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Taiwan’s hotel industry was adversely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to examine the effect of strategic choices by Taiwanese international tourist hotels before and during the pandemic environments.

A data envelopment analysis (DEA)-based Malmquist methodology is used in this study to provide a mechanism to assess Taiwanese hotel strategy performance. Changes in the productivity and performance of Taiwanese international tourist hotels were analyzed in the periods before and during the pandemic to uncover insights useful should a similar crisis occur in the future. Panel data were obtained from the annual report of international tourist hotels published by the Taiwan Tourism Bureau from 2017–2020. Two groups of hotels were analyzed in this study: city hotels and scenic hotels.

The findings of this study reveal that chain hotels tended to perform better than independent hotels in both city and scenic areas during the global pandemic. Specifically, the crisis caused a substantial decline in productivity and profitability for international tourist hotels in Taipei City during the COVID-19 period. Compared to city hotels, findings also indicate that most international tourist hotels in scenic areas were able to maintain better productivity, including larger-sized scenic hotels.

The DEA-based analysis provides unique and valuable insights for hotel firm leaders on how to better identify and make strategic choices when responding to future crises.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the messages delivered by transformational leaders to front‐line employees to build an organizational brand climate and encourage employees' branding behaviors, to attain better company performance within the Taiwanese hotel industry.

Survey data were obtained from 34 human resource managers and 326 customer contact employees working in Taiwanese hotels.

Transformational leadership was found to have both direct and indirect positive influences on the development of organizational brand climate and employees' branding behavior.

Results suggest that transformational leaders may facilitate employees' branding behaviors by developing an organizational brand climate to distinguish the organization from its competitors and develop long‐term customer relationships.

This study advances the knowledge of antecedents and outcomes of the organizational brand climate by applying a multilevel approach to reflect the hierarchical nature of brand distinctiveness within the Taiwanese hotel industry.

Purpose: This paper aims to review the effect of the 2003 SARS epidemic on tourism and to analyze the learning outcomes from this crisis critically. The study further proposes practical and strategic tips for airlines, hoteliers and destination marketers in the top Asian tourism market such as India, China, Singapore and Thailand if a similar crisis affects the region.

Study Design/Methodology/Approach: The study followed the qualitative approach for deriving the findings. The research reviewed past literature by using the Prisma method, which is an evidence-based minimum set of items, for reporting in systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The research summarized the previous literature on the SARS outbreak in 2003 and reviewed various practices for tourism industry sustainability.

Finding: The study provides the information of how the airlines, hoteliers and destination marketers tackled the SARS epidemic and proposes the integrated strategy for managing such crisis in future.

Originality/Value: This paper performed the systematic literature review of all the relevant researches related to the 2003 SARS outbreak and its effect on the tourism industry.

Implications: This paper suggests the strategies and practices based on past reviews and learnings from experiences which may be useful for the tourism stakeholders to tackle and minimize the effect of such crisis in future.

It is crucial for hospitality organisations to develop sustainable leadership by regularly re-evaluating the competencies and skills required by their senior managers and leaders. In the context of this strategic talent management imperative, this paper aims to identify and map competencies required for the pivotal position of a hotel general manager to develop a holistic and relevant leadership competency framework.

Through secondary research, this study undertakes a detailed literature review of competency and leadership studies in the context of the hospitality industry to distil the essential competencies and skills required by a general manager.

This study proposes a leadership competency model for hospitality organisations in the form of a 43-item competency framework for hotel general managers categorised into four broad dimensions – cognitive competencies (knowledge), functional competencies (skills), social competencies (attitudes and behaviours) and meta competencies (motives and traits).

The proposed competency model, once empirically tested for robustness, could serve as a blueprint for hospitality organisations to develop their own organisation-specific competency framework for senior leadership that could prove to be a keystone for integrated talent management practices. Further, educationists and trainers could use the findings of this study as inputs in designing curricula and pedagogical interventions to meet the industry’s future needs and expectations with regards to competencies of senior managers.

By aggregating competencies from earlier studies and synthesising and categorising them in accordance with a contemporary, hospitality industry-relevant typology, a comprehensive competency model specific for hotel general managers has been proposed.

This study aims to explore the high turnover intention issue in Taiwan’s tourist hotel industry. Due to a lack of empirical research regarding front-line employees’ psychological contract breach perceptions in tourism literature, this study develops an integrated model to examine the causal relationship among transformational leadership behaviors, leader–member exchange (LMX), psychological contract breach and turnover intentions.

Data from the 226 frontline employees in Taiwan’s tourist hotel industry were employed to examine the proposed hypotheses by using a series of structural equation modeling analyses.

Statistic results revealed that transformational leadership behaviors influence LMX and LMX in turn influences psychological contract breach, which consequently leads to lower turnover intention.

The results of this study suggest that hospitality organizations should recruit individuals who have the potential to exhibit transformational leadership skills, along with designing leadership training programs for middle- and high-level managers.

This study provides hospitality organization leaders with the necessary information to formulate a beneficial relationship with their front-line employees, which, in turn, weakens their perception of psychological contract breaches and reduces their willingness to leave the organization.

Marketing has always been recognised as an economic activity involving the exchange of goods and services. Only in recent years have socio‐cultural influences been identified as determinants of marketing behaviour, revealing marketing as a cultural as well as economic phenomenon. Nevertheless, the influence on business activity of cultural differences is obvious but not simple to analyse, describe or categorise. Therefore, the cultural aspect of marketing remains a weak and subsidiary element in the theoretical realm of hospitality management. It has been suggested that cultural differences are an important influence on the successful outcomes of business. This exploratory study examines the new approach to relationship marketing (RM) in the context of eastern culture, to uncover the context and construction of relationships in Chinese society. Traditional Chinese culture stresses the importance of human interaction. The essence of this interaction is kuan‐hsi (personal relationships) which goes far beyond the Western concept of networking as kuan‐hsi is entrenched into every aspect of Chinese society, influencing social, political and commercial relations. The nature of RM theory based on a cultural difference oriented perspective is examined, and the present practice of RM and its specific nature within a Chinese cultural context of hotel management in Taiwan evaluated.

In past literature, employee has been extensively utilized as input in most data envelopment analysis (DEA) studies, but different labor types are identically defined to be the same input factor without a specific assumption for their heterogeneity. The influence of manual and non-manual labor utilization on performance also has not been investigated in hotel efficiency analyses. The purpose of this study is to assess inefficiency indices derived from manual and non-manual labor, and analyze the influence of labor utilization on hotel’s operational efficiency.

Based on the different features of the two labor types, performance indicators are evaluated through the hybrid DEA model.

More than 32 per cent of tourist hotels are evaluated as efficient and more than half the hotels have an efficiency score lower than the average. The author evaluated the inefficiency caused by radial inputs that have a greater influence on efficiency. This finding indicates that most hotels are efficient in their utilization of non-manual labor. The investigation of external factors shows that excessive utilization of non-manual labor results in a slight influence on operational efficiency across many non-chain hotels. The author also found the efficiency of non-manual labor utilization to be lower at hotels located in resort areas.

This study used the hybrid DEA model, in which non-manual and manual labors are assumed as non-radial and radial inputs, respectively, to evaluate efficiency. Finding the significance of heterogeneous assumptions for manual and non-manual labor types is the main contribution to the theory of hotel efficiency measurement.

Using the Analytical Hierarchy Process, this study aims to identify organizational and market factors that prevent hoteliers from adopting greener management systems. This study first constructs a list of critical factors based on expert judgments reported in the literature and the responses from a select group of experienced managers. Then, the list is further refined by six hotel managers who consolidate the factors, which results in four categories explained by 20 items. Subsequently, this study draws from surveys on an expert panel consisting of 20 study subjects who are familiar with hotel operations. The survey results show that hoteliers’ abilities to create a greener image are the most important factor influencing the managers’ decisions to adopt environmentally friendly management schemes. Nevertheless, their motivation of adopting a green strategy seems to be associated with a marketing strategy, instead of generic environmental stewardship.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between clustering and hotel competitiveness in emerging economy destinations by analyzing potential mediation of the management innovations implemented.

This empirical study is based on hotel-level information from a survey including 131 hotels in 2014. Colombia was chosen as a representative of Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa (CIVETS) emerging destinations. The relationships were analyzed by structural modeling and partial least squares.

Clustering has a positive direct impact on hotel competitiveness and innovation, and there is a positive effect of innovation on competitiveness. Therefore, the link between clustering and competitiveness is partially mediated through implementation of management innovations.

Hotels should actively participate in agglomerated destinations and build relationships with established firms by clustering. Interaction with related firms and implementation of management innovations will lead to increased levels of economic competitiveness. Public policymakers should foster collaborative strategic networking in the hospitality industry of emerging economy destinations.

This paper focused on separating the direct and indirect effects of clustering on hotel competitiveness. Implementation of management innovations was considered as an outcome derived from clustering in emerging tourist destinations, using the example of Colombia. Clustering stimulates and eases management innovations within the location, and that combination reinforces the role that cooperating while competing plays in hotel competitiveness for destinations with lagging innovation.

This study aims to determine essential attributes of sustainable service innovation (SSI) in the Taiwan hospitality industry.

By combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies while considering perspectives on sustainable management and service innovation, the present study extends the related literature on SSI and presents a new framework. The decision-making trail and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) analytical approaches are used to identify relations between dimensions and their causality attributes.

The findings of the DEMATEL result indicate that innovation diffusion has direct and indirect effects on dimensions of sustainable innovation and on organizational factors. Furthermore, sustainable innovation emerged as the most important attribute while the analytic network process analysis was used.

The critical dimensions identified in this study may serve as guidelines that hospitality practitioners or hotel managers may use when engaging in SSI.

Sustainability management is ranked the most important criterion of sustainable practice, which indicates that considerations of sustainability are necessary when hospitality managers wish to carry out a sustainability project in an organization. Furthermore, organizational capabilities were ranked the most important criteria among all organizational factors. This finding implies that the first step involves establishing a shared vision.

The current study integrates and applies Rogers’ (2003) diffusion of innovations theory (DIT) to identify how to facilitate sustainability through service innovation. In so doing, this study can add to our knowledge in the hotel industry by using the DIT.