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This study aims to assess international customers’ experiences in the leading hotels of the iconic city of Shanghai.

Leximancer, a qualitative analysis software program, was used to examine over 2,000 reviews appraising Shanghai’s superior hotels. The reviews were posted on Agoda.com.

Overall, the international tourists were actually quite satisfied with the superior Shanghai hotels. This study highlighted the continuing importance of the attentive and professional “staff”, physical attributes of the “hotel”, comfort of the “room”, “location”, proximity to a “shopping” area and co-creation possibilities to deliver some “beautiful” experiences. Segments of the market based on tourists’ origins, travel style and hotel management styles emphasized different expressive and instrumental features. Some strong commonalities were identified. The most satisfied customers, no matter what their backgrounds, were those who were more impressed with the expressive and intangible elements in the hotel, especially their interaction with and the service qualities of the hotels’ professional and attentive staff.

The work offers a potential range of insights and emphases for individual properties in Shanghai and other locations to help market and co-create experiences in their properties in distinctive ways.

The work is framed within the wider theoretical concerns of extending the meaning of co-creation in the experience economy. The work argues that co-creation is not limited to the on-site experience but rather that post-visit appraisals through user-generated contents constitute an extended form of interaction which may assist in understanding the full trajectory of the hotel experience.

Creating an extraordinary and memorable customer experience is the goal of every company seeking to be a market leader. This amplifies the need for customer experience management (CEM), particularly in customer-centric industries. Despite the indispensable importance of CEM, studies conducted within this area have been scattered and no agreement has been reached upon its stages. Therefore, this paper aims to identify the main stages and steps for effective and efficient CEM in the hotel industry.

Considering the variety of approaches in the literature and also the need to explain CEM stages in the hotel industry, a systematic literature review (SLR) has been picked as the first research methodology. It entailed a systematic review of 116 academic and professional studies. Then, the framework was completed by interviewing 19 experts.

With SLR and complementary interviews, this study obtains a four-stage framework for CEM in the hotel industry, each comprising necessary steps. These four stages are customer identification, customer experience design, customer experience implementation and customer experience measurement, which are all executed through organizational factors such as culture, structure, leadership, human resources and technology.

This study identifies CEM stages in the hotel industry via SLR and interviews. Due to dispersion in customer experience studies, the need for research on CEM in another service- and customer-based industries is apparent.

The suggested framework can help hotel managers enhance the management of their customers’ experience and deliver a superior and memorable experience.

The current study aims to add value to the literature by presenting a framework of CEM in the hotel industry. Through a systematic literature review and interviewing experts, a framework of CEM stages and steps was identified. The proposed framework allows for improving future CEM studies.

Contemporary tourism product, in terms of its systemic understanding, consists of tangible and intangible elements. These two elements lead to the increase of tourist satisfaction in a way to provide tourism products and services that match tourist expectations. Finally, tourist satisfaction is considered as a key factor influencing repeat visit intention. In line with mentioned, this study aims to empirically test a model linking tangible and intangible elements, tourist satisfaction and revisit intention.

Using data from the Montenegrin survey called Guest Survey 2010, structural equations modelling has been used to determine the impact of tangible and intangible constructs on tourist satisfaction and tourist repeat visit intention in Montenegro.

Working on a sample of 740 tourists, the results reveal that both tangible and intangible elements improve tourist satisfaction that influences tourist repeat visit intention. Noteworthy, the findings indicate that intangible elements have a stronger impact on tourist satisfaction than tangible elements have.

Tangible and intangible elements as factors of satisfaction are analysed and evaluated so that they could be improved in a way that provides superior experience to tourists, which hopefully could result in repeat visitation that is considered as a tool for boosting destination competitiveness, thus indicating the need for the systemic approach to tourism management.

This paper extends earlier tourism research by empirically analysing separately both tangible and intangible elements and their association with repeat visitation that is mediated by the tourist satisfaction. Therefore, a more holistic approach relating the antecedents of tourist repeat visit intention is proposed.

This study aims to present a state-of-the art review on information and communication technology (ICT) research in hospitality and tourism published between 2014 and 2017.

A total of 288 full-length articles from eight top-tier hospitality and tourism journals were gathered by harnessing a systematic literature search approach. Subsequently, the authors used a qualitative content analysis to review, analyse and assign all included articles into a framework with six consumer-related and five supplier-related research streams.

In terms of volume (i.e. the amounts and ratios of ICT research in top-tier journals by publication year) and variety (i.e. the diversity of research topics), a significant progression of ICT research in hospitality and tourism is observed. However, some old and new knowledge gaps are still inadequately addressed, thus requiring scholars and practitioners to conduct additional research in the future.

The accumulation of knowledge and actionable clues in this study is expected to keep practitioners updated with the overwhelming volume of ICT research.

This study contributes to the literature by accelerating the accumulation of knowledge on research topics and setting forth an agenda for future research. The findings also complement prior literature reviews by providing an overview of how knowledge on ICT research in hospitality and tourism has progressed since 2014.

While quantitative survey design represents a default research method in the field of hospitality and tourism, qualitative approaches remain largely sidelined. This is particularly true for netnography, a novel method of scientific enquiry that targets the online interactions of various actors. The present chapter seeks to introduce the netnographic approach, outline its implementation in hospitality and tourism, as well as demarcate it from other methods, such as survey, text mining and content analysis. By giving an overview of recent studies employing netnography, the chapter demonstrates applied examples of ethnographic research online, presents a cross-cultural study on disappointing travel experiences and suggests further research avenues, such as cross-cultural investigation. It concludes by discussing strengths and weaknesses of the netnographic approach. The value of this chapter lies in its reflection of state-of-the-art research in hospitality and tourism based on netnography and the proposition of further directions of research.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in significant changes in tourists’ attitudes and behaviors mostly as a result of confinement-related problems. Although various studies have been conducted to analyze customers’ perceptions of service quality and satisfaction using a drop-off/pick-up method, the influence of COVID-19 on customers’ perceptions of service quality and satisfaction has not been examined using online reviews. It is critical to evaluate satisfaction aspects from user-generated content to ascertain their preferences for hotel services during the pandemic. This research aims to explore the viewpoint shared online by hotel tourists, as well as identify which service practice is associated with higher and lower satisfaction during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Capsule hotels are a revolutionary Japanese concept of lodging that dates back over four decades. On the other hand, capsule hotels are a relatively new concept for most travelers outside of Japan. Organizations within this target segment are starting to recognize the critical role that an excellent customer experience management (CEM) strategy offers in improving competitiveness and organizational success. Thus, this research provides scholastic insight into the framework of CEM by evaluating the user-generated content at capsule hotels.

This study inspected 1,304 online user-generated content from the top 10 capsule hotels from Booking.com. Leximancer 4.5 was deployed to analyze the data.

The analyses revealed nine key themes to CEM of capsule hotels which are “staff,” “hotel,” “area,” “location,” “bed,” “capsule,” “check-in,” “noisy” and “luggage”.

This research encourages hospitality and tourism executives to develop specific strategies for capsule hotels.

This research differs from previous writings in that it attempts to fill a gap in the research by offering insight into the issue in the low-budget hotel industry and by identifying key indicators that influence customer experience.

The paper aims to identify the emergent themes of hotel guests’ satisfaction, to compare the distribution of the attributes of the themes between Chinese and North American guests and to compare the importance of the themes for different satisfaction levels between Chinese and North American guests from a cross-cultural perspective.

By adopting Python (a computer language), the word-frequency method was used to identify emergent themes of hotel guests’ satisfaction. Topic modeling was adopted to compare the attributes distribution of each theme and the features of satisfaction between Chinese and North American guests.

First, three themes were identified including functionality, staff and price. Functionality can be further categorized into five subthemes, namely, room, travel, food, environment and hotel facility. Second, the distribution of the attributes of the themes between Chinese and North American guests was compared from a cross-cultural perspective. Chinese guests tend to mention both lifestyles- and social norms–related attributes and expect personalized service, while North American guests mainly prefer to describe lifestyle-related attributes and prefer standardized service. Third, the study compared the changing importance of the themes (functionality, staff and price) for different satisfaction levels between Chinese and North American guests. As the satisfaction level decreases, the importance of functionality decreases, that of staff increases and that of price remain stable for Chinese guests. In contrast, the importance of each theme has fluctuated mildly from the high to the low satisfaction level for North American guests.

Proposed managerial implications are to highlight lifestyle- and social norms-related attributes, as well as personalized service for Chinese guests. However, lifestyle-related attributes and standardized service should be facilitated for North American guests. Specific suggestions were made to help improve hotel performance such as the good performance of functional-related attributes, which could enhance satisfaction and better staff performance, which would reduce dissatisfaction.

By mining big data, this study investigated hotel guests’ satisfaction from a dynamic instead of a static perspective. This study provides some rare insights into differences in key attributes influencing satisfaction levels of Chinese versus North American guests staying in luxury hotels in China. This study also takes a novel approach to examine the dynamics of the importance of the various themes at different satisfaction levels, and contrast these dynamics between Chinese and North American guests. The findings offer valuable insight into market segmentation and management in the hospitality industry.

This study examines how domestic honeymoon destination quality contributes to achieving honeymooners' fantasy experience and how fantasy experience impacts honeymooners' revisit intention.

Using the convenience sampling technique, 202 self-administrated survey questionnaires were collected (184 considered useable) from domestic honeymooners who had experienced honeymoon trip. The analysis was performed by employing partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) using SmartPLS 4.0.

The findings indicate that honeymoon destination image strongly and significantly influenced honeymooners' fantasy experience, followed by honeymooners' privileges, service providers, social aspects and accommodation. At the same time, the dining experience and honeymoon expenses had no significant impact on the honeymooners' fantasy experience. Notably, honeymooners' fantasy experience also had a strong and significant effect on their revisit intention to honeymoon destination in the future.

This study has an important theoretical contribution, being the first to explore the post-consumption behavior, that is, fantasy experience and revisit intention of domestic honeymooners in tourism literature. The study also has important implications for tourism industry stakeholders, that is, government, tourism department and officials, honeymoon tour planners and hotel managers, to make honeymoon destinations more attractive and fascinating, especially among newlywed couples and the young generation of tourists.

This paper aims to understand how guests’ trip purpose and hotel star rating influence the effects of the value for money perceived at hotels and service quality on guest satisfaction and word of mouth (WOM) recommendation.

Using TripAdvisor, 25 Singaporean hotels were randomly selected for the study, which yielded hotel reviews from 2,040 respondents. Hierarchical and logistic regression analysis was conducted to investigate the relationships proposed in the study.

Results indicate significant differences between leisure and business guests’ perception of value for money and service quality at hotels with various star ratings. While perceived value for money and service quality were found as significant predictors for both leisure and business guests’ satisfaction and WOM, the effects were moderated by the hotel star rating. Despite the significant effect of hotel star rating on guest satisfaction, the study found no significant relationships between hotel star rating and WOM for leisure and business guests.

The findings suggest that managers in the hotel industry should understand the purpose of guests’ trip and offer services based on their expectations. As the star rating of a hotel creates certain expectations for both leisure and business guests, providing an appropriate level of services and assuring value for money in accordance with the hotel rating contributes to guest satisfaction and WOM recommendation.

This study contributes to the hospitality literature by investigating how hotel star rating moderates the relationship of value for money and service quality on leisure and business guests’ satisfaction and WOM recommendation.