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This study aims to understand the normative expectations of travelers on the services and experiences provided by Buddhism-themed hotels as well as how service providers perceive such expectations. The growth of religion-themed hotels in China follows a larger and more generalized global marketing trend in terms of providing tourists and consumers with “themed” experiences.

Using the service quality model, this study investigates these expectations of Buddhism-themed hotels in China. The Delphi method was used with two expert panels, namely, travelers and tourism/hotel practitioners. Preliminary interviews revealed 98 normative expectations from Buddhism-themed hotels. Two sets of Delphi questionnaires were used to compare tourist expectations with practitioner perceptions.

Results show a wide range of expectations of travelers staying in Buddhism-themed hotels. They also reveal how the expectations of the two groups aligned as well as differed.

This study extends the application of the service quality model to the context of religion-themed hotels. As this study adopted the Delphi technique through criterion sampling, future studies should use a larger random sample to verify the results of this study.

The results help religion-themed hoteliers to understand their customer expectations better.

Given the lack of studies on religion-themed hotels, especially on the gap between tourist expectations and service providers’ perceptions, this study is a timely contribution to improve the understanding on the needs and expectations of customers when visiting religion-themed hotels.

This study aims to delve upon customer satisfaction and service quality within small- and medium-sized hotels (SMSHs) by using a modified SERVQUAL model.

Data for the study were collected from a sample of 253 guests of varying nationalities who stayed at SMSHs of one-to-three-star ratings in the UAE. Moreover, 15 face-to-face interviews were conducted. The influence of the five dimensions of the SERVQUAL model on visitors’ satisfaction was explored using structural equation modelling.

The results indicated that three out of the five dimensions of SERVQUAL, namely, tangible, responsiveness and assurance, have significant positive impact on visitors’ satisfaction of the SMSHs Industry. The remaining two dimensions of SERVQUAL, reliability and empathy, have no significant impact on visitors’ satisfaction.

This study provides a major contribution in that it offers the potential to examine a vastly under researched area of customer satisfaction and service quality of SMSHs in a developing country.

The purpose of this paper is to mainly investigate what factors drive growth for independent hotel firms on an island.

Two steps were followed. First, to identify hotels demonstrated significant growth; 92 independent hotels in North Cyprus were analyzed via a self-report questionnaire. Second, key growth factors were examined in five hotels showing the growth over years among the independent hotels via in-depth, semi-structured interviews, focus group interviews, and observations.

The study findings revealed 16 important growth factors for hotels, including active risk taking, education, family history, networks of contacts, other business interests, family investing friends, key employee partners, customer concentration, autonomy, innovativeness, proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness, location, desire to succeed, age of founders, and state support where are strong, weak, and interrelated relationships among these factors. These findings allow factors to be categorized into new groups, namely, strategic and tactical factors. The research findings unveil new factors referred to as “political conflict – pursuing different strategy and opportunities,” importance of second generations affect and entrepreneur’s metacognitive strategies, “informal networking.”

More research should also be undertaken for entrepreneurs or managers who formulate and implement strategies to enter new markets or to tackle turbulent and/or unstable environments.

This study reveals that one factor on its own cannot influence the growth of hotels. Rather, successful growth depends on the entrepreneur’s ability to combine all factors in harmony.

Given that there is limited empirical evidence on the growth of independent hotels on islands, this study made an important attempt to contribute to the entrepreneurship literature in the hospitality management and family business fields via micro-level approaches concerning the factors influencing hotels’ growth on an island. This is one of the first studies presenting and discussing empirical findings on growth factors for small hotels on an island, and brings a new perspective by grouping factors as strategic and tactical factors.

Given the growing importance of religious tourism, the purpose of this paper is to present a review of the literature around the area.

All papers with the term “religious tourism” have been searched via Emerald Insight from January 2006 to December 2017. The search was run in June 2017 for the last time and all early cite papers falling under the criteria were also included. This has ensured that key literature produced after the seminal work by Timothy and Olsen (Eds) (2006) has been reviewed. Certain exclusions apply which have been listed in the paper.

Key themes from the literature on religious tourism along with new developments and overlaps with other tourism sectors have been highlighted.

This paper reviews literature spanning more than a decade on religious tourism.

This paper theoretically and empirically aims to explore customer group flow experiences with an urban adventure game called “escape rooms”.

A comprehensive model of group flow antecedents and consequences is proposed and empirically verified by means of survey research and SEM methodology.

The results indicate that key determinants of group flow experiences are the collective challenge/skills balance, and theming and storytelling. Group flow, in turn, significantly affects participants’ revisit intentions and word-of-mouth communications, as well as group cohesion and subjective quality of life.

The supported research model provides an insight into how group flow experiences can be facilitated by means of gamification and yields important managerial implications. These are systematically discussed in regard to antecedent and consequence constructs.

This paper is one of the first papers to systematically examine the antecedents and consequences of group flow experiences at adventure game-based attractions. It contributes to the understanding and management of peak experiences in contemporary hospitality and tourism.