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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the marketing actions developed for rural tourism lodgings and the effect of these actions on lodgings’ performance.

Data were collected with a questionnaire-based survey, addressing promoters of rural tourism supply in Portugal and were analysed using SPSS. Descriptive analysis was undertaken along with a cluster analysis aimed at identifying groups of suppliers according to the types marketing activities they carried out.

Results show that the majority of the suppliers are engaged in other professional activities, aside from running a tourist lodging. These “other activities” provide the bulk of lodging suppliers’ household income. Moreover, they dedicate very little of their time to managing the tourism lodging and develop few marketing activities. Despite this, there is a small group of lodging suppliers who, even though in minority, show a more entrepreneurial and professional attitude regarding marketing actions. They are correspondingly more successful and more satisfied with the performance of their business.

A more qualitative in-depth case study approach with a systematic triangulation of findings from diverse sources and approaches might have permitted an even deeper understanding of some of the results, such as the reasons for the identified passivity of suppliers or their lack of marketing initiatives, as well as possible solutions to overcome these identified barriers.

This study is important, as there is little existing work connecting rural tourism and marketing. Apart from providing knowledge from theory, the empirical results indicate from a practical perspective some of the potential benefits of assuming a marketing perspective in rural tourism.

This study aims to understand how legislation and technology can enhance socio-economic development in low-density population territories, focusing specifically on the dynamics of local tourist accommodation over the past decade.

A case study was conducted for five municipalities in one of the most significant tourism regions of Portugal – the Algarve – based on a systematic investigation of relevant laws, regulations and electronic platforms. Official statistics were compiled and analyzed for the five territories’ registered local accommodation services, population, overnight stays and additional local services.

The results reveal that public entities’ regulations favor micro-entrepreneurship initiatives in local accommodation and that digital tools supported by online platforms have quite visible effects on low-density territories. The findings also reveal that the local tourist accommodation supply has experienced an especially dynamic, sustained growth over the past decade. This expansion has been accompanied by an increased supply of other services, suggesting that accommodation can positively influence the existing and/or future socio-economic development of low-density territories.

Further studies focusing on other areas with low-density populations are needed to determine more clearly how local accommodation influences socio-economic development.

Public regulations supported by digital platforms that favor micro-entrepreneurship initiatives in local accommodation can strengthen local development.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to analyze how local tourist accommodation can foster socio-economic development in low-density territories.

This study aims to determine the effects of lodging infrastructure development (LID) on Cordillera Administrative Region’s (CAR) environmental quality and natural resource management and its implication to globally responsible leadership. Specifically, this study sought to determine the contribution of LID to environmental deterioration and natural resource degradation in the CAR. As a result, a mathematical model is developed, which supports sustainability practices to maintain the environmental quality and natural resource management in CAR, Philippines.

This study used a descriptive research design using a mixed-methods approach. Self-structured interview and survey were used to gather the data. The population of this study involved three groups. There were 6.28% (34) experts in the field for the qualitative data, 70.24% (380) respondents for the quantitative data and 23.47% (127) from the lodging establishments. 120 respondents from the Department of Tourism – CAR (DOT-CAR) accredited hotels. Nonparametric and nonlinear regression analysis was used to process the data.

The effects of LID on the environmental quality and natural resource management in CAR as measured through carbon emission from liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), electricity and water consumption in the occupied guest rooms revealed a direct correlation between the LID. Findings conclude that the increase in tourist arrival is a trigger factor in the increase in LID in the CAR. The increase in LID implies a rise in carbon emission in the lodging infrastructure. Any increase in tourist arrivals increases lodging room occupancy; the increased lodging room occupancy contributes to carbon emissions. Thus, tourism trends contribute to the deterioration of the environmental quality and degradation of the natural resources in the CAR. A log-log model shows the percentage change in the average growth of tourist arrival and the percentage increase in carbon emissions. Establishments should observe standard room capacity to maintain the carbon emission of occupied lodging rooms at a minimum. Responsible leadership is a factor in the implementation of policy on standard room capacity.

The result of the study has some implications for the lodging businesses, the local government unit (LGU), the Department of Tourism (DOT) and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) in the CAR. The study highlights the contribution of the lodging establishments to CO₂ emission, which can degrade the quality of the environment, and the implication of responsible leadership in managing natural resources in the CAR. The direct inverse relationship between energy use and CO₂ emission in hotels indicates that increased energy consumption leads to environmental degradation (Ahmad et al., 2018). Therefore, responsible leadership among policymakers in the lodging and government sectors – LGU, DOT and DENR – should abound in the CAR. Benchmarking on the model embarked from this study can help in designing and/or enhancing the policy on room capacity standardization, considering the total area with its maximum capacity to keep the carbon emission at a lower rate. Furthermore, as a responsible leader in the community, one should create programs that regulate the number of tourists visiting the place to decrease the number of overnight stays. Besides, having the political will to implement reduced room occupancy throughout the lodging establishments in CAR can help reduce the carbon emissions from the lodging businesses. After all, one of the aims of the International Environment Protection Organization is to reduce CO₂ emissions in the tourism industry. Hence, responsible leadership in environmental quality preservation and sustainable natural resource management must help prevent and avoid greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Most studies about carbon emission in the environment tackle about carbon dioxide emitted by transportation and factories. This study adds to the insights on the existing information about the carbon emission in the environment from the lodging establishments through the use of LPG, electricity and water consumption in the occupied guest rooms. The findings of the study open an avenue for globally responsible leadership in sustaining environmental quality and preservation of natural resources by revisiting and amending the policies on the number of room occupancy, guidelines and standardization, considering the total lodging area with its maximum capacity to keep the carbon emission at a minimum, thus contributing to the lowering of GHG emissions from the lodging industry.

The purpose of this study sought to identify the main themes linked with wine hotel experiences, based on tourists’ narratives shared online, and to investigate whether these narratives vary according to traveler type.

Content analysis was carried out on 4,114 online reviews of 52 wine hotels located in 27 wine regions across 11 nations in both the Old and New World.

The analysis of these web reviews revealed that narratives can be grouped under 11 themes organized into 7 main dimensions as follows: wine, lodging (i.e. hotel, area and room), food service (i.e. restaurant and breakfast), scenery (i.e. views and vineyards), staff, transportation and recommendation. The main narratives vary according to traveler type.

Improving the present understanding of wine tourists’ experiences should help wine hotel managers find new approaches to enhancing visitors’ satisfaction. As the dimensions of wine tourism experiences shared online vary according to traveler type, wine managers can design their offer to target families, couples, friends, solo and corporate clients.

Prior research has identified the need for market segmentation in the wine tourism industry. This research addresses this need by specifying the wine tourism experience according to traveler type. The breadth of the data, and the method of using travelers’ own testimony as opposed to more common surveying are additional contributions for both academics and managers.

This article examines dynamic volatility spillovers between stock index returns of four main hospitality sub-sectors in US during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. These are tourism and travel, hotel and lodging, recreational services and food and beverages. Volatility spillovers are explicitly used as accurate and informative proxies for risk contagion between sectors during turbulent times.

The authors employ dynamic conditional correlation-generalized autoregression heteroskedasticity (DCC-GARCH) and wavelet coherence analysis (WCA) to analyze the phenomenon. The authors’ timeframe is divided into three main sub-periods, namely the pre-pandemic, the first wave and the second wave periods.

This study’s results reveal immense negative shocks in returns of all four sub-sectors on the Black Monday (8th March 2020). Moreover, high volatility persistence was observed during both waves with an exception of tourism and travel which exhibited lower volatility persistence during the second wave. The authors discovered magnified contagion effects between tourism and travel, hotel and lodgment and recreational services during the first wave of the pandemic with tourism and travel being the main volatility transmitter. Lower magnitudes of spillovers were observed between food and beverages and other sub-sectors with a decoupling effect being evident during the second wave.

This study’s findings contribute to the contagion theory by providing evidence of disproportional volatility spillover among hospitality sub-sectors despite being exposed to similar turbulent economic conditions.

Crucial implications can be drawn from this study’s findings to assist in risk management, asset valuation and portfolio management. The importance of close monitoring, safety measures, international diversification and adequacy of liquid assets during health crises cannot be stresses enough for hospitality firms. Retail investors, speculators and asset managers can take advantage of this study’s findings to design trading strategies and hedge against risk.

A body of knowledge pertaining to effects of crises such as COVID-19 on hospitality stocks has been proliferating. Nonetheless, there is still a relative dearth of empirical literature on volatility spillover between hospitality sub-sectors especially during periods of rising economic uncertainties.

The purpose of this study is to integrate wayfinding strategies and open innovation to examine the factors of mobile application (M-App) design.

The study formulated an M-App model from the wayfinding sense-making and open innovation perspective. Samples were collected from the M-Apps users of Airbnb.com in a survey based on the principle of snowball sampling, and 416 samples were returned in total. The hypothesis testing of the model was conducted using structural equation modeling with Linear Structural Relations.

The operators of the lodging industry should design the recommended route on the M-Apps for tourists to reach the accommodation on the map function conveniently.

The orientation of wayfinding sense-making integrates the accommodation host to mark the direction of the accommodation on the map function of M-Apps to indicate the direction of the location.

The operators of the lodging industry should design the recommended route on the M-Apps for tourists to conveniently reach the accommodation on the map function.

For the M-Apps designer of the lodging industry, devising the function with an arrow point on the map would enable tourists to check their current location handily. Moreover, the M-Apps of lodging businesses can reduce marketing expenses from the high recommendations of tourists.

The purpose of this paper is to unveil and discuss the importance of factors determining the internet innovation for external relations in the lodging industry. These external relations include those with customers, other businesses and administrations (B2C, B2B, B2A)

Empirical evidence extracted from a sample of tourism lodging establishments in the Balearic Islands has been used to unveil the determining factors of internet innovation in the lodging industry. The lodging industry has been chosen in order to preserve a certain internal homogeneity since it has been shown previously that the innovation adoption process differs across economic sectors. The factors affecting internet innovation in external relations arise from the estimation of the discrete choice econometric models that represent these firms' decisions.

It was found that certain factors increase the probability that the lodging industry innovates through the use of internet for external relations, i.e. larger establishments, lower seasonality – months per year an establishment remains open; and positive managerial attitudes towards the internet, all have a positive relationship with internet innovation.

Competitiveness of tourism destinations depends on the innovation abilities of its firms. Government and tourism managers should foster the factors that affect them positively. To this extent, some practical implications can be extracted: first, the need for governments to implement specific policies aimed at smaller establishments, since those are the ones that have more difficulties bridging the technological innovation process; second, the need for administrations to adopt a global vision that includes the whole tourist destination; third, the appropriateness of internet innovation in order to improve the seasonal distribution of tourist flows, which is one of the common weaknesses of the tourism sector; and finally, the need to address managers in order to increase their awareness with respect of the usefulness of information and communication technology innovation, and encourage a proactive posture towards it.

The paper contributes to a better understanding of the innovation determinants in service sectors and specifically in the lodging industry. Apart from traditional factors that affect internet innovation, such as size of the establishment, number of months opening, etc., the paper includes and measures the effect of managers' attitudes and opinions towards internet innovation. Finally, the findings obtained may suggest certain guidelines to help tourism destination managers to address their competitiveness policies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the correlation between customer experience and brand equity for a homestay establishment in Eastern Taiwan.

Visitors staying at Yuehetang Rural Residence (YRR) during the month of January 2013 were surveyed, and the data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, reliability analysis and typical correlation.

Visitors demonstrated a very high level of overall satisfaction with their homestay experience (4.43-4.84), especially in terms of YRR’s ability to evoke feelings of being moved or touched, and of pleasure, excitement and satisfaction. Similarly, YRR’s brand equity was rated very high (3.98-4.67). Responders particularly felt that YRR’s image of prioritizing environmental protection and the quality of its lodgings were unique sources of added value and, therefore, factors in creating its healthy brand equity, despite the fact that it was rated low in terms of visibility to homestay-hunting customers. The correlation coefficient between experience and brand equity was 0.742, indicating a high degree of positive correlation. The correlation between customer loyalty and brand equity was also quite high, followed by, in decreasing order of strength, the correlations between brand equity and the environment-friendly image, the quality of lodging, organic farming and visibility.

YRR’s core business value is environmental protection, a factor which, in today’s increasingly environment-conscious world, has unsurprisingly contributed heavily to its brand equity and customer loyalty. YRR and other homestay operators can utilize the findings of this paper to enhance visitor experience and their own brand equity.

This paper is one of the first articles in the homestay experience field that offers content that environmental protection is an important factor to brand equity. It also offers numerous theoretical and practical implications.

This paper aims to discuss how the tourism industry is contending with the economic and interorganizational challenges wrought by the COVID-19 outbreak and heightened by a lack of communication between the government and local businesses in the state of Israel. The researchers examine the dependency of the tourism industry on the general preparation programs that were developed and are currently being deployed by the relevant national stakeholders and question whether instead, it should use the pandemic as a catalyst for formulating its own nuanced tourism-travel-and-hospitality-oriented strategies and procedures.

Applying an ethnographic-based mix-methods research approach, this paper draws on insights from data compiled by fusing existing theoretical and emerging practical knowledge with empirical research (qualitative and quantitative) conducted among numerous relevant macro (governmental/centralized industry) and micro (hotels, travel and tourism operators and service providers) stakeholders as well as potential consumers.

It is essential that national and local government bodies form collaborative interorganizational relationships with local stakeholders to jointly activate case-specific hospitality and travel-specific risk mitigation management strategies. Moreover, the pandemic laid bare the tentative and fragile nature of the globalized tourism industry supply and demand chains, a condition that may be remedied via a pivot toward using national or even regional supply chains and goods and service providers. Within Israel, such changes could lead to increased economic benefits that extend beyond the tourism industry to provide certain security-related benefits.

Relating to idiosyncratic factors relevant to an Israeli cultural context, this paper uses the ethnographic field-borne familiarity of the researchers with the tourism and travel industries in Eilat and the Dead Sea to offer applicable suggestions for leveraging certain industry resources to both meet the demands of the present-day circumstances and cultivate a multifaceted organizational web of macro and micro social, economic and environmental networks so as to foster a more diversified and therefore resilient local tourism and travel economy.

Companies are adopting a more active role in managing their online reputations by using electronic word of mouth (eWOM) and often responding directly to customer reviews. Therefore, companies need to understand the effects of management responses to customer reviews. This study aims to explore whether it is worth responding to reviews and whether expressing gratitude enhances the effects of review responses.

This study uses customer reviews and management response data from a sample of 766 Spanish rural lodging establishments listed on Toprural (www.toprural.com). Analyses are undertaken with NVivo and SmartPLS.

Responding to negative reviews improves lodging establishments’ average ratings, but responding to positive reviews has no significant direct effect. Expressing gratitude in responses positively moderates the effects of review responses; this moderating effect is more significant for responses to negative than to positive reviews.

Previous research provides contradictory evidence about the positive outcomes of a company’s responses; it also does not address expressions of gratitude. This research provides evidence of the direct effects of management response quantity on ratings. It also expands current research on the content characteristics of these responses. The contextual setting for this research, rural tourism, is a key driver of sustainable rural development and a sector in which eWOM is especially relevant; thus, correctly managing the eWOM phenomenon becomes crucial.

Al objeto de mejorar su reputación online, las empresas progresivamente están adoptando un papel más activo ante las reseñas online de los clientes, ofreciendo respuestas online a dichas reseñas. Por tanto, es necesario que las empresas conozcan mejor los efectos de responder online. Este estudio examina si resulta beneficioso responder a las reseñas y si expresar agradecimiento potencia el efecto de responder.

A partir de datos sobre reseñas online de clientes y respuestas de la empresa, correspondientes a una muestra de 766 alojamientos de turismo rural de Toprural (www.toprural.com), se realizan análisis con NVivo y SmartPLS.

Responder a reseñas negativas mejora las puntuaciones medias del establecimiento en Toprural. Sin embargo, responder a reseñas positivas no tiene un efecto directo significativo. Además, expresar agradecimiento en las respuestas modera positivamente el efecto de responder. No obstante, esta moderación es más intensa en el caso de respuestas a reseñas negativas frente a las reseñas positivas.

La investigación previa aporta evidencia contradictoria sobre los efectos de la intensidad de respuesta empresarial a las reseñas online; además, no se ocupa de la expresión de gratitud en particular. Este estudio aporta luz respecto al efecto directo de la intensidad de respuesta sobre las puntuaciones online y amplía la investigación actual sobre las características de contenido de las respuestas. El marco de estudio, el turismo rural, se considera clave para un desarrollo rural sostenible y constituye un escenario donde el boca-oído electrónico es especialmente importante; en consecuencia, gestionar correctamente el fenómeno es crucial.

Palabras clave Boca-oído electrónico, Respuesta empresarial, Reputación online, Turismo rural

Tipo de artículo Trabajo de investigación