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Despite the severe impact of the COVID-19, Maldives was one of the top destinations which witnessed decent tourist arrival amid the pandemic. This study aims to analyze luxury hospitality experiences of guests amid COVID-19 pandemic.

This study is exploratory in nature. This study analyses 4,302 real-time customer reviews using sentiment and thematic analysis with the help of NVIVO 12 plus and Leximancer.

The findings suggest travel products as well as services associated with luxury resorts needs to be revisited. Staff needs to be more professional and must be proactive while redesigning services specially in situations like pandemic. While redesigning services in situations like pandemic, staff needs to be proactive, professional and must follow all protocols. Major negative experiences included long waiting time to avail frill services, privacy intrusion by bloggers and influencers, service quality issues. We recommend enhancing service quality followed by investing more in training and development, increasing the number of foreign languages spoken by staff and disseminating localized culinary experiences will enhance the experience quality with guests.

This study has several limitations: first, this study limited itself to 15 luxury resorts of Maldives, which may not serve as a true representation of all luxury resorts of Maldives. The next limitation of this study is that the authors have collected customer reviews from TripAdvisor only, and the reviews were only in English language.

The findings of the research can be beneficial for the policymakers, hospitality practitioners and academicians who study luxury tourism industry to carve appropriate strategies for enhancing the customers’ luxury experience like leveraging customization in all areas and enhancing service quality, food quality, training and development of employees.

Maldives has become one of the most expensive traveler destinations and is home to world’s most expensive resorts. This study is original in nature and has a forward-looking approach which studies the disruptive effect of pandemic, intangible nature of luxury as a concept can be used by hospitality industry to redesign the luxury customer experience which can improve marketing strategies aiming to potentiate this niche. In addition, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study will be the first one to capture the real customer experiences of luxury resorts of Maldives.

This study aims to acknowledge the social capital challenges faced by female entrepreneurs in Small Island Developing States (SIDS), specifically the Maldives. As budding female entrepreneurs in a predominantly traditional culture are somewhat limited in their quest for economic empowerment, this study aims to clarify the role of social capital dimensions – structural, relational and cognitive – in shaping entrepreneurial intentions among women in the Maldives.

Data were gathered from 325 female business students from ten tertiary educational institutions in the Maldives. After establishing its validity and reliability, the data were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling, including hypothesis testing.

Structural social capital (SSC) has a significant positive influence on attitude (ATE), subjective norms (SNs), perceived behavioural control (PBC) and entrepreneurial intention (EI). Relational social capital (RSC) has a significant positive influence on ATE and SNs and a significant negative influence on PBC and EI; cognitive social capital (CSC) has a significant positive influence on ATE, SNs and PBC, but does not significantly influence EI. Additionally, ATE, SNs and PBC are significantly associated with EI. The results also show that the indirect and direct effects through the mediation of ATE, SNs and PBC are significant in the relationship between SSC, RSC and EI. Furthermore, this study reveals an indirect effect on the relationship between CSC and EI.

The findings outline the intricate mechanism by which social capital influences EI. These findings provide useful insights for establishing policies and organising relevant programmes to promote female entrepreneurship in SIDS.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to examine the role of social capital in a unique setting, such as SIDS. Moreover, this study integrates the heterogeneous role of social capital into the female EI model. This highlights the urgency of developing relevant social capital among women to promote EI.

Virtual professional learning communities provide digital platforms for teachers across the globe to join learning networks and engage in continuous and unrestricted learning. This study aimed to explore the impact of contextual factors on establishing virtual professional learning communities in Maldivian schools.

This quantitative study used a sample of 420 Maldivian in-service teachers chosen using two-stage cluster sampling and a stratified random sampling method.

The findings revealed that all three contextual factors – micro-, meso- and macro-contextual – positively and significantly influenced the virtual professional learning communities.

These findings recommend an integrated framework with micro-, meso- and macro-contextual factors as valuable instruments for educational leaders striving to establish virtual Professional Learning Communities (PLCs).

This study is among the first to examine the association of contextual factors of schools with the establishment of virtual PLCs in a country such as the Maldives, with geographically dispersed islands and limited resources.

This study aims to investigate how the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Chinese outward foreign direct investments (FDI) impact the Belt and Road countries (BRCs). It draws on postcolonial theory to investigate the (geo)political objectives behind the financial and economic means.

In line with the nature of postcolonial studies, the study applies a discourse analysis integrating it with empirical data on indebtedness and trade.

This study finds that FDI and the BRI, as a development project, need to be considered a double-edged sword for the receiving countries. The authors provide evidence that China has instrumentalized financial and economic means to gain political influence and pursue geopolitical ambitions. Moreover, investments into sensitive sectors (e.g. energy, infrastructure), combined with the BRCs’ inability to pay back loans, could eventually lead to China gaining control of these assets.

The study investigates the financial and economic means that are instrumentalized to gain political influence while not considering flows of technology and know-how. It also limits itself to the study of FDI coming from one specific country, i.e. China. Therefore, no comparison and evaluation are made of FDI from other countries, such as the USA or European countries.

By revealing noncommercial objectives and geopolitical ambitions that China pursues through the BRI, the authors derive policy implications for the BRCs, third countries and China.

The study contributes to postcolonial theory and neocolonialism by investigating how China uses financial and economic means to achieve noncommercial objectives and pursue geopolitical ambitions. Additionally, the authors enhance the understanding of FDI by highlighting more subtle aspects of the complex and contextual nature of FDI as a social phenomenon, which have been overlooked thus far. The authors challenge the predominant positive framing of FDI and provide a counterpoint to the way FDI is often coined.

This chapter considers the current situation of community-based tourism (CBT) in Sri Lanka, available potentials to promote this for the future tourism industry in Sri Lanka and demand and global trends of CBT. This chapter consists of an introduction examining CBT in the global scenario. This chapter's second title discusses the potential of CBT in Sri Lanka. The third topic concerns the demand and trends of CBT in a changing economy. The fourth topic is discussing global best practices and policies for CBT development. Finally, it concludes with recommendations and suggestions for CBT development in Sri Lanka.

This case study was conducted through qualitative analysis, and data will be collected with primary and secondary data. Primary data will be collected through interviews with industry stakeholders, tourists and other relevant interviewees. In addition, it will be carried out observation on selected community-based destinations. Furthermore, the secondary data will be gathered through books, articles, research papers, websites and other materials. This chapter conducted an empirical study on CBT in Sri Lanka. It brings the values of CBT to a changing economy. Furthermore, this study identified problems, potentials, demands and trends for future tourism development by evaluating global best practices and policies.