Search results

Interest in the Electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) in connection with tourism is constantly growing not only among consumers but also among theoreticians. Therefore, the objective of this chapter is to provide an overview of studies that focus on eWOM in the tourism sector using the snowball method. The article is based on a review of the literature of 60 studies that focus not only on consumer behavior in tourism and the impact of eWOM on tourism supply but also on the impact of hotel managers' responses to other consumer behavior and tourism companies. The results of the studies show that eWOM has a significant impact not only on consumer behavior but also on tourism supply. Manager responses can also strongly affect other consumer behavior in decision-making. When eWOM is distributed, consumers are influenced by their emotions, motives, and also by the websites to which they have decided to contribute. The chapter proposes further research areas for different authors.

The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

The aim of this chapter is twofold: (i) to perform a synthesis of the academic research regarding the changes of tourist consumer behavior brought about by social media; and (ii) to suggest a set of strategies for tourism businesses to address resulting challenges.

Extensive literature reviews have been executed on the motivating factors and the effects of online reviews.

This analysis of the related research identified three main topics, namely: (1) the antecedents, the factors motivating tourists to write online reviews; (2) the impact of eWOM on providers of tourism services (business perspective); and (3) the influence of online reviews on consumers’ behavior (demand perspective). This chapter focuses on the impact of online reviews on tourism businesses and suggests suitable strategies.

This study is based on a literature review and implications indicated by previous studies; hence the suggestions are indicative rather than conclusive. A need exists for empirical studies to fully validate the chapter’s suggestions.

This chapter outlines a series of adequate strategies formulated for business practitioners divided into two fields, namely managerial and marketing activities.

This study provides practical recommendations/suggestions for tourism businesses in addressing the challenges and opportunities raised within the online context.

Introduction: With the accelerated process of building metropolitans, more and more people tend to live in cities. So, to deal with this, the need has arisen to make smart everything that we have around us even when we arrived at the term of the smart city. All of this produces data we call big data that is generated by citizens.

Aim: So, cloud computing is the main idea implementation which we can use ineffective from all of these services which we call smart. And taking into account all of this, in this literature review, we have used different techniques to extract the most relevant papers on our topic. Mainly, we focus on smart cities and their taxonomy of it such as smart homes, smart buildings, traffic monitoring, security and emergencies, and so on. For a smart city, we discussed different proposed system architectures which represent the real work of researchers.

Results: In this way, we mention services that are offered and have the base services cloud services. Also, the articles we used are extracted and analysed from the most powerful and relevant databases such as IEEE, ACM, Elsevier, Science Direct, and so on. In total, we take 88 papers, and from all of these papers we have extracted 53 with different methods. This Systematic Literature Review presents building and using smart cities inside of cloud computing services.

Conclusion: However, a different implementation idea to do better life for all of us is by converting our lifestyle into a new form of living. The only form of implementation is by digitalising and implementing everything around us which means making every service in one place, where you can have access from anywhere, anytime. So, the smart city is the future.

Originality/value: This systematic literature review contributes to everyone who expresses interest to implement and provides additional evidence for existing studies in smart city patterns which used cloud services. Researchers offer various implementation forms of different models and express the impact of cloud services, especially for placements, where there are more people populated. Also, this study identifies a major weakness in existing smart city implementation by using cloud services, which have identified the main obstacles now and it needs to reanalyse the form of implementation for more complex systems in the future.

The Algarve is a region located in the South of Portugal and is mostly known for its sun and sea product. In order to strengthen the Algarve’s competitiveness, the Allgarve program was launched in 2007. We intend to analyze the importance of events as a differentiation factor of tourist destinations. Questions like loyalty, satisfaction, and perception about the event’s program are the main subjects analyzed. This study uses data from a questionnaire applied to 224 individuals who attended “street artist events” and pop music concerts in the 2011 edition of the Allgarve program. Two main techniques were applied: OVERALS and k-means. Despite its flaws, positive conclusions were reached, and after its five editions, the program was finally able to be linked to the region’s image, distinguishing it in a wide range of cultural events and entertainment.

For the last several decades, technology has been playing an important role in changing the lives of consumers with an unexpected speed of innovative developments. Most of them were disruptive and had shaped not only the behaviour of consumers, but also empowered them to search for better products and services. These changes took place in media, communication, and information management of socialisation and collaboration. The digitisation revolution is a continuum until people and machines embrace a common ground for improving the lives of consumers. There were three stages of this movement. In the first stage, Turkish perspective was in alignment with the world where new channels of communication were established with support of Internet and information management. Marketing technology tools such as customer relationship management and call centre systems were discovered. In the second stage, continuous learning from the best uses and implementations has started. The ultimate goal became total customer satisfaction. Many improvements and innovative services, such as omni-channel marketing, took place for achieving this goal. Today, in the third stage, new marketing tools are being developed on the basis of integrated machine learning, such as analysis of customer conciseness, prediction of behaviour and perceptive marketing, which will be used extensively through digital platforms, new media, social web and in everyday devices for targeted marketing. In this chapter, a broader look is taken and an explanation is made for what has happened through these periods of intersection of marketing science and information technology. Moreover, ongoing changes which have given a new impetus to consumer life are addressed with respect to marketing management literature.

The conflict between institutionalism and neoclassicism in the 20th century has been investigated by scholars over the years. Many of them believe that in the postwar period, neoclassicism triumphed while institutionalism largely disappeared. The present chapter takes a very different view. The late 20th century represents a broad synthesis of neoclassical and institutional themes in a methodology we call pragmatic empiricism. That approach combines the mathematical model building and theoretical formalism of neoclassical economics with the institutional economist’s data-driven statistical analysis and concern for developing institutional forms. We use as a case study the history of American locational economics from the 1930s to the present. The mixing of institutional and neoclassical themes is quite evident in the work of three young scholars at Harvard who effectively initiated American locational economics. In the postwar period, we find a series of outstanding, well-published papers that capture the spirit of the “founders.” These papers do use more modeling, but they also focus on major institutional developments. A broader review of locational works is consistent with the pragmatic empiricism label. The history of locational economics supports the claim that institutionalism, far from disappearing, continues to provide fundamental questions and techniques for modern pragmatic empiricism.

This research is to identify how user-generated contents (UGC) affect a pre-trip decision on the booking of a guesthouse among international travelers. Online surveys are conducted among social network users who have booked an ecolodge in the past year. A snowball sampling is used, which posts a questionnaire link in social networks including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram in addition to travel blogs. This study indicates a positive relationship between UGC and lodging selection. UGC is considered as a significant predictor of booking an environmentally friendly guesthouse. Among the UGCs, travelers' review is the most important one influencing guesthouse selection. Future studies may focus on other IT potentials such as “Gamification” or other types of content such as “Podcasts” or “live videos” to engage independent travelers.