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Practitioners and researchers are persistently trying to identify critical product/service attributes that generate greater customer satisfaction, which in turn yields multiple positive outcomes for the business. However, traditional measuring of attribute performance does not account for a non-linear nature of the relationship between attribute performance and customer satisfaction. The purpose of this paper is to apply an alternative method – penalty-reward contrast analysis (PRCA) grounded in Kano model – to a wine festival setting and to estimate the effects of each attribute on the overall satisfaction.

The aim of the study is to use a self-administered survey distributed to attendees of a large wine festival in the USA, resulting in a sample of 250 festival attendees.

Personnel and entertainment were considered “must-be” or basic factors for wine festivals. Failing to deliver on these dimensions will lead to attendees’ frustration and is likely to outweigh positive impact of other factors. Wine was considered to be a linear, or performance, factor with symmetrical positive and negative impact on satisfaction. Food and facilities were non-significant in predicting customer satisfaction.

Given that most wine festivals operate with rather scarce resources in a competitive environment, using an approach that helps determine how limited resources are best deployed to achieve the highest levels of customer satisfaction is beneficial for the industry. The study provides new insights to wine festivals managers as to how drivers of satisfaction may vary according to attributes of both the festival and the attendees.

The study adopts the novel approach of the PRCA in its application to wine festivals, making the study unique and noteworthy. It brings new knowledge about quality components of wine festivals and adds support to the new evaluation tool.

The main purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of embedded social media channels and determine whether the embedded social media channels enhance the overall experience of travelers using the hotel Web sites.

A true-experimental, between-group and post-test-only design was used to address the primary research questions. Two privately accessible complete versions of the Web site (one with embedded social media channels and one without them) were designed for the experiment. The uses and gratifications approach was used to test the proposed hypotheses. Data were analyzed using ANOVA.

The results of this study revealed that embedded social media channels on the hotel Web site enhanced travelers’ social gratifications of perceived social interaction. Apart from these benefits for travelers seeking social gratifications, embedded social media channels did not enhance the overall experience (content and process gratifications) of travelers using the Web site.

In the case of embedded social media on hotel Web sites, this study suggests that hotel managers measure return on engagement to examine the effectiveness of embedded social media, instead of return on investment.

The study revealed that the emergence of embedded social media channels and their integration on hotel Web sites will have significant influence on travelers who seek social gratifications.

The findings of this study offer new empirical evidence that embedded social media channels enhance only travelers’ perceived social interaction during their first visit to the hotel Web site.

The purpose of this paper is to address issues of performance optimization through accounting for asymmetric responses of customer satisfaction to different types of product or service attributes: core, facilitating and “green” (eco‐friendly). The primary research inquiry was to explore how these attributes affect customer satisfaction and account for interactions among them in order to identify an optimal combination that would maximize customer satisfaction in lodging industry settings.

An experimental design and a web‐based survey were used to collect data from a convenience sample of faculty and staff of two US universities. Univariate and regression analysis were two primary methods of data analysis.

The findings confirmed non‐linear nature of customer satisfaction response and indicated that “green” attributes impact customer satisfaction similarly to facilitating attributes but differently from the core type of attributes in the context of lodging industry.

Generalizability of the findings is bounded by convenience sampling technique. Additionally, only limited number of hotel attributes was examined.

The current findings help to solve the problem of performance optimization and allow creating hotel offerings that yield maximum levels of customer satisfaction and optimal resource allocation.

The study provides additional knowledge about factor structure of customer satisfaction and points on the place and role of “green” attributes in formation of CS in the context of lodging industry.

This work aims to examine the communication on Twitter of the most responsible companies in Spain to identify the topics covered on corporate social responsibility (CSR) from the perspective of happiness and social marketing. In addition, the profiles of the messages that show an association with the impact of the messages have been identified.

An empirical analysis of the Twitter posts of Spain's ten most responsible companies has been carried out. The methodology of this work combines data mining techniques, sentiment analysis and content analysis, both from a quantitative and qualitative approach.

The results show that most brand tweets do not deal with CSR-related topics. The topics they address the most are those related to sports and the weather. From the perspective of social marketing, conversational-type tweets are the most published and have achieved the most significant reaction from the public. In addition, four messages' profiles have been identified based on the company and the emotional connotation associated with the impact, giving rise to more outstanding promotion of social causes.

Our main contribution to this work has been to value positive communication and social marketing to promote better CSR on Twitter. In this sense, it has been verified that there is a relationship between the public's reaction, the affective connotation and the company that issues the messages.