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The Bed and Breakfast (B&B) enterprises generally lack sufficient human resources and time to conduct research on important social media marketing factors for visitors’ satisfaction and visitors’ intentions. Therefore, this study aims to provide crucial social media marketing and factors and service quality elements for improving customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in B&B sectors. This study also provides some recommendations for attracting more visitors and increasing customer satisfaction and customer loyalty through social media.

First, social media marketing factors and service quality elements were identified through the systematic literature review. Then these identified factors and elements were used to design a survey questionnaire for collecting data. The research data included responses of 64 B&B enterprises and 625 customers. The collected data was analyzed by feature selection approaches including Decision Tree algorithm and Information Gain to identify the key factors for improving customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

The findings of this study determined that featured choice is an important social media marketing factor, and assurance is the common service quality element for both B&B enterprises and their customers in terms of satisfaction and loyalty.

This study adds a value to the growing literature on customer satisfaction and loyalty in B&B sectors by exploring key social media marketing factors and service quality elements. The study reveals several implications for theories and practices. The findings hopefully help B&B enterprises better social media marketing with less workforce and budget.

This paper reviews recent trends in major hospitality sectors in the Asia‐Pacific region. Observes that the meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions (MICE), backpacker, and bed and breakfast sectors are growing, characterised by burgeoning market demand, proliferation of specialist infrastructure, sector‐specific education and training, and dedicated development and marketing strategies. The casino sector is facing major challenges, seeing declining demand in some areas. Competitive forces are evident in the licensed clubs sector, where a proliferation of gambling options has undermined traditional sources of revenue. Conversely, the hotel and restaurant sectors can be considered mature. There is increased attention to facilities development, asset management, market segmentation and use of new technologies, and the restaurant sector appears focused on product revitalisation. Concludes that the recent economic turmoil in Asia will no doubt produce new challenges, as well as opportunities, in the lead up to the next millennium.

Reports the findings from a study of entrepreneurial activity in the small hotel sector in a Scottish town, St Andrews. Applies bodies of theory on the small entrepreneurial firm, developed for other sectors of the economy, to an examination of small firm activity in the hotel sector. The central thesis is that small hotel entrepreneurs will have had to adopt a business‐oriented approach to ensure the success, or at least the survival, of their firms. Findings from a survey of the small hotel sector in St Andrews provide some evidence to support this thesis, and conflict with those of an earlier study of the small hotel sector in the Bournemouth area in the 1980s. Recommends that further research should consider the nature of entrepreneurial activity in the small hotel sector generally. If a significant proportion of the sector overall is representative of the small entrepreneurial firm, this may have positive consequences for local economic prosperity in many areas.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the pertinent issues in the relationship between service experience and service design among small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in the tourism industry.

The conceptual paper undertakes a thorough review of the relevant literature before developing propositions regarding service experience and service design for SMEs in the tourism industry.

Service experience must be appropriately managed by SME operators by collecting and evaluating relevant data on customer experience. Service design must be undertaken in a holistic manner that is embedded in the organisational culture of the service provider using tools such as “blueprinting”. Synergistic cooperation and learning regions among traditionally fragmented tourism providers are essential for achieving long‐term competitiveness.

Future research should undertake empirical studies to validate and/or modify the propositions presented in this conceptual paper.

This is one of the few studies to have addressed the relationship between experience management and service design for SMEs in the highly competitive tourism industry.

The paper seeks to explore the experiences of owners of rural tourism accommodation businesses in New Zealand within the framework of copreneurship. It aims to examine roles within copreneurial rural tourism businesses and describes and evaluates women's experiences of entrepreneurship.

The method of the research is a postal survey of rural tourism accommodation business owners complemented by in‐depth interviews with women in copreneurial business relationships. Triangulation of data sources and methods, combining qualitative and quantitative techniques enables a rich understanding of copreneurial expectations, roles and responsibilities and of women's experiences specifically.

The paper finds that the rural tourism accommodation sector in New Zealand is characterised by lifestylers and copreneurs running their businesses as a “hobby” and that non‐economic, lifestyle motivations are important stimuli to business formation. The paper also finds that any perception of copreneurship as a tool for enabling women to become freed from traditional gender roles may not equal the reality as a gendered ideology persists even through copreneurial relationships in rural tourism. Copreneurial couples appear to engage in running the accommodation business using traditional gender‐based roles mirroring those found in the private home.

The paper goes some way toward addressing the fact that there exists an underexplored and unarticulated feminine set of processes and behaviours in new venture production. In this research, women's voices were able to come through in both the survey and the interview research and their experiences are reported through their narratives. What is revealed is that a gendered ideology persists even through copreneurial relationships in rural tourism.

Accommodations providers in the sharing economy are increasingly competing with the hotel industry vis-à-vis the guest experience. Additionally, experience-related research remains underrepresented in the hospitality and tourism literature. This paper aims to develop and test a model of experiential consumption to provide a better understanding of an emerging phenomenon in the hospitality industry. In so doing, the authors also expand Pine and Gilmore’s original experience economy construct.

Using data from a survey of 630 customers who stayed at a hotel or an Airbnb in the previous three months, the authors performed a multi-step analysis procedure centered on structural equation modeling to validate the model.

The authors demonstrate that the dimensions of serendipity, localness, communitas and personalization represent valuable additions to Pine and Gilmore’s original experience economy construct. Airbnb appears to outperform the hotel industry in the provision of all experience dimensions. The authors further define the pathways that underlie the creation of extraordinary, memorable experiences, which subsequently elicit favorable behavioral intentions.

The findings suggest the need for the hotel industry to adopt a content marketing paradigm that leverages various dimensions of the experience economy to provide customers with valuable and relevant experiences. The industry must also pay greater attention to its use of branding, signage and promotional messaging to encourage customers to interpret their experiences through the lens of these dimensions.

The study expands a seminal construct from the field of services marketing in the context of the accommodations industry. The Accommodations Experiencescape is offered as a tool for strategic experience design. The study also offers a model of experiential consumption that explains customers’ experiences with accommodations providers.

Such are the breadth and diversity of the hospitality industry, that a millennial review requires a specific focused perspective. This article proposes a triangular framework for analysis based on the hospitality cycle of practice of knowledge, in which the increased sophistication of practice and operations requires the development of theoretical paradigms for research and education purposes. The nature of the industry and its challenges are introduced in preparation for a series of six articles by academic experts.

The aim of this study is to empirically investigate the additional motives, aside from the social interests that motivate social entrepreneurs. This paper does so by using an inductive approach and specifically carrying out a re-examination of two pieces of research examining social entrepreneurship that were carried out independently by the two researchers in South Africa and Ireland.

The method used for the paper is content analysis. Research using qualitative content analysis focuses on the characteristics of language, talk and conversation (Sarantakos, 2005) with attention paid to the content or contextual meaning of the text. Thus, a qualitative content analysis is concerned with an examination of the uses of language. According to Downe-Wambolt (1992, p. 314), the aim of content analysis is “to provide knowledge and understanding of the phenomenon under study”.

The findings indicate that the informants do have additional motivations with respect to their business ventures including lifestyle motives, receiving acknowledgement and generating profit.

Few published papers investigate the motives of social entrepreneurs and explore if there are indeed any additional motivations aside from community interests. The results in this study identify that indeed social entrepreneurs are motivated by an array of motivations. The motivations we discovered in our research illustrate an individual who is mutually concerned with their communities, the environments in which they live in, lifestyle interests, acknowledgement and profit which may suggest that such community contributions could be sustained over time.

Assesses the implications for tourism organizations, with responsibility for training, of promoting world‐class standards in the delivery of the UK tourism product. Analyses the implications through a detailed assessment of the demand for training by bed and breakfast operators. Examines the motivations of operators, their perceived training requirements and determinants of views on training. Identifies two target segments: a learner segment and a non‐learner segment. Finds that tourism organizations must review the quality of their own product. They must acquire a detailed understanding of their target training markets and tailor their marketing strategy accordingly.