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Following the increasing trend of artificial intelligence (AI) research in hospitality literature, this critical reflection paper aims to identify AI-assisted mindfulness as a critical yet under-investigated issue and to contribute feasible directions for future research.

The authors first conceptualize a framework explaining the effects of mindfulness design in AI interventions on improving human mindfulness. The authors then identify opportunities for interventions in AI-assisted mindfulness for the tourism, hospitality and events industries. Finally, the authors propose potential themes for AI-assisted mindfulness research.

This study contributes three major conceptual works. First, we conceptualize a framework of AI-assisted mindfulness, showcasing that the scope of AI-assisted mindfulness spans from AI interventions to state mindfulness and then to trait mindfulness. Second, the authors offer two approaches to strategic thinking, one from mindfulness (i.e. mindfulness-focused niche markets and activities) and one from AI applications (i.e. AI-facilitated devices and platforms), to identify opportunities for AI-assisted mindfulness interventions. Third, for both management- and marketing-oriented AI-assisted mindfulness research, the authors propose 18 themes.

This critical reflection paper offers directions for future knowledge creation in AI-assisted mindfulness in the tourism, hospitality and events industries.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this critical reflection paper serves as the first in hospitality and tourism literature to systematically propose the research issue of AI-assisted mindfulness, offering directions and themes for future research.

The purpose of this study is to explore how event attendees experience interactive encounters in the most competitive segment of the business sector of events – conferences.

A total of 26 in-depth personal interviews was conducted with previous conference attendees. Line-by-line open coding, axial coding and selective coding are performed.

This study develops a framework for experiences during customer–customer encounters (CCEs), which presents a dual motivational structure that explains one’s participation in CCEs, a classification of typical CCEs, four processes that one experiences during CCEs and three levels of situational factors that influence experiences during CCEs.

This study makes one of the first attempts to propose a multidimensional conceptualization of CCE experiences using an attendee perspective. Beyond the utilitarian and social benefits, this study suggests that it is important for event studies to explore the psychological and emotional meanings of CCE experiences through an experiential lens and that the competitive battleground in event industry should lie in staging memorable experiences during CCEs.

The paper aims to introduce a framework within which to interpret and manage organisational events that have marketing significance. It also seeks to introduce associated concepts to further this area of study and practice.

The paper introduces and appraises the marketing event landscape and goes on to examine the unique DNA of marketing events evaluating their specific relevance and role in the contemporary marketing environment. The final section of the paper explores a range of strategic event objectives as the starting point for event design, delivery, and evaluation. Couched between the author's previous and future (ongoing) empirical work in this area, this article provides much needed conceptual development.

The framework provides a structured approach through which practitioners and academics can interpret and realise the value of marketing events. The discussion demonstrates that there exists a wide and rich array of organisational events that have marketing utility, marketing events is therefore an inclusive term. Underpinning the framework, and associated discussion, is how the marketing events feed into a wider marketing strategy. The connection between event objectives and marketing strategy is therefore pivotal, and is a prevailing theme of the paper.

The paper demonstrates how the inherent qualities of marketing events are very relevant given the contemporary marketing environment. Despite this, there is a lack of academic literature and events remain a poor relation to other forms of marketing communication. This detracts from them realising their potential as a relevant and high impact marketing delivery method. The models, concepts, and ideas in this paper are original, inspired by a range of fragmented literature relevant to the topic of marketing and events.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the term branded marketing events (BMEs), and examine the role of its experiential components as a strategic tool for the facilitation of customer brand engagement. This study examines five experiential components of BMEs at events held in Australia and France to determine their respective impact on customer brand engagement.

Surveys were distributed to attendees of ten events by six wine brands in South Australia, and six events in five sub-regions of Bordeaux.

Findings suggest that BMEs influence customers’ brand engagement and brand purchase intention in both Australia and France. However, the experiential components within the events had differing effects. Australian customers were influenced by cognitive, sensorial, and relational experiences and their increased customer brand engagement strongly influenced brand purchase intention. French customers, however, required pragmatic event experiences to build brand engagement.

Recognizing their mutual experiential and interactive foundations, this study integrates the research domains of marketing events, customer experiences and customer brand engagement, and contributes to the strategic understanding of how branded event experiences facilitate customer brand engagement.

This paper reports on a year‐long engagement in a sub‐region of South West England with public sector managers, who frequently work in partnership contexts. The purpose of the initiative was to increase the effectiveness of partnership working by exploring common issues and building a shared understanding of how they might be resolved. This was undertaken by holding a series of seminars and forums facilitated by the authors. The findings show that managers who are involved in numerous partnerships value stepping outside of their formal roles to reflect together on their experiences. Participants were able to identify many pertinent issues that affect their practice in partnership contexts and generate important insights. The findings are being used to develop approaches to support partnerships and collaboration in the sub‐region and further afield.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the understanding of socialization in the context of temporary operations and organizational settings, using project alliance – the most contemporary approach to the management of large and complex projects – as an example. In particular, the paper also assesses how informal and formal socialization mechanisms are used to facilitate relational capital in such a setting.

Data were collected by two case studies of complex infrastructure projects in a Northern European city. The analysis focuses on how socialization is managed across organizational interfaces within the alliance organization during the project tendering and development phase to create relational capital.

The findings indicate that significant emphasis is put on socialization in project alliances. However, while in the tendering phase both informal and formal socialization mechanisms are used to create relational capital; in the development phase informal socialization mechanisms are associated with higher levels of relational capital and formal socialization mechanisms are used to maintain the level of relational capital.

While operations and supply chain management research argues that socialization is critical to manage organizational interfaces and to create relational capital in buyer-supplier relationships, research has mainly focused on ongoing operations. This study complements the prior research by developing further insight into socialization in the context of temporary operations and organizational settings; such settings create a unique empirical context, posing different managerial challenges as the results also indicate.

This chapter discusses emerging issues in event management with a focus on small-scale events. The author reflects on managerial approaches to stakeholder involvement and engagement, and underlines the complexity of strategy formulation for destination development planning. This contribution also provides advanced conceptual instruments for event marketing as guiding principles that permeate destination-marketing strategies. In addition, the author investigates the role and nature of sponsorship linked to enhancing the value of small-scale events and highlights fundamental issues in developing a marketing management model for place marketing and the key drivers of event management strategies involving sponsors and event participants.

Education for Sustainable Development and graduate employability are key agendas within Higher Education, and career-related events provide a context that caters to both simultaneously. There is a need for greater integration of academic department and career service teams in developing event management that systematically considers the potential to raise awareness of sustainability-related careers. This can maximise student personal and professional growth through sustainability-related career events, which simultaneously benefit the student through shaping personal and professional ‘purpose’, society through impact on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and university impact-related measures. By approaching events as a source of empowering students to become aware of, and actively seek out careers in which they can have a positive impact on people and planet, universities can provide a pipeline of sustainability ‘actioners and transformers’. This chapter illuminates the potential actions between career service teams and academic departments in developing information-related events about sustainability-related careers. It extends a popular employability framework to sustainability, presented with an illustrative case in a UK study context aligned with the sustainability ‘Thinker, Actioner and Transformer’ typology. An analysis of career service information enables clear recommendations to be provided on how academic teams, career and other operational services might coordinate approaches. It is proposed that the ultimate commitment of growth in transformation might well be to nurture students as activists for change, presented through the topical analysis of ‘fossil-free’ career events. This is very much a starting point, and it is hoped that the chapter provides an opening for further discussion.

While the importance of leadership in quality improvement is increasingly being acknowledged, we still do not know enough about what improvement leaders actually do and how they behave. This paper describes how Alder Hey, using a range of experimental approaches, has created its own model of change and concluded that certain habits of mind are at the heart of sustainable improvement leadership.

Sport mega-events have received much criticism of late. However, there has been increasing awareness of the brand-related benefits from hosting a sport mega-event, with their hosting being a deliberate policy for many nations, most notably among emerging nations. One such nation is South Africa, which explicitly stated its nation branding ambitions through the staging of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Through this single case, this paper aims to identify the unique characteristics of the sport mega-event that were leveraged for benefits of nation branding.

An interpretivist, qualitative study explored the insights of nation brand stakeholders and experts, elicited using in-depth, semi-structured interviews (n = 27) undertaken two to three years after the staging of the event.

Three characteristics of the 2010 sport mega-event were deemed by stakeholders to be unique in creating nation branding opportunities: the scale of the event that created opportunities for transformational development; the global appeal, connection and attachment of the event; and the symbolic status of the event that was leveraged for internal brand building and public diplomacy. The paper proposes that while sport mega-events provide nation branding opportunities, the extent of these benefits may vary according to the context of the nation brand with lesser-known, troubled or emerging brands seemingly having the most to gain.

While acknowledging the critique of mega-events, this paper highlights a pertinent example of an emerging nation that leveraged the potential of a sport mega-event for nation branding gains. It extends the understanding of sport mega-events and their potential for nation branding.