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This study attempts to identify and explicate the unique segmentation of the increasingly growing virtual reality (VR) user market based on the user experience. Consequently, it collects five hundred forty-five online survey questionnaires through the Prolific platform and deploys cluster analysis to identify mutually exclusive groups of VR users. The research variable, user experience, contains 16 indicators explained by four dimensions. As a result, this study is able to unveil three mutually exclusive markets which are labeled as (1) beginner, (2) aficionado, and (3) utilitarian. The unique features of these three groups are further compared based on their VR tour behaviors. In the conclusion section, it offers managerial implications for devising novel marketing strategies.

Luxury tourism is an emerging area of research and deserves consideration for its implications for tourism and hospitality management and policy development. This chapter reviews the phenomena of luxury tourism in the academic literature and in particular, its links to the concepts of high yield, sustainability and tourist experiences. The global hiatus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has presented an opportunity for tourism policymakers and industry stakeholders to reconsider how luxury tourism can contribute to optimal economic, social and environmental outcomes with desired yield and sustainability aspirations. A renewed understanding of luxury tourism in terms of its production and consumption processes, as well as the associated value, emotion and narrative, is therefore of critical importance. The value of this chapter lies in synthesising a number of strands of inquiry across disparate bodies of literature to identify a research agenda. Areas that are proposed for further research include the conceptualisation of luxury tourism, the evolving nature of luxury experiences; value co-creation across all stages of luxury tourism; and the nexus between luxury tourism and destination image. Managerial implications of luxury tourism are also discussed, including the necessary conditions for cultivating luxury tourism; the need to measure the social and environmental impact of luxury tourism; and the important relationships between luxury tourism, innovation and market leadership.

As the elderly population in Korea grows, sales of travel packages for elderly people are also increasing. Senior tourists should spend much time with other tourists because of the nature of package travel. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the significance of rapport with other tourists in the elderly tourist context. Specifically, the current study examined the relationship between other customer perceptions and rapport with other tourists. In addition, this study investigated the influences of rapport with other tourists on tour quality, tour satisfaction and word-of-mouth.

This paper collected data from 411 elderly tourists in Korea and conducted a structural equation modeling analysis to test nine hypotheses.

Physical appearance and suitable behavior positively affect rapport with other tourists and thus aid in increasing tour quality, tour satisfaction and word-of-mouth.

In service marketing, there is a general consensus that customers are influenced by other customers who use the same service facility because they recognize other customers as the environment of the service facility. The concept of other customer perceptions was applied to tourism marketing in this study in combination with another understudied concept, rapport. This study is one of the first, as per the authors’ knowledge, to apply those important concepts to the tourism industry in particular, although there has been a considerable body of research in the service marketing field. Consequently, the findings of this paper would be meaningful and useful for travel agencies when developing a marketing strategy to enhance rapport between tourists.

This paper explores the major factors influencing multinational companies’ (MNCs) propensity to change the level of resource commitments during financial crises in emerging markets. Favorable changes in the host government policies, market demand, firm strategy, and infrastructural conditions are hypothesized to influence the MNCs’ decision to increase resource commitments during a crisis. The hypotheses are tested with data collected in a survey of 82 MNCs during the recent Argentine financial crisis (late 2002). While all the above variables are considered by the respondents as generally important reasons for increasing resource commitments during a crisis, only favorable changes in government policies significantly influence MNCs’ decisions to change the level of resource commitments during the Argentine financial crisis. The research, managerial implications, and policy‐making implications are discussed.

This study aims to simultaneously examine the influence of demographic, psychographic and situational factors on consumers’ willingness to pay a price premium (WTPp) for robotic restaurants and to profile market segments based on consumers’ WTPp levels (positive, neutral and negative).

Using an online survey, the data were gathered from a sample of 897 Thai consumers who had dined at a robotic restaurant in the past 12 months. Structural equation modeling, chi-square tests and the one-way analysis of variance were used for data analysis.

Demographic (gender, age, income and marital status), psychographic (perceived advantages/disadvantages, personal innovativeness and personality traits) and situational factors (perceived health risk and self-protection behavior) significantly influence consumers’ WTPp for robotic restaurants. The positive price premium group differs significantly from the neutral and negative price premium groups in terms of demographic, psychographic and situational profiles.

The findings of this study help restaurateurs target the correct customers and set up appropriate price fences to safeguard profits and maximize return on investment.

This study contributes to the literature on technology-based services and hospitality by heeding the calls made by Ivanov and Webster (2021) and providing much-needed empirical evidence of possible changes in consumers’ WTPp for robot-delivered services in restaurants due to COVID-19.

The work on bridge resilience assessment includes quantitative and qualitative approaches to compare the multiple bridges based on their resilience. But still, the bridge resilience obtained by these assessment approaches is inefficient when prioritising multiple bridges to improve their resilience. Therefore, this study aims to develop a methodology for prioritising the bridges to improve their resilience.

The research methodology follows three sequential phases. In the first phase, criteria importance through intercriteria correlation (CRITIC) technique is used to compute the criteria weights. The criteria considered are age, area, design high flood level, finish road level FRL and resilience index of bridges. While 12 river-crossing bridges maintained by one bridge owner are considered as alternatives. Then, in the second phase, the prioritisation of each bridge is evaluated using five techniques, including technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution, VIKOR (in Serbian, Visekriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje), additive ratio assessment, complex proportional assessment and multi-objective optimisation method by ratio analysis. Finally, in the third phase, the results of all five techniques are integrated using CRITIC and the weighted sum method.

The result of the study enables bridge owners to deal with the particular bridge that requires resilience improvement. The study concluded that it is not enough to consider only the bridge resilience index to improve its resilience. The prioritisation exercise should consider various other criteria that are not preferred during the bridge resilience assessment process.

The proposed methodology is a novel framework based on the existing multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques for contributing knowledge in the domain of bridge resilience management. It can efficiently overcome the pitfall of decision-making when two bridges have the same resilience index score.

The present study intends to discover and analyze the determinants of users' intention to use (ITU) drone-based online food delivery (OFD) services. The study mainly focuses on the drone-based food delivery system in India and its implications.

This study has used the purposive sampling method. With the support of the technology acceptance model (TAM) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB), a theoretical model was developed conceptually. Later, the model was validated using the partial least square-structure equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique with consideration of 324 responses mainly from university students in Delhi- National Capital Region (NCR).

The findings reveal that all the determinants are positively and significantly related to ITU, except for perceived behavioral control that does not influence the consumer’s ITU drone-based OFD services. The study also shows that how food delivery system through drone can revolutionize the entire food delivery system in India.

The present study has developed a unique model that can be used by practitioners, future researchers in this field and policymakers in government departments. The present study is limited to Delhi-NCR in India, and thus, there is an issue of generalizability in the present study.

This study has examined the future of food delivery system through drone-based system. Thus, the leaders in the food industry will be better positioned to understand consumers' intentions to use OFD services using drones and be able to make more informed decisions about investment in drone technology in their respective organizations.

The present study has combined both the technology adoption model and the TPB and developed a theoretical model. The study enriches the literature on drone-based OFD services. Since users' acceptance of OFD services using drones is an under-researched area, the present study will make a meaningful contribution to bring the body of literature in this domain.

This chapter investigates diverse policy experiences of smart village strategy in Korea. The Korean approach has been highly influenced by the European Union (EU) experience emphasizing the importance of a bottom-up territorial development. The Korean government acknowledges agriculture is not the only driver of rural jobs and wealth creation. Rather it understands that diversified non-farm activities in rural areas are essential to revitalize the rural economy. The major policies relevant to the development of rural smart village are first, establishing regional innovation system fitted for depressed regions, second, inducing agriculture to become value-added industries, third, diversifying rural economic activities and integrating industrial support, fourth, improving the welfare of rural residents by improving settlement conditions, and finally, encouraging rural–urban interaction. Since the campaign of smart rural village as a rural development strategy is closely related with the discussion of rural tourism in Korea, this study investigates past and recent streams of rural tourism strategies pursued by the central government in Korea. Along with introducing the historical development strategy in Korea, this study presents the current and possible future characteristics of rural development strategies in Korea. This study investigates the perceived role of tourism as well as recent streams of rural development policies such as 6th industrialization and smart farming in the rural development strategies. Presenting success and failure stories, this study also considers why development of rural tourism has been slow in rural areas in Korea, reviewing restraints, reservations, and problems identified during the last few decades in Korea.

In any organization there are main goals, with lots of projects designed to achieve these goals. It is important for any organization to determine how much these projects affect the achievement of these goals. The purpose of this paper is to develop a fuzzy multiple attribute-based group decision-support system (FMAGDSS) to evaluate projects’ performance in promoting the organization's goals utilizing simple additive weighting (SAW) algorithm and technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) algorithm. The proposed FMAGDSS deals with choosing the most appropriate fuzzy ranking algorithm for solving a given fuzzy multi attribute decision making (FMADM) problem with both qualitative and quantitative criteria (attributes), and uncertain judgments of decision makers.

In this paper, a FMAGDSS model is designed to determine scores and ranks of every project in promoting the organization's goals. In the first step of FMAGDSS model, all projects are assessed by experts based on evaluation criteria and the organization's goals. The proposed FMAGDSS model will then choose the most appropriate fuzzy ranking method to solve the given FMADM problem. Finally, a sensitivity analysis system is developed to assess the reliability of the decision-making process and provide an opportunity to analyze the impacts of “criteria weights” and “projects” performance’ on evaluating projects in achieving the organizations’ goals, and to assess the reliability of the decision-making process. In addition, a software prototype has been developed on the basis of FMAGDSS model that can be applied to solve every FMADM problem that needs to rank alternatives according to certain attributes.

The result of this study simplifies and accelerates the evaluation process. The proposed system not only helps organizations to choose the most efficient projects for sustainable development, but also helps them to assess the reliability of the decision-making process, and decrease the uncertainty in final decision caused by uncertain judgment of decision makers.

Future studies are suggested to expand this system to evaluate and rank the project proposals. To achieve this goal, the efficiency of the projects in line with organization's goals, should be predicted.

This study contributes to the relevant literature by proposing a FMAGDSS model to evaluate projects in promoting organization's goals. The proposed FMAGDSS has ability to choose the most appropriate fuzzy ranking algorithm to solve a given FMADM problem based on the type and the number of attributes and alternatives, considering the least computation and time consumption for ranking alternatives.