Search results

This paper attempts to identify emerging themes that focus on customer experience of culinary tourism of international tourists who opted for food tours in Delhi.

The paper uses a multi-method approach for data collection. A thorough review of literature was conducted followed by gaining insights from the industry experts for the themes and a tentative thematic table was established. Thereafter, secondary data comprising 1,744 customer reviews from world’s leading travel website – Tripadvisor.com was analysed using thematic analysis. Customer’s real-time feedback and industry insights were paired together to gather meaningful and practical insights on customer experiences of food tours in Delhi.

Culinary tourism of Delhi is facing challenge in the areas of infrastructure, hygiene and certain preconceived notions related to brand perception of Indian cuisines. The findings of the study allude that the food tour agencies must be professional with all certifications and attention must be paid to location of food tastings, as it become the representation of Indian food worldwide. The findings also indicate customization is the key to positive customer experience, thereby requiring culinary professionals to understand the customer choices and personalize the food tours accordingly. Online reputation management is another key area requiring attention as electronic word of mouth plays a major role in the hospitality industry.

Although this study corroborates valuable academic findings and practical insights, it has few limitations that can be further investigated in the future. A quantitative study can be conducted to provide deeper insights into the factors of a culinary tour resulting in positive customer experience. Secondly, this study focuses on customer experience of food tours which is one of the forms of Culinary tourism, another elaborate study can be conducted incorporating other methods of culinary tourism such as cooking classes, food festivals, events etc. and delving into insights of customer experience and challenges in those practices.

Themes ascertained in this research paper provide deeper and worthy insights to all the stakeholders which would help them use their tourism resources in best optimal manner. Findings of the study would be valuable to culinary organizations, tourism department and other researchers working in the area of culinary tourism. Also, this study can be quite valuable for the academic researchers. Suggestions of the study will help the government, culinary organizations and other stakeholders to enhance culinary tourist experiences of Delhi.

The study is original and highly appropriate to all the stakeholders to formulate suitable strategic framework to improve customer experience in the field of culinary tourism. Using real customer experiences as data and choosing thematic analysis as a method of analysis further enhance the worth of study by opening the area for further exploration.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the key factors influencing mobile shopping adoption intention and actual usage in the backdrop of the moderating effect of gender and age.

The study identifies eight independent variables including two relatively new variables, i.e. perceived regulatory support (PRS) and perceived benefits, and proposes an integrated framework to understand mobile shopping behavior. A total of 304 mobile device users were surveyed using a comprehensive questionnaire. The collected data were utilized to analyze the hypothesized relationships through structural equation modeling.

The results indicated that all the factors considered in the framework were significant in predicting mobile shopping behavioral intention (BI) except for PRS. Demographic variables such as age and gender moderate the effect of factors such as perceived critical mass, personal innovativeness and hedonic motivation on mobile shopping BI.

The small sample sizes and a possibility to include new variables other than consumer-centric factors are some of the limitations of this study.

The findings of this paper are of significant use for mobile shopping app developers, mobile payment gateway providers and other institutions involved in facilitation and provision of such mobile shopping services to develop suitable strategies to encourage adoption of mobile devices as a medium of online shopping.

The study is first of its kind in India and integrates variables from different areas of technology adoption along with two new variables, i.e PRS and perceived benefits to understand mobile shopping behavior.

Despite the severe impact of the COVID-19, Maldives was one of the top destinations which witnessed decent tourist arrival amid the pandemic. This study aims to analyze luxury hospitality experiences of guests amid COVID-19 pandemic.

This study is exploratory in nature. This study analyses 4,302 real-time customer reviews using sentiment and thematic analysis with the help of NVIVO 12 plus and Leximancer.

The findings suggest travel products as well as services associated with luxury resorts needs to be revisited. Staff needs to be more professional and must be proactive while redesigning services specially in situations like pandemic. While redesigning services in situations like pandemic, staff needs to be proactive, professional and must follow all protocols. Major negative experiences included long waiting time to avail frill services, privacy intrusion by bloggers and influencers, service quality issues. We recommend enhancing service quality followed by investing more in training and development, increasing the number of foreign languages spoken by staff and disseminating localized culinary experiences will enhance the experience quality with guests.

This study has several limitations: first, this study limited itself to 15 luxury resorts of Maldives, which may not serve as a true representation of all luxury resorts of Maldives. The next limitation of this study is that the authors have collected customer reviews from TripAdvisor only, and the reviews were only in English language.

The findings of the research can be beneficial for the policymakers, hospitality practitioners and academicians who study luxury tourism industry to carve appropriate strategies for enhancing the customers’ luxury experience like leveraging customization in all areas and enhancing service quality, food quality, training and development of employees.

Maldives has become one of the most expensive traveler destinations and is home to world’s most expensive resorts. This study is original in nature and has a forward-looking approach which studies the disruptive effect of pandemic, intangible nature of luxury as a concept can be used by hospitality industry to redesign the luxury customer experience which can improve marketing strategies aiming to potentiate this niche. In addition, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study will be the first one to capture the real customer experiences of luxury resorts of Maldives.

Social networking sites (SNSs), especially Facebook, have made deep inroads in the teaching-learning process worldwide. The purpose of this paper is to understand the key factors which influence a students’ intention to use Facebook for academic usage.

A web-based questionnaire survey was administered among 218 students enrolled in higher education programme of universities/institutions in National Capital Territory of Delhi. The relationship among the proposed variable were tested through structural equation modelling and neural network (NN) approach. SEM is used to identify and validate the factors significant to influence the intention to use Facebook among students. To further find which of the factors are more influential, factors NN with tenfold cross-validation was used to identify the factors which are more influential among the ones proposed in this study.

The results suggested that the proposed framework has a good fit and the five relationships hypothesized were found to be significant; thus, establishing that the antecedent factors have a positive influence on the intention of users (student) to actively use Facebook as an academic medium for collaborative learning.

This study establishes that the antecedent factors identified in the course of this study have a positive influence on the intention to use Facebook for higher academics and collaborative learning by the students. This paper suggests and supports the adoption and usage of Facebook as a learning tool for higher academics.

This paper aims to understand the factors that affect consumers’ adoption of mobile wallet as an alternative method of making payments to purchase goods and services.

A survey of over 210 mobile phone consumers was made. The study added two additional constructs – perceived regulatory support (PRS) and promotional benefits (PBs) – and proposed an integrated approach to understanding mobile wallet adoption. The hypothesized relationships were analysed via structural equation modelling.

The results indicated performance expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, perceived risk, perceived value, PRS, as well as PBs, to be significant factors in predicting behavioural intentions to adopt mobile wallet solutions. The impact of effort expectancy was found to be statistically insignificant.

The small sample size and the possibility of including new variables such as personal innovativeness, which have not been addressed here, are some of the limitations of this study.

The findings of this paper would be useful for mobile wallet service providers, mobile app writers and institutions involved in the facilitation and regulation of such services to develop suitable strategic frameworks to encourage the adoption of mobile wallets.

The study is the first of its kind in India and has added a new dimension in the assessment of technology adoption by proposing two new variables.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the customer attitude and perception towards the online brand communities (OBCs) and purchase intention (PI). The paper also analyses the moderating effects of age, income and internet usage on the relationship among the proposed variables.

The study employed a multi-analytical approach through the use of structural equation modelling and neural networks to test the proposed framework. The information was obtained from 236 respondents using a web-based questionnaire survey. Further, moderation analysis, with age, annual family income and weekly internet usage as moderating variables, was conducted on the structural model.

The results of the analysis demonstrate that the multi-group moderating effect for different groups within age, income and internet usage have significant differences for the relationships between the independent variables content perception, perceived usefulness, critical mass, brand attachment and attitude towards brand and the dependent variable, PI.

The study is one of its kind to understand and analyse the role of moderating variables (age, income and internet usage) on OBC-induced PI.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the influence of online brand communities on customers’ attitude, who engage with such communities, and their further influence on purchase intention (PI).

A conceptual framework was developed by reviewing literature and then validating it in the context of customers, engaged with Facebook brand pages. The framework empirically examined the influence of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, social influence and attachment with brand (AWB) on attitude towards brand and PI; alongside the influence of AWB on PI, from 206 responses gathered from an online survey administered to Facebook users. The framework was validated by using structural equation modelling.

The results demonstrate that the proposed framework was found to have a good fit, and seven of eight relationships hypothesized were found to be significant. The study establishes that the online brand communities have an impact on the customers’ attitude, which in turn has an influence on customers’ intention to purchase.

This study is first of its kind to analyse the engagement on Facebook online brand communities and the influence they have on the customers’ attitude towards a brand which further develops the PI of the customer. The paper suggests and supports the adoption and usage of online brand communities as a part marketing and communication strategy.

The growing use of internet-based learning (IBL) platforms in institutions of higher education is producing profound changes in the traditional teaching learning process worldwide. This paper aims to identify and understand the ways in which higher education institutions draw benefits by the use of such means, synthesizing the literature research.

The study synthesized the literature research by using a mixed method approach in which both Web of Science (WoS) and bibliographic techniques were used to retrieve the relevant data base.

The comprehensive review of the literature suggests that communication technology (CT), massive open online courseware (MOOCs), social networking sites (SNSs), blogs, real simple syndication (RSS) and YouTube are creating new possibilities and avenues of collaborative learning by transforming the traditional class and teacher-centric system.

Multiplicity of the IBL platforms and rapid technological obsolesce are some of the limitations of this paper.

The findings of this study are highly useful in developing a strategic framework to accelerate the integration of IBL platforms to make teaching learning process more interactive and informative.

This study aims to add to the current understanding of mediation and moderation processes through which employee career orientation (CO) is linked with organizational citizenship behavior (OCB).

Data were collected from 214 employees working in Delhi and NCR of India. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used for testing moderated mediation and establishing linkages between CO, CMP and OCB. Drawing on the social exchange theory, our model posits that the effect of CO on the outcome variable OCB is mediated by career management practices (CMPs) and the CMP-mediated relationship between the two is moderated by the gender of employees.

Overall, data from 214 employees from service organizations in India support the model. This suggests that the enactment of OCB as a consequence of CO and OCB is largely dependent on the gender of employees. The relationship was observed in such a way that for women employees, CMP will have a stronger influence on the CO-OCB relationship. According to bootstrap results, upon the addition of CMP as a mediator, the main effect of CO on OCB among male employees was significant but dropped from the Beta value of 0.281 to 0.196. However, adding CMP as a mediator among women employees caused the CO-OCB relationship to become insignificant (Beta = 0.124; LLCI = 0.415; ULCI = −0.127; p = 0.420), highlighting that CMP would have a more substantial influence on the CO-OCB relationship.

This study explains the mediational role of CMP in the relationship between CO and OCB (explaining how the employees with new CO can trigger the role of CMP, and consequently, CMP can help them enact OCB) and how the gender of employees moderate the mediated impact of CMP in the relationship between CO and OCB (explaining how the mediated relationship varies across genders). The novelty of the study lies in exploring such a relationship that has not been studied so far.

The advent of mobile telephony devices with strong internet capabilities has laid the foundation for mobile commerce (m-commerce) services. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine predictors of m-commerce adoption using a modification of the widely used technology acceptance model and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model.

The data were collected from 213 respondents by means of an online survey. The data were analyzed through multi analytic approach by employing structural equation modeling (SEM) and neural network modeling.

The SEM results showed that variety of services, social influence, perceived usefulness, cost and perceived trust have significant influence on consumer’s intention to adopt m-commerce. The only exception was perceived ease of use which observed statistically insignificant influence on adoption of m-commerce. Furthermore, the results obtained from SEM were employed as input to the neural network model and results showed that perceived usefulness, perceived trust and variety of services as most important predictors in adoption of m-commerce.

The findings of this study give an insight of key determinants that are important to develop suitable strategic framework to enhance the use of m-commerce adoption. In addition, it also provides an opportunity to academicians and researchers to use the framework of this study for further research.

The study is among a very few studies which analyzed m-commerce adoption by applying a linear and non-linear approach. The study offers a multi-analytical model to understand and predict m-commerce adoption in the developing nation like India.