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This paper aims to define and demonstrate the importance of crowdsourcing for the improvement of diverse functions of hotels, the advantages and disadvantages of this technique and, specifically, the relevance of crowdvoting for enhancing hotel sales, and diverse hotel performance dimensions.

A total of 45,103 opinions from Booking.com, a sample of 184 questionnaires addressed to hotel managers and partial least squares (PLS)-path modeling were combined to contrast the hypotheses.

The results empirically show the direct and positive impact of the opinions of the crowd on the amount of hotel sales that do not depend on physical intermediaries, and the impact that this has on the performance dimensions of hotels.

The paper shows the relevance of following strategies addressed at increasing the customers’ recommendations in the main social media or virtual travel agencies, as a mechanism to reduce tourism and hospitality organizations’ traditional weaknesses and increase their long-term performance.

The novelty of crowdsourcing, means that few works (although with an explosive increase and with high impact) have focused on this aspect in the literature, especially in the tourism and hospitality literature. The results of our research open new areas of research and contrast the relevance of crowdsourcing and specifically crowdvoting for the success of hotels. In addition, the methodology employed, by mixing the data from a social media, with a questionnaire addressed to managers, can open new ideas for future works.

In recent years, crowdsourcing – an open and innovative model for outsourcing tasks to a crowd – has become popular for production processes, allowing organizations and firms in different industries to access external skills and expertise efficiently. Companies have opened their innovation processes to crowds outside their boundaries, and users and customers are often involved in developing products in line with market needs. This work aims to investigate the link between crowdsourcing, production and quality to better understand this new interesting phenomenon.

An explicit and systematic method for reviewing the literature was used. Through the selection and analysis of the relevant articles in the field, this paper presents a comprehensive overview of the pros and cons, risks and opportunities, disadvantages, or concerns, as addressed in the literature, for the adoption of crowdsourcing in the production processes.

It identifies where, how and to what extent crowdsourcing can be applied profitably within the production of products and services, highlighting how crowdsourcing could affect product and process quality. Finally, some directions for future research are outlined from the analysis conducted.

This work applied the systematic literature review to investigate and evaluate the actual use and impact of crowdsourcing on the production process, focusing on quality enhancement contribution.

The need for consumer involvement in innovation processes has been recognised for four decades. Consumer involvement as a part of open innovation is an important strategy in the food sector, specifically for enhancing consumer acceptance and promoting successful market introduction. The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyse the concept of consumers’ role and the level of consumer integration and interaction in recent food innovation processes.

In 2016, a three-step literature search was performed to identify the state-of-the-art scientific literature on consumer-involvement approaches and methods in the food sector. These methods and approaches were qualitatively analysed based on categories in accordance with the qualitative content analysis method.

A key finding is that most implemented consumer-involvement approaches and methods fall under von Hippel’s manufacturer-active paradigm rather than the customer-active paradigm (CAP). However, there are practical reasons for the low diffusion of CAP. The presumed reasons include needed change of the perception of roles and of organisational structures, as well as a lack of trust among actors.

There remains a need to promote an active role for consumers, especially amid changing consumer demand and increasingly conscious consumer behaviour concerning food production and processing conditions.

This paper contributes to the theoretical and practical discussion about innovation management by reflecting on the innovation paradigm underlying an approach or method. The paper may also have practical implications for the choice and implementation of business models that consider consumers’ role.

While the benefits of open innovation (OI) and crowdsourcing (CS) for solutions to R&D problems have been widely promoted in the last ten years, their appropriateness for organisations specialising in providing R&D services has not been explicitly considered. This paper aims to examine an R&D organisation's response to increased adoption of OI and CS, highlight their drawbacks in this context, and analyse how and why the alternative of problem‐sourcing (PS) proved more effective.

The paper provides an in‐depth documentation and analysis of an initiative called: The “What's Your Problem New Zealand?” (WYPNZ) challenge. The use of a single case and qualitative approach allows the development of an illustrative, rich description and is suited to studying unique and novel events.

In the context of professional R&D organisations, a range of benefits of CS for R&D problems rather than solutions were identified, including generating a potential pipeline of projects and clients as well as avoiding the challenge to the professional status of the organisation's research capability. An unexpected side‐effect was that the reputation of the research organisation as open, accessible and helpful was greatly enhanced. The success of the PS approach to CS for R&D provides insight into how some of the pitfalls of OI/CS can be better understood and potentially managed.

The PS model provided by the “WYPNZ” initiative represents a new strategic possibility for R&D organisations that complements their traditional competencies by drawing on the openness that OI and CS seek to leverage. As such, it can provide insights for other organisations wishing to make use of the connectivity afforded by OI/CS in an alternative mode to that typically in use and reported in the literature.

The paper aims to provide the necessary basis for a novel interdisciplinary research field. Various types and implementations of crowdsourcing have emerged in the market; many of them are related to logistics. While we can identify plenty of crowd logistics applications using information technology capabilities and information sharing in practice, theories behind this phenomenon have received only limited attention. This paper accounts for filling this research gap by analyzing the crowd’s contributions in logistics of goods and information.

This paper is part of an ongoing research endeavor in the field of location-based crowdsourcing. It represents conceptual work that builds on a literature review enriched with an in-depth analysis of real-world examples in the field of crowd logistics. Using a scoring method, we provide an example how a company may evaluate the alternatives of crowd logistics. The main approach is an analysis of variants of how the social crowd may be integrated in logistics processes. The work is conceptual in its core. Thereby, we use real-world examples of crowdsourcing applications to underpin the evaluated variants of crowd logistics.

The paper presents relevant theoretical background on crowd logistics. The authors differentiate between variants of crowd logistics with their flow of materials, goods and information. Thereby they zoom in the type, significance and process flow of the crowd’s contributions. They discuss potential advantages and challenges of logistics with the performing crowd and deeply discuss opportunities and challenges from a business and from an individual’s perspective. Finally, they highlight a route map for future research directions in this novel interdisciplinary research field.

As this work is conceptual in its core, generalizations may be drawn only with great care. Still, we are in a position to propose a route map for further research in this area in this paper. Also the integration of an analysis of a scale of real-world applications allows us to highlight our research’s practical relevance and implications.

The main contribution of this paper is an in-depth analysis and consolidation of innovative crowd logistics applications to provide an overview on recent implementations. The authors propose a categorization scheme and contribute with a route map for further research in the field of crowd logistics.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a model examining the key factors that emerge from the social customer relationship management (CRM) process. Specifically, this study aims to address the chain-of-effects that occurs as a result of the social CRM process, leading to superior levels of hotel performance.

Data were collected using a quantitative approach. Using a mail and online questionnaire, data were gathered from 120 key informants in hotels in Ireland. The proposed model was tested using partial least squares structural equation modelling.

Results demonstrate that the social CRM activities of hotels enhance hotel service innovation activities. This positively impacts the ability to develop a customer-linking capability, resulting in higher levels of customer performance. In turn, higher levels of customer performance leads to higher levels of financial performance.

Service innovation and customer-linking capability are identified as critical outcomes of the social CRM process that lead to enhanced hotel performance.

This study explains the chain-of-effects through which the social CRM process results in higher levels of performance.

The hospitality industry values segmentation and loyalty programs (LPs), but there is limited research on new methods for segmenting loyalty program members, so managers often rely on conventional techniques. This study aims to use big data-driven segmentation methods to cluster customers and provide a new solution for customer segmentation in hotel LPs.

Using the k-means algorithm, this study examined 498,655 profiles of guests enrolled in a multinational hotel chain’s loyalty program. The objective was to cluster guests according to their consumption behavior and monetary value and compare data-driven segments based on brand preferences, demographic data and monetary value with loyalty program tiers.

This study shows that current tier-based LPs lack features to improve customer segmentation, and some high-tier members generate less revenue than low-tier members. Therefore, more attention should be given to truly valuable customers.

Hotels can segment LP members to develop targeted campaigns and uncover new insights. This will help to transform LPs to make them more valuable and profitable and use differentiated rewards and strategies.

As not all guests or hotel brands benefit equally from LPs, additional segmentation is required to suit varying guest behaviors. Hotel managers can use data mining techniques to develop more efficient and valuable LPs with personalized strategies and rewards.

This study aims to demonstrate how destination management organizations can fruitfully harvest users’ ideas by facilitating an online idea contest to enhance value creation and innovation processes. The structure of the idea quality, contest-related factors and user-related factors are investigated in relation to the overall quality of the ideas submitted by users.

A total of 489 ideas were assessed based on the overall quality and effects of various factors. A structural model was tested to analyze the dimensions contributing to quality of the submissions that influence the overall idea quality. Furthermore, non-parametric tests were performed to reveal how specific user traits as well as contest-related traits relate to overall idea quality. Lastly, post-hoc analyses were performed to reveal if mean values differ among users who are grouped according to age, overall idea quality, place of residence and age at time of submission.

The study demonstrates that novelty, feasibility, relevance and elaboration explain overall idea quality. Only the age of the idea submitter exhibits an impact on the level of idea quality, wherein younger users tend to submit higher quality ideas. The areas of innovation significantly differ depending on the users’ place of residence and age. Moreover, none of the contest-related traits that were analyzed have an impact on the level of overall idea quality.

Marketing managers and destination management organizations are given a set of recommendations on how to facilitate internet-based participation tools, such as idea contests, to collect high-quality input from various user segments and, subsequently, to feed their value creation and innovation processes.

Within the field of tourism, the open tourism paradigm is relatively new. New insights into the role of online tools, and how they can be leveraged to harvest users’ ideas, as well as users’ capabilities for enhancing tourism firms’ value creation and innovation processes, are provided.