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The Indian hospitality and tourism industries, major economic growth drivers and employment generators, have been greatly affected by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In FY 2020, the Indian tourism sector created 39 million jobs and contributed nearly US$194.3bn, or 6.8%, to India’s gross domestic product. The purpose of this study is to focus on ranking 22 listed hotels and 9 listed travel agencies in India based on their performance across 14 selected financial parameters in both the pre-COVID-19 year ending in March 2019 and the post-COVID-19 year ending in March 2021 to understand how the pandemic affected their businesses.

This research proposes to analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the financial performance of 22 listed Indian hotels and 9 listed travel agencies evaluated over 14 financial parameters using a pipeline of two recently developed multicriteria decision-making techniques, method based on the removal effects of criteria (MEREC) and grey-based combined compromised solution (CoCoSo). First, the criteria weights are objectively determined using MEREC, and then the financial performances of the selected companies in both the hospitality and tourism industries are separately assessed using CoCoSo to get their overall performance score, based on which the companies are ranked in order of preference.

It was observed that Westlife Development, Lemon Tree Hotels, Indian Tourism Development Corporation, Royal Orchid and Country Club performed significantly poorer than their peers in the aftermath of the pandemic, whereas EIH, Advani Hotels and Resorts and TGB Banquets performed relatively better. Travel agencies Easy Trip and International Travel House performed particularly poorly because of the pandemic, but VMV Holidays performed relatively better in FY 2021.

The findings of the analysis will aid portfolio construction, corporate investment decisions, competition research, government policymaking and industrial analysis.

The proposed model is novel because it fills the research gap in the application of the integrated MEREC–CoCoSo method to study the impact of COVID-19 on the hospitality and tourism sectors in India.

The authors investigated the role of cultural (i.e. traditional and religious) values in predicting the relationships between the attitudes toward the environment and slow fashion and the purchase intention for sustainable apparel.

An online survey was conducted in Amazon Mechanical Turk with the millennials of the US (n = 317). The data were analyzed through structural equation modeling (SEM).

The connection with indigenous cultural values in terms of the (1) traditional values positively influenced attitudes toward the environment and slow fashion; (2) religious values positively influenced attitude toward slow fashion but did not influence attitude toward the environment. (3) Both attitudes towards environment and slow fashion positively influenced purchase intention for sustainable apparel. (4) The connection with cultural values did not influence purchase intention toward sustainable apparel directly; however, (5) attitude toward slow fashion mediated the relationship between connection with cultural values and purchase intention for sustainable apparel both in terms of traditional and religious values, and (6) attitude toward the environment mediated the relationship between connection with traditional values and purchase intention for sustainable apparel.

Instead of focusing only on pro-environmental messages, marketers should use culture-specific cues to evoke favorable attitudinal and behavioral responses toward sustainable apparel.

Advertisement cues of sustainable apparel imbuing the target market's cultural values could help in protecting culturally significant elements of nature in the long-term by evoking positive attitudes toward the environment and slow fashion and encouraging purchase intention for sustainable apparel in the short-term.

The authors indicated the importance of indigenous cultural values in shaping favorable attitudes toward the environment and slow fashion and purchase intention for sustainable apparel.