Search results

The purpose of the study is to assess whether a relationship exists between corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement and tour operators' performances.

A web survey was submitted to tour operators worldwide. A large sample of tour operators from different countries and continents participated in the survey. Principal component analysis was performed and a regression model was developed to analyze the relationship among variables.

Empirical evidence indicates that tour operators with high CSR engagement experienced a significantly higher short-term growth of profits and sales volume. Results also show that applying CSR principles, facilitating CSR values and fostering local economic linkages have a positive and significant influence on tour operators' performances.

Tour operators should cultivate a sustainable corporate culture requiring a commitment to sustainability of the company and its suppliers. The findings contradict with the tendency of “enclavisation” of package tourists within self-sufficient tourism complexes and suggest that locals are part of the tourism place-product.

This research reviews the literature on the relationship between CSR and firms' performances in tourism and hospitality. The relevance of this study is its focus on tour operators, a context with a fundamental importance for the sustainability of the tourism industry worldwide. Tour operators are the players that mostly reflect the variety of sectors within the tourism industry, combining travel services such as accommodation, food, transports, entertainment and excursions. This is the first time that a study on the relationship between CSR and firms' performances has been developed on tour operators worldwide. The paper is based on the data collected through a survey on 201 companies from 42 countries from all continents.

This paper aims to focus on the reason why hoteliers choose to be present in online travel agent (OTA) and social media web sites for sales purposes. It also investigates the technological and human factors related to these two practices.

The research is based on a survey sent to a wide range of hotels in a Swiss touristic region. The empirical analysis involves the specification of two ordered logit models exploring the importance (in terms of online sales) of both social media and the online travel agent, Booking.com.

Findings highlight the constant tension between visibility and online sales in the web arena, as well as a clear distinction in social media and OTA web site adoption between hospitality structures using online management tools and employing personnel with specific skills.

The research highlights the need for the hospitality industry to maintain an effective presence on social media and OTAs in order to move towards the creation of a new form of social booking technologies to increase their visibility and sales.

This research contributes to understanding the major role played by OTAs and social media in the hospitality industry while underlining the possibility of a major interplay between the two.

This study aims to address how the social structure of the hospitality management field has evolved from 1960 to 2016.

The informal social structure of the hospitality management literature was analyzed by collecting authorship data from seven hospitality management journals. Co-authorship analyses via network analysis were conducted.

According to the findings, throughout the history of hospitality management, international collaboration levels are relatively low. Based on social network analysis, the research community is only loosely connected, and the network of the community does not fit with the small-world network theory. Additional findings indicate that researchers in the hospitality management literature are ranked via degree centrality, closeness centrality and betweenness centrality. Cliques, which contain at least five researchers, and core researchers are identified.

This study helps both scholars and practitioners improve the informal structure of the field. Scholars must generate strong ties to strengthen cross-fertilization in the field; hence, they collaborate with authors who have strong positions in the field. Specifically, this provides a useful performance analysis. To the extent that institutions and individuals are rewarded for publications, this study demonstrates the performance and connectivity of several key researchers in the field. This finding could be interesting to (post)graduate students. Hospitality managers looking for advisors and consultants could benefit from the findings. Additionally, these are beneficial for journal editors, junior researchers and agencies/institutions.

As one of the first study in the field, this research examines the informal social structure of hospitality management literature in seven journals.

While the importance of social media will continue to grow, the purpose of this study is to provide a retrospective systematic literature review of the social media research published in major hospitality and tourism journals over a specific time period.

The study conducted a bibliometric analysis to review the literature of 439 social media articles published in 51 hospitality and tourism journals over a 15-year time span (2002-2016).

Ulrike Gretzel authored the highest fractional citations. The results indicated that social media-related research was mostly published in top-tier journals. The International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management was amongst the four leading journals in terms of the percentage of published social media articles. While inter-country social media research collaborations were relatively modest, interestingly, inter-country collaborations have been steadily increasing in the past five years. Another finding indicated that social media research in hospitality and tourism journals has been predominantly quantitative. The results revealed six new areas within the consumer behaviour research theme, namely, eWOM, service recovery, customer satisfaction, brand/destination image and service quality. Finally, it is important to note that four new trends in social media research appeared between 2011 and 2016, namely, big data, netnography, Travel 2.0 and Web 2.0.

While this study made significant contributions to the social media literature, some limitations do exist. For example, the current research excluded publications from major conferences, books, book chapters and dissertations. Additionally, it is not within the scope of this paper to take into account issues related to self-citations.

The results obtained from analysis contribute to a comprehensive understanding of social media research progress in hospitality and tourism. For example, evaluating the performance of individual scholars helps educational institutions to compete in the global university ranking system. Additionally, to compete for funding opportunities on the topic of social media, institutions can use citation counts to demonstrate their competitiveness. Furthermore, due to the expected future growth in the number of social media platforms, practitioners need to understand motivating factors and tourists’ needs in different countries, target market segments, age groups and cultures to create highly engaging communities around their brands.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the sample of this study synthesized the largest selection of social media articles published in hospitality and tourism journals. This is the first study to apply the fractional score at the author level, the adjusted appearance score at the university level and the average citation score at the journal and inter-country levels in the analysis. In addition, prevalent research orientations and research trends in social media made significant contributions to existing literature.

This paper aims at exploring the historical roots of ideals-based accountability (IBA) in a family business of the past. It examines the narrative accounts of the history of an Italian long-lived family business written by one of its latest business owners to determine how and to what extent it was used to discharge a more ethical form of accountability.

An extensive thematic analysis informed on the conceptual framework of IBA is conducted on the unpublished manuscript by Angelo Barovier, the oldest leader of the Barovier’s family business.

The retrospective narrative served the family owner as a means for IBA, unveiling to the present and future generations of family owners the values and ideals that had motivated the ancestors to sustain the family business throughout the centuries despite the financial performance or the adversities.

This paper reveals the historical roots of IBA as grounded in family business historical narratives. It contributes to management and family business history by showing the historical relevance of ideals and values for the development and sustainment of a family business.

This study opens to a larger application of IBA also in contemporary businesses, as a tool to foster and disseminate a more ethical form of accountability and to a further extent support the construction of a more ethical society.

This paper connects the newly developed IBA framework, conceived for family businesses, to a management history perspective showing its potential for the intergenerational transmission of business culture.