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The purpose of this paper is to perform an analysis of how pets in general and dogs in particular condition the planning and realisation of people’s trips. Similarly, the motivations that lead families to travel with their pets in Spain are analysed.

The methodology used in this research consisted of carrying out fieldwork based on surveys of 1,696 dog owners in Spain. The data analysis was carried out using a Partial Least Squares methodology (PLS-SEM) to test the relationship of the families with their pets, the motivations they have for travelling with their pets and the assessment of the destination by both the family and the pet itself.

The main results of this research focus on analysing how and when a family plans a trip with their pet, except for their second home, there are several motivations for both families themselves and their pets, which condition this trip and that must be considered by tourist destinations. Similarly, it is also concluded that the motivations are closely related to the attachment that the family has to the pet.

The originality of this research focuses on including the relationship of the family with their dog and the adequacy of the destination to the needs of their pet as motivation to make a certain trip or choose a certain destination.

This study aims to explore the underlying mechanism of human–pet interaction in pet tourism affecting tourism experiences and daily lives of tourists. The research investigates the moderating role of pet attachment in this mechanism as well.

Based on the social exchange theory and value co-creation theory, this research develops and empirically tests a theoretical framework of human–pet interaction. Data were collected through an online survey of US tourists who have pet travel experiences. The data were analyzed by partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The results show that emotional value partially mediated the relationship between human–pet interaction and travel intention/quality of life, while social value partially mediated the relationship between human–pet interaction and quality of life. The findings of multi-group analysis suggest that the travel experience of tourists with low (vs high) levels of pet attachment is strengthened by human–pet interaction, leading to favorable outcomes.

This study enriches the empirical evidence on pet tourism experience. This study extends the existing literature by demonstrating the heterogeneity of the relationship between human–pet interaction, co-creation value, quality of life and travel intention of tourists with different pet attachment levels.

本研究旨在探索宠物旅游中人与宠物互动影响游客旅游体验和日常生活的潜在机制。本研究还考察了宠物依恋在这一机制中的调节作用。

基于社会交换理论和价值共创理论, 本研究开发并实证检验了人-宠物互动的理论框架。通过对有宠物旅游经历的美国游客进行在线调查收集数据。采用偏最小二乘法-结构方程模型(PLS-SEM)对数据进行分析。

情感价值部分中介了人宠互动与旅游意向/生活质量的关系, 社交价值部分中介了人宠互动与生活质量的关系。多群组分析的结果表明, 低(vs .高)宠物依恋水平的游客的旅游体验因人-宠物互动而得到加强, 从而导致良好的结果。

本研究丰富了宠物旅游体验的实证证据。本研究通过论证具有不同宠物依恋水平游客的人-宠互动、共创价值、生活质量和旅游意向之间关系的异质性, 拓展了现有文献。

El objetivo de este estudio es explorar el mecanismo subyacente de la interacción humano-mascota en el turismo con mascotas que afecta a las experiencias turísticas y a la vida cotidiana de los turistas. El estudio también examina el papel moderador del apego a las mascotas en este mecanismo.

Basada en la teoría del intercambio social y la teoría de la cocreación de valor, esta Investigación desarrolla y prueba empíricamente un marco teórico de la interacción entre humanos y mascotas. Los datos se recopilaron a través de una encuesta en línea a turistas estadounidenses que han tenido experiencias de viaje con mascotas. Los datos fueron analizados mediante un modelo de ecuaciones estructurales basado en mínimos cuadrados parciales (PLS-SEM).

Los resultados muestran que el valor emocional medió parcialmente la relación entre la interacción humano-mascota y la intención de viajar/calidad de vida, mientras que el valor social medió parcialmente la relación entre la interacción humano-mascota y la calidad de vida. Los resultados del análisis multigrupo sugieren que la experiencia de viaje de los turistas con niveles bajos (vs altos) de apego a las mascotas se ve reforzada por la interacción humano-mascota, lo que conduce a resultados favorables.

Este estudio enriquece la evidencia empírica sobre la experiencia del turismo con mascotas. Este estudio amplía la literatura existente al demostrar la heterogeneidad de la relación entre la interacción humano-mascota, el valor de cocreación, la calidad de vida y la intención de viaje de turistas con diferentes niveles de apego a las mascotas.

Chewy, Inc. is a direct-to-consumer seller of pet food and supplies. Their approach involves a deep understanding of pet owners’ needs and behaviors to provide personalized product recommendations and exceptional customer service. This case study aims to describe Chewy’s growth strategies and how the company can remain a market leader.

Using the customer value assessment tool, the authors examine Chewy’s value proposition, including service, quality, image and price strategies.

Chewy has built a loyal customer base that values the company’s commitment to their pets’ health and well-being. Future opportunities include focusing on pet wellness products and services, collaborating with veterinary providers in telemedicine and international expansion.

This work is largely conceptual and presents a descriptive case study which reviews Chewy’s marketing strategy based on industry research as well as a customer value assessment via the service-quality-image-price framework.

Corporate leaders must adapt to market change and create business strategies to deliver superior value for customers. This requires innovative products, services and processes. The strategic insights are applicable to retailers, service and technology firms and entrepreneurial companies seeking to scale their businesses.

Chewy’s highly competitive market includes Amazon, e-commerce pet supply companies and big-box pet stores. But it has dominated the online sector and has substantial growth prospects. This paper concludes with recommendations for management and questions for consideration.

At the end of the case discussion, students should be able to:▪ analyse and discuss networks as a form of social capital;▪ identify and discuss alternative growth strategies for an small, medium, micro enterprise (SMME) in the context of prevailing challenges;▪ use the six domains of the entrepreneurship ecosystem to identify and discuss factors that enhance and challenge a business with particular reference to an SMME; and▪ analyse and understand the key dimensions of entrepreneurial behaviour using the case protagonist as an example.

Nhlanhla Dlamini, the managing director of Maneli Pets based in Johannesburg, South Africa had opened an office in Cincinnati in the USA in July 2019 to take over the distribution and marketing of the company’s high-quality protein pet treats. Just over eight months later, the COVID-19 pandemic exploded across the world resulting in unprecedented disruption to people’s lives, world trade and the global economy.Now, in June 2022, Dlamini contemplated the successes and challenges he had experienced since starting Maneli Pets in 2016, not least of which was parting company with US-based Novel Dog LLC, which had previously marketed and distributed the pet treats. He had built an internationally accredited factory from scratch, produced pet products and a brand that was appealing to the competitive international market, and exported to 12 countries around the world. However, Dlamini had also faced the retrenchment of a large number of staff, the breakdown of the relationship with Novel Dog, the difficulties of setting up a distribution business in the USA along with overseeing the South African factory, and in September 2019, his co-founder, Sipha Ndawonde, had left Maneli Pets.Maneli Pets had served Dlamini’s philanthropic purpose of creating jobs and contributing to the growth of the South African economy. Despite the setback of parting ways with Novel Dog, he hoped to continue to create jobs and return to and exceed the staff numbers he had achieved by 2018, regardless of the hard work involved.In his dual position of managing director of Maneli Pets, based in Johannesburg, and sales director of the distribution and marketing arm, Nandi Pets Inc. in Cincinnati, Dlamini had a global view of the companies’ financials that he realised had been missing initially. Would the new structure of Maneli Pets he had created in 2019 in a pre-pandemic world see the company profitable by the end of 2022? What else could he do to take the company to the next level?

MBA, Masters in Management, Postgraduate Diploma in Business, Executive Education short courses.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.

Pet-friendly hotels are growing rapidly. The prevalence of pet adoption has largely resulted from the loneliness due to social distancing that happened during the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Many hotels around the world aim to become pet-friendly to satisfy the growing demand. Hoteliers believe that the popularity of pet-friendly hotels will continue, as pet owners often treat pets as their kids. This study aims to investigate how pet-friendly hotels need to design and manage pet-friendly services and policies.

Using grounded theory methodology, this research conducts interviews with 25 pet-friendly hotel managers from Hong Kong (HK). The study includes hotels from different hotel categories and classifications. It examines the conceptualization of pet-friendly service design, drawing on a service blueprint.

Building on the service marketing and service blueprint literature, this research provides a synthesis that reflects how pet-friendly hotels can serve both guests with and without pets. The findings reveal that pet-owner’s service expectations are formed on anthropomorphism, that is, an inclination of attributing human features to nonhuman entity. Hotel managers, and particular those who have pets personally understand better how pet-friendly service can be adapted to meet the expectations and requirements of pet owners while accommodating guests without pets. The market of pet-friendly hospitality is growing, with high profit potential from pet owners who are willing to spend generously.

Data were collected from selected pet-friendly hotels in HK through interviews with pet-friendly service providers. The research is qualitative and exploratory in nature. It aims to explore and examine the multilevel pet-friendly hospitality service design from a managerial perspective. This research enriches the literature on anthropomorphism theory, the design of pet-friendly services and the application of service blueprint.

The research offers explicit suggestions for the design of pet-friendly hospitality services. A pet-friendly hotel service blueprint is developed. This can help managers to develop essential pet-friendly policies and service collaborations between internal departments and with external specialist organizations, maximizing the value for all stakeholders.

The study explores a rapidly emerging market and scrutinizes its specific design requirements. It extends theoretical insights by enriching the anthropomorphism theory and broadening the conceptualizations of service blueprint based on anthropomorphism theory.

This study examined the wear comfort and thermal insulation properties of Al₂O₃/graphite particle-imbedded sheath/core and dispersed fabrics via a thermal manikin experiment.

Al₂O₃/graphite sheath/core and dispersed polyethylene terephthalate (PET) yarn (POY 120d/24f) were spun using a pilot melt bi-component conjugated spinning machine, which was texturized as 75d/24f on the belt-type texturing machine. The woven fabric specimens were made using nylon 70d/34f in the warp with three types of weft yarn: Al₂O₃/graphite sheath/core, dispersed and regular PET yarns. Thermal insulation properties were measured and compared in terms of the heat retention rate (I) by KES-F7 apparatus and the maximum surface temperature by light heat emission equipment, as verified by the emissivity of various fabric specimens by far-infrared ray experiment. In addition, this study examined the thermal insulation (Clo value) characteristics of the clothes made of Al₂O₃/graphite sheath/core and dispersed fabrics using a thermal manikin apparatus, which were compared with the properties of regular PET clothing.

The thermal insulation of the dispersed fabric was superior to that of the sheath/core fabric, which was tentatively attributed to the higher emissivity of the dispersed yarn with Al₂O₃/graphite particles distributed over the whole yarn cross-section than that from the core of the sheath/core yarn. This result for the clothing measured using a thermal manikin was consistent with the higher heat retention rate (I) and the maximum surface temperature of the dispersed fabric than that of the sheath/core fabric. In addition, the thermal insulation of the dispersed and sheath/core fabrics was superior to that of the regular PET fabric, which revealed that the Al₂O₃/graphite particles imbedded in the dispersed and sheath/core yarns exerted a greater effect on the heat storage and release characteristics compared to that of the TiO₂ particles in regular PET yarn. The Clo values of the dispersed and sheath/core fabrics under the light-on condition were much higher than those under the light-off condition, and furthermore, the difference of the Clo value between the sheath/core and regular PET fabrics under light-on condition was approximately 1.7 times greater than that under the light-off condition. These results revealed that the far-infrared rays emitted from the Al₂O₃/graphite particles imbedded in the sheath/core and dispersed yarns enhance the heat storage and release characteristics from the fabric under the light-on condition, i.e. under the sunlight.

The previously examined thermal wear comfort properties of the various inorganic particle-imbedded fabrics were measured with the fabric state, not clothing, which could not provide objective data related to the actual wearing performance of clothing.

This paper aims to propose a framework for how privacy-preserving technologies (PETs) create business value for organizations. The framework was developed by examining the literature on privacy and information technology’s impact (symbolic and function). The authors evaluate the framework’s applicability using multiparty computation (MPC) as an instance of PETs, with expert interviews in the telecommunication industry.

In an illustrative case of four telecommunication companies, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with experts and used MPC as an instance of PET.

The evaluation of the framework indicates that PETs create business value for organizations: enhancing customer interactions, sales, personalized services, predicting market trends and collaboration among organizations. The findings show that business value of PETs is mainly driven by consumers and organizations willing to share data and collaborate.

This study was limited to the telecom sector and focused on MPC as an instance of PET. Further studies should be conducted to explore the benefits of other PETs and MPC. Future research could find out if this framework is also helpful for implementing other PETs or even other types of technology. The authors’ framework provides factors that future studies can use to quantify the impact of PETs. The authors hope that this framework provides an overarching reference for organizations considering the adoption of PETs.

The authors’ findings inform managers in exploring the business value of PETs for organizations. This study also provides insights into which costs and risks to consider when implementing PETs.

This study is one of the few to propose a framework on how PETs create business value for organizations. Future research can use factors in the framework (e.g. customer interactions, sales, personalized services and market trend prediction) to conduct a quantitative study on PETs’ business value. Managers adopting PETs can use the framework to identify areas where PETs impact their organization.

Human–animal interactions (HAIs) have been found to have an extensive and significant influence on individuals' well-being and health-related outcomes. However, there are few studies that examine this influence on work-related contexts, such as teleworking. In this study, the author relied on the affective events theory to examine the effect of daily HAI on employees’ daily work engagement and the underlying mechanisms (daily affect ratio and state mindfulness), by resorting to a daily diary study.

To test the hypotheses, the author collected daily data during five consecutive working days with pet owners (N = 400 × 5 = 2,000).

Multilevel results showed that interacting with pets during the working day was positively associated with daily work engagement, but this positive relationship was stronger for individuals with lower levels of mindfulness. Further analyses showed that the daily affect ratio mediated the moderating effect of mindfulness on the relationship between daily interactions with pets and daily work engagement.

These findings provide strong support for the proposed mediated moderation model; indeed, positive affect and mindfulness help to explain the positive effect of HAIs on work engagement. Hence, managers may consider the adoption of teleworking, even in a hybrid format for those workers who own pets, because interacting with pets may be a strategy to make them feel more positive and, in turn, more enthusiastic, dedicated and absorbed in their work.

This study is one of the first studies to demonstrate the importance of adopting pet-friendly practices, such as allowing pet owners to telework, as a way to promote daily work engagement.

Inclusion of animals in emergency contingency planning is not yet common practice in many countries. The purpose of this paper is to assess the need for and viability of such inclusion in Latin America.

The study surveyed 1,882 pet owners in urban areas in Colombia, Costa Rica and Mexico to evaluate perceptions of pet owners with regard to their animals in emergencies.

Overall 74.5 percent (confidence interval 72.5‐76.5) said they would take their animals if evacuated. Only 16 percent (14.5‐17.8) would leave their animals behind. Regular vaccination was carried out by 70.5 percent of owners (68.0‐72.5): from 63.6 percent (60.8‐66.2 percent) in Mexico to 87.5 percent (84.3‐90.0) in Colombia. People in lower socio‐economic levels were less likely to take animals to the vet, or to vaccinate or identify them, and more likely to leave their animal behind during evacuation.

Results indicate both the need and the likely success of an animal contingency planning process in urban areas of Latin America.

This is the first survey of its kind concerning disaster preparedness for pets in developing countries, and counters the common perception that in such countries owners are less attached to their pets and that inclusion of animals in emergency contingency planning is not important.

The purpose of this paper is to review the vulnerability and challenges faced by Canadian pet owners in times of disaster and evaluate emergency preparedness measures put in place to address the identified issues.

Emergency preparedness strategies from different countries were identified to weigh against Canada’s state of preparedness.

Pet/animal owners without emergency plans for their animals are more vulnerable than non-pet owners when they need to flee from disaster; and as Canada faces disaster challenges, proactive preparedness in emergency demands awareness, cooperation and commitment from everyone –governments, corporations, community groups and individuals become a necessity.

Based on the identified need, the paper reviews strategies that engages pet owners in preparing for emergency in order to keep individuals and their communities safe. This paper will be beneficial to policy makers, researchers, health educators, scholars and emergency management professionals that read the journal.