managers should pay close attention to providing fair service to all customers by training and educating employees because the unfair treatment that solo diners receive from employees affects focal customers' negative emotions.

The experienscape model was applied to the solo dining context based on Mehrabian and Russell's (1974) stimulus–organism–response paradigm and Pizam and Tasci's (2019) experienscape concept, which reflects the growing trend in solo dining.

This study aims to examine how cruise ship dinescapes, as a specific type of organized and staged service environment, influence customers’ attitudes, on-board behaviour, satisfaction and behavioural intentions.

Data was collected using a cross-sectional survey from 552 passengers on-board one of the big cruise ships with a Caribbean itinerary.

Cruise ship dinescape, as an on-board food experience platform, is built on three dimensions: restaurant atmospherics, interactions with other guests and restaurant staff. The findings show how these dimensions influence passengers’ emotional experiences and quality perceptions. The results also show how travellers’ cruise ship dinescape satisfaction affect their overall vacation satisfaction and future travel behaviour.

The findings imply that cruise companies should pay extra attention to organised food service environments like dinescapes staged for passengers. Through these scapes cruise companies may provide favourable platforms enabling dining satisfaction, but also social interaction and co-creation of memorable experiences.

This study builds a comprehensive model in cruise ship context, which links dinescape experiences to overall cruise ship dining experiences and dining behaviour mediated by emotional and perceived quality outcomes with further consequences.

Meal ordering apps (MOAs) have transformed the customers' dining habits, particularly during mobility restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the theoretical cover of the extended stimulus–organism–response (SOR) model, this paper attempts to explore the critical antecedents and outcomes of customer MOA engagement which predict the continuous purchase intentions using these apps. A multigroup analysis is conducted to investigate the difference between the hypothesized relationships between the Chinese and Indonesian consumers.

A mixed-method approach, including a systematic literature review, an open-ended essay (qualitative) with 139 MOA users and an online survey (quantitative) with 1,207 MOA users in total, was used for hypotheses testing.

The structural equation model results revealed that customer MOA experience factors such as mobile online reviews (MR), food quality (FQ), restaurant reputation (RR), service quality and system quality (SyQ) are the absolute positive factors that influence customer MOA cognitive, affective and behavioral engagement, which in turn affect continuous purchase intentions. The multigroup analysis results reveal that Chinese customers prioritized MR and FQ for customer MOA engagement (cognitive, affective and behavioral). Comparatively, Indonesian customers placed most importance on RR and SyQ.

Considering a market-specific setting and based on the extended SOR framework, this study is one of the first to take a comprehensive look at the critical antecedents and outcome of multidimensional customer MOA engagement in the developing countries’ (China and Indonesia) online to offline meal delivery context. Further, this study investigates the customer continuous purchase intentions as an outcome of MOA engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings also reveal the differences in consumer behavior across the two developing but culturally diverse countries samples during the pandemic.

The main goal of this paper is to identify the attributes of consumer experience in Michelin-starred restaurants and to estimate their effects on restaurant ratings.

A sample of 70,233 online reviews of 224 Spanish Michelin-starred restaurants were analysed with the latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm. A sentiment analysis and a logistic regression analysis were also employed to estimate the effect of attributes on restaurant ratings.

Customer attention, food quality, decor and ambience and value for money are frequently used to define restaurant experience. However, it is shown in this study that the experience in a Michelin-starred restaurant goes beyond the evaluation of those four attributes. Furthermore, the effect of the factors that were identified on customer satisfaction differed depending on the restaurant ratings.

The findings are linked to the context of Spanish Michelin-starred restaurants. It is also assumed in this study that online reviews are based on truthful opinions.

Restaurant managers should primarily focus on customer attention and food quality to achieve customer satisfaction. In addition, those restaurants with an error-free service and a highly appreciated wine list among diners are more likely to achieve the culinary excellence that deserves a 5-star rating on TripAdvisor.

The attributes of the restaurant experience are frequently identified in literature reviews. Research based on text-mining analyses of customer reviews to discover a posteriori the factors that define a restaurant experience is scarce, and particularly difficult to find in the context of Michelin-starred restaurants.

This study aims to establish a model for rapid and accurate emotion recognition in restaurant online reviews, thus advancing the literature and providing practical insights into electronic word-of-mouth management for the industry.

This study elaborates a hybrid model that integrates deep learning (DL) and a sentiment lexicon (SL) and compares it to five other models, including SL, random forest (RF), naïve Bayes, support vector machine (SVM) and a DL model, for the task of emotion recognition in restaurant online reviews. These models are trained and tested using 652,348 online reviews from 548 restaurants.

The hybrid approach performs well for valence-based emotion and discrete emotion recognition and is highly applicable for mining online reviews in a restaurant setting. The performances of SL and RF are inferior when it comes to recognizing discrete emotions. The DL method and SVM can perform satisfactorily in the valence-based emotion recognition.

These findings provide methodological and theoretical implications; thus, they advance the current state of knowledge on emotion recognition in restaurant online reviews. The results also provide practical insights into intelligent service quality monitoring and electronic word-of-mouth management for the industry.

This study proposes a superior model for emotion recognition in restaurant online reviews. The methodological framework and steps are elucidated in detail for future research and practical application. This study also details the performances of other commonly used models to support the selection of methods in research and practical applications.

The aim of this study is to analyse the moderating roles of restaurant type and client long-term orientation (LTO) on the loyalty building process. In addition, this analysis delves into the role of customer satisfaction and delight in the dining experience on the development of loyalty to a restaurant.

This study advances a moderator mediation model stemming from self-administered online questionnaires presented to clients subsequent to their gastronomic experiences. The analysis comprised a sample of 250 customers of moderate restaurants and 290 of midscale restaurants.

The results reveal that customer satisfaction and delight are two key antecedents to the process of building loyalty towards restaurants and that the responses depended on restaurant type and client LTO.

The study advances recommendations to restaurant managers and gastronomic marketing specialists. Moderate restaurants should satisfy the customer without offering additional services while medium-scale establishments should design actions perceived as an extra that surprise the client. Moreover, it is more important to offer delight to short-term oriented clients than to long-term oriented clients.

The global character of the hospitality industry implies that achieving customer loyalty requires going further than generating favourable attitudes. This has led the academic world to place more interest on the issue of delight perceived by the client. In this sense, the present study examines exclusively the long-term cultural dimension due to the little attention it has received in hospitality literature. Finally, the advances offered by the PROCESS software in analysing indirect conditional effects renders it possible to identify the different levels of customer LTO towards different types of restaurants.

The paper aims to explore and examine the factors that influence the post-consumption behavioral intentions of education consumers with the help of online reviews from a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform in the knowledge payment context.

The paper adopted a novel mixed-method approach based on natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Variables were identified using topic modeling drawing upon 14,585 online reviews from a global commercial MOOC platform (Udemy.com). The relationships among identified factors, such as perceived quality dimensions, consumption emotions, and intention to recommend, were then tested from a cognition-affect-behavior (CAB) perspective using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

Results indicate that course content quality, instructor quality, and platform quality are strong predictors of consumers' emotions and intention to recommend. Interestingly, course content quality displays a positive effect on invoking negative emotions in the MOOC context. Additionally, positive emotions mediate the relationships between three perceived qualities and the intention to recommend.

Limited research has been conducted regarding MOOC consumers' post-consumption intentions in the knowledge payment context. Findings of this study address the limited literature on MOOC qualities and consumer post-consumption behaviors, which contribute to a comprehensive understanding of MOOC learners' experiences at a meso-level for future paid-MOOC creators.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-09-2021-0482/

This study aims, first, to understand consumers’ perception of chefs as human brands (i.e. study one). Second, tests were run to assess the validity of a new conceptual model of the relationships between the factors of chef image, luxury restaurant image, both images’ congruity and consumers’ hedonic and novelty experiences and happiness and well-being (i.e. study two).

The first qualitative study involved using Leximancer software to analyse the data drawn from 43 interviews with luxury restaurant clients. In the second quantitative study, 993 valid survey questionnaires were collected, and the proposed model was tested using structural equation modelling.

The results reveal that consumers perceive chefs as human brands and the associated narratives include both performance- and popularity-based characteristics. The findings support the conclusion that individuals give great importance to chefs’ image and the congruence between chefs and their restaurant’s image. In addition, luxury restaurant image only affects novelty experiences, and both hedonic and novelty experiences have a positive effect on customers’ happiness and well-being.

This research focused on Portuguese luxury restaurants. The consumers’ happiness and well-being needs to be replaced by other outcomes to confirm if the model produces consistent results.

The results should help luxury restaurant managers understand more fully which pull factors are valued by their clients and which aspects contribute the most to their pleasure and welfare.

This study adds to the extant literature by exploring consumers’ perceptions of chefs as human brands and the role these chefs’ image play in customers’ luxury restaurant experiences and perceived happiness and well-being.

The extant literature documents the significance of nostalgia-evoking stimuli in promoting consumer behavior. Despite the prevalent use of nostalgia-evoking stimuli in restaurant service, research on nostalgia-evoking restaurants is significantly lacking. As a result, little is known about customers’ cognitive responses toward nostalgia-themed restaurant stimuli and their influences on customer loyalty behavior. Thus, grounded in an extended stimulus-organism-response model, this study aims to examine the role of nostalgia-evoking restaurant stimuli in explaining an integrated model focusing on nostalgia, in relation to local food consumption value, familiarity with nostalgia-triggering restaurants and loyalty and continued patronage.

The authors collected data from 544 Taiwanese customers at nostalgia-themed restaurants. Using PROCESS (Model 6), the direct and indirect effect of nostalgia-evoking restaurant stimuli on loyalty and continued patronage were examined.

The confirmatory factor analysis results showed that five domains of restaurant attributes (i.e., service staff, exterior and interior design, furniture and tableware, local food and atmosphere) are nostalgia-evoking stimuli. The authors also found that these nostalgia-evoking stimuli significantly affected customer loyalty indirectly, through customers’ consumption value and familiarity.

The results of this study help identify the importance of nostalgia-generating cues in nostalgia-themed restaurants and their roles in postpurchase behaviors. The outcomes contribute to an improved understanding of how to exploit nostalgic sentiments in nurturing diners’ consumption value, maintaining customer loyalty and generating greater profits.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the few studies examining restaurant attributes evoking nostalgia and explaining the mechanism by which nostalgia-evoking stimuli affect consumer behavior.