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Following the increasing trend of artificial intelligence (AI) research in hospitality literature, this critical reflection paper aims to identify AI-assisted mindfulness as a critical yet under-investigated issue and to contribute feasible directions for future research.

The authors first conceptualize a framework explaining the effects of mindfulness design in AI interventions on improving human mindfulness. The authors then identify opportunities for interventions in AI-assisted mindfulness for the tourism, hospitality and events industries. Finally, the authors propose potential themes for AI-assisted mindfulness research.

This study contributes three major conceptual works. First, we conceptualize a framework of AI-assisted mindfulness, showcasing that the scope of AI-assisted mindfulness spans from AI interventions to state mindfulness and then to trait mindfulness. Second, the authors offer two approaches to strategic thinking, one from mindfulness (i.e. mindfulness-focused niche markets and activities) and one from AI applications (i.e. AI-facilitated devices and platforms), to identify opportunities for AI-assisted mindfulness interventions. Third, for both management- and marketing-oriented AI-assisted mindfulness research, the authors propose 18 themes.

This critical reflection paper offers directions for future knowledge creation in AI-assisted mindfulness in the tourism, hospitality and events industries.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this critical reflection paper serves as the first in hospitality and tourism literature to systematically propose the research issue of AI-assisted mindfulness, offering directions and themes for future research.

This paper examines the changes in Macao's gaming public policy following the 2022 revision of the gaming law. The revision introduces more regulations on the gaming industry and highlights the gaming industry's contribution to economic diversification, anti-money laundering and national security. The paper analyzes the economic, cultural and political factors that motivated these changes and evaluates the effectiveness of the new gaming public policy.

This paper compares the different versions of Macao's gaming laws and the gaming laws of Nevada and New Jersey, using a qualitative approach to interpret the meanings behind the law text.

The paper reveals that Macao's gaming public policy has changed significantly. The revised policy focuses more on economic diversification than the growth of the gaming industry and imposes more responsibilities on the gaming operators. It predicts that Macao's gaming industry will face more difficulties in increasing its market share in the next decade.

The findings of this paper can help the Macao government assess its gaming public policy and other governments learn from the complex situation when developing their public policies.

The findings of this paper can enhance the understanding of Macao's gaming laws and the reality of Macao's gaming industry.

This paper is the first in academia to address Macao's new public policy toward gaming.

Drawing on person–environment fit theory, this study aims to investigate how the relationships between service task types (i.e. utilitarian and hedonic service tasks) and perceived authenticity (i.e. service and brand authenticity) differ under different conditions of service providers (human employee vs service robot). This study further examines whether customers’ stereotypes toward service robots (competence vs warmth) moderate the relationship between service types and perceived authenticity.

Using a 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design, Study 1 examines a casual restaurant, whereas Study 2 assesses a theme park restaurant. Analysis of covariance and PROCESS are used to analyze the data.

Both studies reveal that human service providers in hedonic services positively affect service and brand authenticity more than robotic employees. Additionally, the robot competence stereotype moderates the relationship between hedonic services, service and brand authenticity, whereas the robot warmth stereotype moderates the relationship between hedonic services and brand authenticity in Study 2.

Restaurant managers need to understand which functions and types of service outlets are best suited for service robots in different service contexts. Robot–environment fit should be considered when developers design and managers select robots for their restaurants.

This study blazes a new theoretical trail of service robot research to systematically propose customer experiences with different service types by drawing upon person–environment fit theory and examining the moderating role of customers’ stereotypes toward service robots.

This study aims to progress scholarly understanding of the staycation phenomenon by examining customer segments and documenting local customers’ attribute preferences.

A stated choice experiment is used to examine customer preferences for staycation package attributes. Latent class discrete choice modeling is deployed to classify customers into market segments based on their preferences. The profile of each segment is enhanced by documenting customer characteristics and consumption styles.

Six prominent market segments are identified using a combination of sociodemographics, consumption styles and staycation attribute preferences. The findings draw on consumer experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic to generate theoretical insights into preferred staycation packages. Empirically, the estimation results from the research framework and choice experimental method demonstrate that staycation market segments exhibit distinct preference structures.

Practitioners and policymakers can incorporate the findings of this study in designing and/or assessing staycation packages. This can ensure differentiated products for defined segments that resonate within local communities through positive word of mouth, thus offering prospective spillovers to visiting friends and relatives.

This is a pioneering study on preference heterogeneity from the customer perspective, with a focus on staycation markets. The findings can encourage and assist hotel sector leaders to capitalize on local market developments to achieve a more resilient hospitality business model.

With its potential to significantly improve the tourism sector, augmented reality (AR), an emerging technology, is a growing force in the field. It has attracted significant academic attention and expanded publishing options over the past 20 years. However, so far, no review has provided a comprehensive overview of AR-related research in tourism. This work uses the VOS Viewer and Bibliometrix R-package software to present a bibliometric review of the scientific literature in the area of AR-related tourism research in order to fill this gap.

The theme of AR in tourism was searched in the Scopus database. The original search yielded 327 papers in total, which were then filtered based on the parameters. A total of 190 relevant documents were generated by the refining process. For the publications pertaining to AR in tourism, the most cited papers, prominent authors, productive journals and countries, co-authorship among countries, trending topics, thematic map, co-occurrence analysis of keywords and bibliographic coupling of documents were all looked into.

This report shows a recent rise in research on AR in the tourism industry. The top 10 studies in the topic had a combined total of 1749 citations, while the authors found three papers with more than 200 Scopus citations. Till the date of extraction, 555 writers have contributed to the field of AR in tourism, with Tom Dieck M.C., Chung N. and Jung T. receiving the most citations. According to co-authorship analysis, the UK collaborates with other countries the most. Thematic map has thrown insight into the niche themes and emerging themes in the field. Coupling analysis has revealed four major research streams in the field of AR in tourism.

This study can be considered as a first study to utilize a bibliometric method to address this research gap, identifying the top documents, journals and, most importantly, the future research areas identified through the thematic map analysis of keywords and bibliographic coupling.

Historical growth within this discipline was made clear by an in-depth analysis of the studied themes in this area. Hence, the discovery of relatively new subjects offers scholars the chance to plan their research in this area and thereby enhance the literature. The study is also beneficial for practitioners in the tourism industry.

This work examined previously published publications on AR in tourism using a bibliometric analytic technique. Additionally, it contributes to the current knowledge accumulation in learning about the applicability of AR in tourism and enlightens tourism scholars on the structure of the field.

The COVID-19 lockdown severely impacted organizations in the cultural and tourist business as their products all of a sudden “disappeared”. This study aims to explore if and how the unexpected and disruptive nature of the pandemic accelerated the development of new communication strategies on their social media.

The study draws on data from 24 midsize cultural institutions and tourist attractions in Denmark over the first two months of the lockdown in 2020. Approximately 900 posts on Facebook were collected and analyzed through the netnographic method. The analysis followed a two-layered qualitative approach. First, open coding to identify typologies and enable a comparison with established strategies from the literature review. Then, an exploratory examination was conducted across the typologies.

Nine different content categories were identified in the data and subsequently assessed and discussed in relation to the literature on strategies and dialogic intentions. This resulted in the emergence of two new overarching strategies: hope and host.

While hope is particularly relevant in crisis situations, the utilization of employees in the host role presents an opportunity for further development and engagement. Further, the results call for future research that breaks with the traditional quest for ideal strategies for the benefit of exploring the notion of “strategic doers”.

The identification of the hope and host strategies, along with the analysis of content categories and their alignment with various strategic intentions, contributes to the existing knowledge in this field. Further, the classic perception of engagement as driven by explicit interaction and dialogue is also challenged.

This secondary source case is based mainly on legislative documents (that tracked the initiation and progress of the Parental Rights in Education bill that later became an Act), corporate documents (published by The Walt Disney Company) and news articles from publications such as The New York Times and Bloomberg. All sources are cited in the case narrative and as end notes.

In April 2022, The Walt Disney Company and its CEO, Robert Chapek, were at the center of a controversy over the company’s opposition to the State of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill. The bill, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by its critics, prohibited instruction on sexual identity and gender orientation in the state’s elementary schools. The controversy stemmed from Disney’s initial non-reaction to the bill and its later strident opposition and call for its repeal. Chapek was pressured by negative media publicity and employee disgruntlement on the one hand and adverse economic consequences for opposing the bill by the state’s Governor, Ron DeSantis. Chapek and the Board had to respond to the political threats to Disney’s economic well-being while appeasing its employees and other stakeholders who wanted the company to be a corporate champion in diversity, equity and inclusion.

The case is best suited for advanced undergraduate or graduate leadership, strategic management and marketing courses. From a leadership and strategic management perspective, the case is well-suited for demonstrating the evolving expectations of leaders and corporate social responsibility, as well as the concepts of issue framing and nonmarket management. Instructors may also leverage the case in marketing courses (e.g. brand management), as CEO activism (i.e. messaging and practice) is one characteristic of brand activism (Animation Guild, 2022).

This study aims to establish a comprehensive satisfaction analysis framework by mining online restaurant reviews, which can not only accurately reveal consumer satisfaction but also identify factors leading to dissatisfaction and further quantify improvement opportunity levels.

Adopting deep learning, Cross-Bidirectional Encoder Representations Transformers (BERT) model is developed to measure customer satisfaction. Furthermore, opinion mining technique is used to extract consumers’ opinions and obtain dissatisfaction factors. Furthermore, the opportunity algorithm is introduced to quantify attributes’ improvement opportunity levels. A total of 19,133 online reviews of 31 restaurants in Universal Beijing Resort are crawled to validate the framework.

Results demonstrate the superiority of Cross-BERT model compared to existing models such as sentiment lexicon-based model and Naïve Bayes. More importantly, after effectively unveiling customer dissatisfaction factors (e.g. long queuing time and taste salty), “Dish taste,” “Waiters’ attitude” and “Decoration” are identified as the three secondary attributes with the greatest improvement opportunities.

The proposed framework helps managers, especially in the restaurant industry, accurately understand customer satisfaction and reasons behind dissatisfaction, thereby generating efficient countermeasures. Especially, the improvement opportunity levels also benefit practitioners in efficiently allocating limited business resources.

This work contributes to hospitality and tourism literature by developing a comprehensive customer satisfaction analysis framework in the big data era. Moreover, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is among the first to introduce opportunity algorithm to quantify service improvement benefits. The proposed Cross-BERT model also advances the methodological literature on measuring customer satisfaction.

The purpose of this study is to conduct a thematic content analysis of facial emotion recognition (FER) research within the context of the hospitality and tourism industry. Through this analysis, the study aims to identify key themes, trends and implications of the utilization of FER technology in enhancing customer emotions and experiences within hospitality and tourism settings.

This is qualitative research that utilizes thematic content analysis. The research data were obtained from the Scopus database. A total of 45 articles (titles, abstracts and keywords) were coded into MAXQDA and VOSWiever programs for data analyses and mapping.

Based on the analyses, the predominant term used in titles was emotion, indicating its centrality in the research domain. Moreover, the most prevalent concepts in this field were emotion and experience. Notably, facial emotion recognition emerged as the most frequently utilized term within this context. Within the hospitality and tourism industry, FER was primarily employed within the travel sub-branch. Finally, the research culminated in the visualization of the theoretical framework and conceptual background, offering a comprehensive overview of the field.

There is a growing demand for using FER technology specifically within the hospitality and tourism industry context; therefore, growing scientific research has been conducted on this topic recently. By conducting a thematic content analysis, this study uncovered novel insights into the utilization of this technology to enhance customer emotions and experiences, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of its potential implications and applications within the hospitality and tourism industry.

The purpose of this study is to conduct a systematic literature review of the adoption of immersive marketing technology (IMT) in terms of strategic planning of its adoption, resource requirements and its implications and challenges.

This study categorizes and contextualizes qualitative approaches to evaluate the literature, with Scopus databases serving as the primary source of 90 selected articles in the areas of information technology, business and marketing strands. Theme analysis was carried out using thematic techniques and grounded approach principles to facilitate thematic coding and generate theme analysis.

The analysis was supported by the three concepts of business flexibility, agility and adaptability, which were drawn as a strategy for IMT adoption. The findings presented three main themes: proactive flexibility, responsive agility and reactive adaptability that enable business owner–managers to craft a strategy for IMT adoption.

The novel contribution of this study is the inclusion of key implications related to IMT as a starting point of the next level of innovative marketing for all academics, practitioners and business owner–managers.