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Budget hotels are becoming an emerging industry for convenience and affordability, where consumer sentiments are of paramount importance. Tourism has become increasingly dependent on social media and online platforms to gather travel-related information, purchase travel products, food, lodging, etc., and share views and experiences. The user-generated data helps companies make informed decisions through predictive and behavioural analytics.

Design/Methodology/Approach: This study uses text mining, deep learning, and machine learning techniques for data collection and sentiment analysis based on 117,151 online reviews of the customers posted on the TripAdvisor website from May 2004 to May 2019 from 197 hotels of five prominent budget hotel groups spread across India using Feedforward Neural Network along with Keras package and Softmax activation function.

Findings: The word-of-mouth turns into electronic word-of-mouth through social networking sites, with easy access to information that enables customers to pick a budget hotel. We identified 20 widely used words that most customers use in their reviews, which can help managers optimise operational efficiency by boosting consumer acceptability, satisfaction, positive experiences, and overcoming negative consumer perceptions.

Practical Implications: The analysis of the review patterns is based on real-time data, which is helpful to understand the customer’s requirements, particularly for budget hotels.

Originality/Value: We analysed TripAdvisor reviews posted over the last 16 years, excluding the Corona period due to industry crises. The findings reverberate in consonance with the performance improvement theory, which states feed-forward a neural network enhances organisational, process, and individual-level performance in the hospitality industry based on customer reviews.

The development of the tourism and hospitality industry in Belarus has a long-term positive trend. This process is uneven and the growth rate is below the global average. To stimulate the development of the tourism and hospitality industry, measures are being taken in the form of creating visa-free zones, stimulating business activity, holding major sport events. The potential for growth in this industry has not yet been exhausted. The assessment of the competitiveness of Belarus in comparison with the neighboring countries showed that the development of the tourism and hospitality industry requires improvement of the business environment, increase of openness for tourists, strengthening of country marketing in the world tourism market.

This paper analyses expansion strategies of international hotel operators in Eastern Central Europe (ECE) in relation to the changes in tourism supply and demand in ECE. Potential market sectors for the ECE region are explored, with the most promising for Eastern Central Europe being an emphasis on green or nature tourism, cultural tourism, the tourist business market and, finally the rejuvenation of the traditional spas and medicinal tourism of the region. Two groups of International hotel companies are identified. The majority group who are pursuing a follow-the-customer approach for the international business client in Prague, Budapest or Warsaw, and the smaller group who have expressed interest in supplying the budget and mid markets in secondary and tertiary locations.

The aim of this chapter is to present in a pedagogical way the main digital tools used by tourism-related businesses, especially by hospitality businesses. The main purpose of this chapter is to illustrate our discussion with concrete examples and to give a set of advices for efficient use of those tools.

Literature review was conducted on conceptual issues, as well as managerial and marketing aspects of digital tools, their value and use in the hospitality industry.

This chapter highlights the fact that needs in terms of digitalisation depend on the size of the hotel. The main differences can be explained by differences in terms of hotel capacity, and digital technologies should be customised to different types of structures.

This chapter is exploratory in nature, based on a literature review.

It provides clear and practical guidance about the way independent hospitality businesses could use digital tools for marketing purposes. It also suggests the most efficient digital technologies to improve their performance in the field of marketing and customer relationship management.

The chapter demonstrates the huge gap between best practices in the hospitality industry and the way independent enterprises really use, in practice, the digital tools for marketing purposes. It shows how digital technologies could be used in a more efficient way, to take advantage of their full potential.

Purpose: The purpose of this chapter is to explore the use of employer branding as a key strategy in talent management, in an effort to retain employees in the context of the Irish hotel industry.

Methodology/Approach: This chapter was part of a wider body of research, and combines this discussion with a sequential mixed-method approach. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 hotel general managers in Cork City/County, and these were combined with 417 employee questionnaires conducted in the same hotels.

Findings: This chapter finds that hoteliers in Ireland are aware of the necessity to tackle the area of employee retention, are conscious of the importance of positive employer branding to aid in decreasing employee turnover, but that many are just at the genesis of their journey in the area of talent management. Indeed, many hotels have not yet implemented a talent management plan into their organisation and need to be more innovative in their approach to talent management through positive employer branding.

Practical implications: Employees strongly believe that those hotels which possess a positive employer brand have more committed employees, while those with negative reputations in terms of their employment affect an employee’s intentions to leave the business. Therefore, employers must put strategies in place to enhance their employer brand if they are to attract and retain employees.

Social implications: The chapter makes recommendations to hotel managers as to how employer branding can be utilised as part of their overall talent management strategy to increase employee retention in a challenging employment market, improving overall performance, and leading to sustained competitiveness. The areas of talent management, employer branding, and employee retention are interlinked, and it is imperative that hotels implement strategic initiatives in these key areas.

Originality/value of paper: This chapter contributes to the overall talent management area, offering further guidance to operators who are embarking on this strategic direction. It supports the link between talent management and employer branding.

This study focuses on tourists’ perceptions of a capsule hotel, a budget form of accommodation with a unique appearance and the small size of a sleeping pod. The data were obtained in Bangkok from 402 foreign travellers from over 30 countries. The results indicate that room size, sleep ambient control system and in-room television were the three main attributes that were positively correlated with decisions to stay in such hotels. Tourists with previous experience of staying in capsule hotels had more positive perceptions regarding room size and indicated higher intentions to stay than those without such experience. The researchers also found that budgetary considerations negatively moderated the relationship between room size and intention-to-stay. Additionally, the relationship between intention-to-stay and three other hotel attributes, including room size, the service scape and perceived security, was weaker for female travellers than for male travellers. Lastly, risk avoidance also positively moderated the relationship between intention-to-stay and location and security.

This chapter examines the notion that contemporary tourists prefer luxury experiences rather than luxury products by testing the opinions and attitudes of middle-class tourists as a critical target for global luxury tourism through the lens of experience-oriented accommodation. Notions from the study were used in conceptualising a spectrum to describe the shades of grey within luxury tourism. A Japanese temple lodging known as ‘shukubo’ in Koyasan, an experience-based accommodation, was used as a case to investigate the preferences of two groups of middle-class Thai tourists: non-pilgrims and pilgrims. The results, which revealed positive opinions and attitudes towards the programme, confirm that both groups were satisfied with the luxury tourism experience programme. However, non-pilgrims, described as psychocentric tourists (represented in black at the left end of the spectrum), tended to embed them with luxury materials, such as the accommodation's facilities and amenities. Conversely, pilgrims, identified as allocentric travellers (represented in white at the right end of the spectrum), were inclined to define ‘simplicity’ as a luxury. They were also interested in learning experiences at both ‘off-the-beaten-track’ and famous branded destinations. The differences found in such an example as described above conceptualised tourists' personalities regarding luxury tourism within three shades of grey: dark grey, grey and light grey, depending on the intensity of their interests in material concerns or learning experiences. Findings from this study are general; however, it presents an original concept developed from demographic and psychographic factors to broaden the understanding of luxury tourism, which is undergoing a paradigm shift.

For many decades, destination marketing organizations have evolved in their structure and in their programming, especially as targeted toward leisure travel and tourism markets. They changed their focus to internet communication, then to brand strategy and destination management, and most recently to address disruptions from the tourism online gig economy consisting of myriad microentrepreneurs, some sharing local experiences directly with tourists. This chapter relates how Raleigh, USA, and its tourism office have begun to embrace tourism microentrepreneurship through strategic planning efforts and specific programs of the last five years. It concludes with implications for how small and medium destinations can structure new programs, policies, and interactions to support marketplaces of tourism microentrepreneurs as part of holistic tourism-related economic development.

Operations management involves utilizing given resources as efficiently as possible to deliver services to customers and meet business goals. Developing efficient business operations requires a hospitality organization to design efficient service environments, as part of its mission. This chapter articulates the key design and planning strategies for the development of a successful hospitality organization. The first section covers the process of location selection, as the most important factor leading to the success of a hospitality organization. The second section discusses strategies for estimating the number of users (service employees and customers) during peak and idle times to justify a costly financial investment. The third section concerns the readers with the topic of layout planning, with the goal of service optimization for a targeted number of customers. The fourth section deliberates workflow conditions, and finally, the last section addresses the ambience and design of the physical hospitality environment, which is crucial for customer evaluation of a hospitality organization as it creates a first impression.