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This study aims to identify the key determinants of Airbnb rating scores.

This study is based on a sample of 127,257 listings across 43 cities. A total of 24 explanatory variables were identified, and they were further grouped into host verification information, communication, policy of renting, space, information about environment, price and experience of hosting. Both Tobit and ordered logit models were used to perform the analysis.

The results indicate that good communication, large space and provision of information about the listings’ environment have a positive effect on users’ satisfaction, whereas experience of hosting negatively influences users’ satisfaction.

This study contributes to the peer-to-peer accommodation literature by affording a more complete understanding about guest satisfaction and its determinants.

The aim of this study is to understand the knowledge-sharing structure and co-production of trip-related knowledge through online travel forums.

The travel forum threads were collected from TripAdvisor’s Sydney travel forum for the period from 2010 to 2014, which contains 115,847 threads from 8,346 conversations. The data analytical technique was based on a novel methodological approach – visual analytics, including semantic pattern generation and network analysis.

Findings indicate that the knowledge structure is created by community residents who camouflage as local experts and serve as ambassadors of a destination. The knowledge structure presents collective intelligence co-produced by community residents and tourists. Further findings reveal how these community residents associate with each other and form a knowledge repertoire with information covering various travel domain areas.

The study offers valuable insights to help destination-management organizations and tour operators identify existing and emerging tourism issues to achieve a competitive destination advantage.

This study highlights the process of social media mediated travel knowledge co-production. It also discovers how community residents engage in reaching out to tourists by camouflaging as ordinary users.

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize a dyadic theoretical model which takes social-oriented and individual-initiative drivers into account and illustrates a mechanism between social commerce intention and its antecedents in the hospitality industry. To understand tourist social commerce behaviors, the current study puts forward a comprehensive model and investigates the impact among social support, social capital, participant involvement and social identification on tourist propensity to engage in social commerce with behaviors such as to like, share, post reviews and make purchases.

The current research draws on social exchange theory and social penetration theory to study how social-oriented drivers (i.e., social support and social capital) and individual-initiated drivers (i.e., participant involvement and social identification) could better explain tourists’ social commerce intentions. Structural equation modeling was performed based on a sample of 569 hotel guests from 61 hotels in Macau.

Results reveal that social capital mediates the relationship between social support and social commerce behavioral intention. This chain of relationship is moderated by social identification in that the more a hotel guest identifies himself/herself as an in-group member of an online community, the more likely he/she would engage in social commerce behaviors.

The diffusion velocity of marketing effect is manifested through customers’ social commerce intentions and behaviors, which helps managers to identify the importance in maintaining a supportive atmosphere to nurture intimate member-to-member and member-to-provider relationships.

The present study enriches the social penetration theory and social exchange theory by showing how both individual and social perspectives could jointly influence hotel guest propensity to post likes and comments and to reserve hotel rooms, as means to build more intimate relationships with the members within a virtual community.

This study aims to use organizational fashion to underscore a novel phenomenon in which products, services and practices fade in and out of the tourism/hospitality setting within a specific time frame. Drawing from the fashion theoretical strands in organization research, this paper studies how fashion has been conceptualized, operationalized and then diffused among tourism/hospitality enterprises.

A qualitative case design was used. A total of 37 semistructured in-depth interviews with executives of innovative tourism/hospitality companies (e.g. restaurants, hotels, theme parks and travel agencies) were conducted. This paper focuses on the organizational fashion phenomenon in which organizational trendsetters with creative, “hot” products/services have emerged prominently in the marketplace.

This inquiry illustrates a social phenomenon concerning the organizational fashion setting process by integrating existing production practices among different organizational suppliers in the hospitality sector. Different cases in the study show that fashion consists of a series of hybrid, paradoxical processes. These include conceptualization (conventionalization vs novelty, and personalization vs conformity), operationalization (bundling vs unbundling, and learning vs relearning) and diffusion (framing vs co-framing, and adaptation vs alteration).

Throughout the three continuous processes, service design and identity development for consumption, as well as value creation and knowledge transformation for production, are carried out according to the decision of what is “hot” and what is “out” at a particular time. In essence, fashion helps to explain why hospitality institutions imitate specific innovations to take advantage of popular trends in the consumer market, as well as how such trends vanish eventually.

This research contributes the insight that organizations use fashion as a managerial initiative to translate their organizational goals and improvise nascent products and services. The fashion processes can be triggered by microlevel individual organizations and are spread through a series of social interactions to become macrolevel phenomena in a recurring manner.

Drawing on the person–supervisor fit theory, this study aims to adopts a dyadic and relational approach to investigate the congruence between the leader’s and the follower’s learning goal orientation (LGO) on their leader–member exchange (LMX) quality and the follower’s innovation.

The participants were 213 frontline employees and their 69 immediate supervisors from a large five-star hotel in China. The authors analyze the multiple-wave data using the cross-level polynomial regression approach.

The results show that when the levels of LGO between the leader and the follower are congruent, follower innovation and LMX are higher; when the levels of LGO between the leader and the follower are incongruent, it hinders LMX but benefits follower’s innovation.

This study implies that personality congruence and incongruence can be equally important in creating positive work outcomes, enriching the theoretical understanding and practical implications for promoting LMX and follower innovation in hospitality industry.

Prior research has identified the importance of employees’ LGO in promoting innovation. However, the fit between employees’ and their leaders’ LGO has not been investigated.

This paper aims to investigate customers' perceptions of four service quality aspects – service environment, service delivery, game service, and food service – in the casino setting among Chinese players.

The study examined the proposed model through a 2(gambler type: leisure versus hardcore)×2(gender: male versus female) multivariate analysis of variance of the four casino service quality aspects.

Based on a sample of leisure and hardcore casino players, the results show significant differences between the two types of patrons on the four casino service dimensions. In addition, significant gender‐by‐player interaction is revealed.

This study sheds new light on the understanding of the direct and moderating roles of gender and type of casino players on service evaluation in the literature. The research findings should be interpreted with caution as the results are derived from a Vegas‐like casino in Macau among a mass‐market Chinese casino clientele.

The findings extend service research by illuminating perceptual differences in different casino service quality dimensions in the Asian leisure milieu. Casino operators should take customers' gender and player type into account and design service offerings that are more attractive to female and leisure consumers, as they represent a large potential casino clientele.

The findings extend the customer contact model and further the understanding in regard to the service quality perception in the burgeoning casino gambling industry in the Far East.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of perceived corporate social responsibility (CSR) on employees’ affective commitment through the mediating role of perceived corporate culture.

Data were collected by means of self-administered survey. A total of 379 complete responses were obtained from tourism and hospitality organizations in China. The proposed relationships were tested using structural equation modeling in four nested models.

Results show that CSR to employees and CSR to customers are fully mediated by employee development, harmony and customer orientation of the corporate culture, while CSR to stakeholders is partially mediated.

The findings also suggest that the literature should reconsider how CSR initiatives could pinpoint a specific dimension in developing loyal employees. This study also shows that employees are social actors who seek a corporate culture that best suits their self-interest; hence, they are more committed to an organization particularly in respect to employee development and social harmony.

This study adds to the literature by showing that not all CSR efforts would directly lead to employee commitment. It shows that the CSR-to-employee and CSR-to-customer dimensions play the most salient roles in nurturing a corporate culture that is perceived to focus on employee development, harmony, customers and innovation.

This study aims to investigate how perceptions associated with corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives influence customers’ preference and loyalty in a controversial consumer market. The mediating effect of brand preference between perceived CSR initiatives and customer loyalty is also examined.

The methodology in the current study involves the use of questionnaire surveys delivered to a convenience sample in the city of Macau in 2012. A total of 616 valid samples were collected among casino players in a high bet limit area in six major casinos. Regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses formulated for carrying the study forward.

The findings indicated that customers’ brand preference can be enhanced by their perceptions on CSR. Two CSR initiatives (stakeholders and society) significantly increase loyalty intention, although to varying degrees. The impact of CSR on stakeholders has a stronger influence on customers’ brand preference. Another important finding of the current study is the fact that brand preference is a partial mediator of perceived CSR initiatives and customer loyalty.

This study verified the relationship among CSR initiatives perception, brand preference and loyalty intention in the context of the Macau gaming industry. Perceived CSR initiatives enhance customer loyalty. Additionally, this study found a partial mediating effect of brand preference between CSR perception and customer loyalty.

Customer loyalty can be enhanced with companies’ appropriate investments in social responsibilities. Although a socially responsible brand image of a company is not guaranteed to be a competitive advantage that attracts more premium customers, there is a general consensus that it may result in the latter with appropriate CSR strategies involving the greatest attention directed toward improving stakeholders’ interests. From the marketing perspective, retaining premium customers with a higher brand preference level is a key to both long-term competitiveness and profitability.

This study investigates how premium customers’ perceived CSR initiatives of a casino influence their loyalty intention, and also examines how brand preference, as a mediator, influences the relationship between perceived CSR and loyalty intention. Extending the realm of CSR study to understand the linkage between CSR and customer behaviors is also important because multiple theories predict different benefits, and assessing the value of CSR, therefore, requires multiple approaches. Finally, evidence from the research is significant for researchers and practitioners, especially when working on conflicting issues.

The purpose of this paper is to show how value equity and its subdimensions of service quality, cost, and convenience drive customer satisfaction among business and leisure travelers who are attending events (e.g. conventions, expositions, parades, cultural events) in Macau, China.

Data were collected through a survey of 322 leisure and 91 business travelers who were present at 40 different major events in Macau, using a questionnaire that was designed by practitioners, academics, and tourism governmental authorities. The data were used to support the structural framework, and group comparison modeling was employed to show that a respondent's leisure or business travel status serves as a moderator between value equity and customer satisfaction.

The results show that though value equity is positively related to customer satisfaction among both business and leisure travelers, some major differences exist regarding how these groups respond to an event's marketing actions that promote value and how they derive satisfaction from value. For example, leisure travelers place more emphasis on a venue's space and layout than business travelers. In terms of satisfaction, business travelers place more importance than leisure travelers on service quality but are less sensitive to an event's price.

The paper extends the value equity literature by applying the concept to event planning. The paper suggests that event planners should consider designing and implementing marketing actions that focus on value equity, in addition to traditional planning that relies on the service marketing mix. Given that the study's scales were adapted for use at 40 different venues in Macau, event planners may need to modify the scale items for their respective locales. The authors also put forth recommendation regarding expanding the SERVQUAL survey.

Although value equity has been explored in hospitality/lodging, the concept is relatively unexplored in event planning. In addition, this paper shows how group consensus using the Delphi method among tourism academics and practitioners can yield a set of reliable service quality, cost, and convenience scales that may apply to a series of event venues.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether tourists in Hawaii experience the Bali Syndrome. The Bali Syndrome suggests that tourists in Polynesian destinations experience artificial cultures. To explore the syndrome, the paper investigates whether tourists are interested in purchasing Hawaiian souvenirs and memorabilia that are based on the state's history and culture, as well as the extent to which Hawaiian history and local culture motivates their Hawaiian sojourn.

This paper employs survey methodology in two studies. Both studies are based upon questionnaire responses from a convenience sample of approximately 700 tourists in Waikiki.

Although tourists in Hawaii express an interest in the state's history and local culture, the majority have no intention of purchasing historic/cultural souvenirs or memorabilia.

Marketing and tourism planners in Hawaii, Fiji, and Bali should create advertising and promotional campaigns that focus on the “escape” qualities of these destinations, rather than on Polynesian histories and cultures. Given that the study was conducted in Waikiki, researchers may want to explore the Bali Syndrome in other Polynesian destinations.

Marketing and tourism planners may respond to the Bali Syndrome from four different perspectives; these are, servicescape, ethics, cause‐related, and eco‐tourism.

The paper provides empirical evidence that the Bali Syndrome exists and then offers a range of possible responses based upon four perspectives.