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This study aims to investigate the online customer review behavior and determinants of overall satisfaction with hotels of travelers in various travel group compositions.

The author collected data from online reviews of travelers in various travel group compositions from 600 hotels in 100 of the largest cities in the USA from Booking.com and used latent semantic analysis (LSA) to identify the positive and negative factors from online reviews of travelers in various travel group compositions. Then, text regression was used to determine the influential factors of overall satisfaction of travelers in various travel group compositions.

It was found in this study that not all the positive and negative textual factors mined from travelers’ online reviews significantly influenced their overall satisfaction. In addition, the determinants of traveler satisfaction were different when travelers were in different travel group compositions.

The author found similar online review behavior, but different basic, excitement and performance factors of travelers in different travel group compositions.

This study helps hoteliers understand customers’ perception of the specific attributes of their products and services, which provides a guideline for businesses to design the priority rule to improve these corresponding attributes and use market segmentation strategy when dealing with customers in different travel group compositions.

The author examined and compared the online review behavior and determinants of satisfaction using the factors mined from online reviews between travelers in various travel group compositions. This study combined customer ratings with textual reviews and predicted customer ratings from the factors extracted from textual reviews using LSA and text regression.

Although much satisfaction research examines the role of demographics, few examine the phenomena of family cohesion or travel party composition and the role they play in influencing satisfaction. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to leverage the two to further understand satisfaction.

Data from 400 vacationing families were analyzed to examine the factors of family cohesion, activity satisfaction and overall vacation satisfaction.

Contrary to previous research, the results suggest that family cohesion is comprised of two primary factors: emotional bonding and decision making, family boundaries and coalitions. The findings suggest that family cohesion and activity satisfaction contributed to overall vacation satisfaction. However, as an addition to extant research, the findings demonstrate that travel party size moderated this relationship.

This research challenges findings of extant research on family cohesion and extends satisfaction research by introducing the effect of family cohesion and travel party composition. Both suggest and offer opportunities for future academic research. Practically speaking, this research also provides insight for practitioners as to why “travel party composition” should be regarded as an operative, rather than a descriptive term.

Practically speaking, this research also provides insight for practitioners as to why “travel party composition” should be regarded as an operative, rather than a descriptive term. Given the results of this research, the moderating effect of travel party composition is an interesting academic finding. Operationalizing this component in practice is challenging. However, practitioners can take the knowledge of the positive relationships between family cohesion, participation in activities, and overall vacation satisfaction, as well as the moderating effect of travel party composition, into account when evaluating guest satisfaction scores, programming activities, and resolving guest issues.

In addition to challenging findings of prior research, this research utilizes data gathered during family vacations; therefore not relying on recall or issues with memory effect. In addition, it extends existing research through the exploration of moderating variables. Finally, the research has practical implications for practitioners to attend to satisfaction of the increasing global family leisure market.

Destination recommender systems need to become truly human‐centric in their design and functionality. This requires a profound understanding of human interactions with technology as well as human behavior related to information search and decision‐making in the context of travel and tourism. This paper seeks to review relevant theories that can support the development and evaluation of destination recommender systems and to discuss how quantitative research can inform such theory building and testing.

Based on a review of information search and decision‐making literatures, a framework for the development of destination recommender systems is proposed and the implications for the design and evaluation of human‐centric recommender systems are discussed.

A variety of factors that influence the information search and processing strategies that influence interactions with a destination recommender system are identified. This reveals a great need for data‐driven models to inform recommender system processes.

The proposed framework provides a basis for future research and development in the area of destination recommender systems. The paper concludes that the success of a specific destination recommender system will depend largely on its ability to anticipate and respond creatively to transformations in the personal and situational needs of its users. Such system intelligence needs to be based on empirical data analyzed with sophisticated quantitative methods. The importance of recommender systems in tourism marketing is also discussed.

The purpose of this study is to provide new insights into the factors that influence cancellation behaviour with respect to hotel bookings. The data are based on individual bookings drawn from a hotel reservation system database comprising nine hotels.

The determinants of cancellation probability are estimated using a probit model with cluster adjusted standard errors at the hotel level. Separate estimates are provided for rooms booked offline, through online travel agencies and through traditional travel agencies.

Evidence based on 233,000 bookings shows that the overall cancellation rate is 8 per cent. Cancellation rates are highest for online bookings (17 per cent), followed by offline bookings (12 per cent) and travel agency bookings (4 per cent). Probit estimations show that the probability of cancelling a booking is significantly higher for early bookings, large groups that book offline, offline bookings during high seasons, bookings not involving children and bookings made by guests from specific countries (e.g. China and Russia). Among the factors, booking lead time and country of residence play the largest role, particularly for online bookings.

The analysis is based on individual-level booking data from one hotel chain in Finland, and therefore cannot be generalised for the total population of hotels in the country under observation.

The main contribution of this paper is a thorough investigation of the factors that influence cancellation behaviour at both the theoretical and empirical levels. Detailed and unique data from a hotel reservation system allow for new empirical insights into this behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to gain more insight into the phenomenon of solo travel to city destinations and attain more knowledge on the topic.

The study employed a questionnaire consisting of qualitative and quantitative items. In all, 21 individuals (12 women, 9 men) responded.

The most important reason for solo travel was their own free choice and in some cases, difficulty finding companions. Their activities at the destinations were mostly visiting attractions followed by visiting friends, shopping, walking, eating at restaurants, learning the language, working, etc. They mostly mentioned advantages but also some disadvantages with solo travelling. Their experiences, especially with the people in the host destinations, have been positive and they show overall satisfaction with their visit. A predominant share of the interviewees showed a kind of loyalty to one or more specific city destinations and wished to revisit them again and again.

The current study might have some implications for city tourism developers/destination developers, travel agencies, national or regional tourism boards and tour operators in major urban areas and cities. Especially, this study has a practical contribution to the city tourism practitioners and gives them more insight in what values, attitudes, perceptions, expectations and motivations the solo travellers might have before or while they visit their cities. The study also has implications for potential solo travellers seeking more knowledge and information on the issue.

The phenomenon of solo travel to city destinations is an unresearched topic in Sweden. This exploratory study is the first in Sweden to focus on solo travellers visiting city destinations.

The importance of smart tourism technologies (STTs) has been rising recently, but how STTs are related to tourists' psychological well-being has got little attention. The study intends to show how STTs increase tourists' psychological well-being by capitalizing on the theory of Tourism 4.0. The study investigates the associations between the factors of STTs with the perceived benefit and, subsequently, perceived benefit with the psychological well-being of tourists. Moreover, this study also examines the moderating impact of a growth mindset (GM) between perceived benefits (PB) and tourists' psychological well-being (TPW) in the tourism industry.

Using a structured questionnaire, 243 responses were collected through the convenience sampling method. Partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used for the analysis.

Findings show that automation, security/privacy concerns, information accuracy, and personalization are significantly related to the PB of tourists. The results also confirm that a GM moderates the relationship between PB and TPW.

The results show the social and managerial importance of the perspective of tourism in developing countries. Based on the tourism 4.0 concept, this study presents a theoretical contribution by expanding practical information regarding the link between STTs and psychological well-being. Moreover, the study shows some directions to the tour operator about improving PB and psychological well-being. The notion of tourism 4.0 is a new paradigm that seeks to unlock the psychological well-being of visitors through the hyper-interconnectedness of humans and technologies.

This study contributes to prior research on technology-based tourism by exploring the uncharted STT variables, PB, GM and psychological well-being. Moreover, the study makes an empirical effort to conceptualize the tourism 4.0 concept on the proposed relationships. Tourist firms should focus on implementing this theory to develop their business.

This study aims to unpack the notion of travelling mobilities from the perspectives of an Asian solo traveller using the context of the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan.

An autoethnography was used for this research, analysing reflective notes drafted on hand-written journals over the duration of six days over three host cities of the sporting event.

Asian solo men appear to be treated very differently from their Western counterparts and solo female tourists. In addition, engaging with a sport that is highly Western-centric exposes the liminal spaces of in-between. Being of Asian appearance and conversant in Japanese further blurred the travelling mobilities of being an unlikely sports fan, an impromptu translator, a presumed local resident and an unconventional wanderer.

These limitations notwithstanding, the research has contributed to the paucity of knowledge surrounding Asian solo male tourists and some aspects of their corresponding travelling mobilities. Such nuanced understanding then inform tourism and hospitality knowledge and practice of offering relevant experiences to such a market.

Leisure and tourism activities have proliferated and become important parts of modern life, and the hotel industry plays a necessary role in the supply for and demand from consumers. The purpose of this paper is to develop guidelines for hotel service development by applying a service development approach integrating Kansei engineering and text mining.

The online reviews represent the voice of customers regarding the products and services. Consumers’ online comments might become a key factor for consumers choosing hotels when planning their tourism itinerary. With the framework of Kansei engineering, this paper adopts text mining to extract the sets of Kansei words and hotel service characteristics from the online contents as well as the relationships among Kansei words, service characteristics and these two sets. The relationships are generated by using link analysis, and then the guidelines for hotel service development are proposed based on the obtained relationships.

The results of the present research can provide the hotel industry a comprehensive understanding of hotels’ customers opinions, and can offer specific advice on how to differentiate one’s products and services from competitors’ in order to improve customer satisfaction and increase hotels’ performance in the end. Finally, this study finds out the service development guidelines to meet customers’ requirements which can provide suggestions for hotel managers. The implications both for academic and industry are also drawn based on the obtained results.

Now, in the internet era, consumers can comment on their hotel living experience directly through the internet. The large amount of user-generated content (UGC) provided by consumers also provides chances for the hospitality industry to understand consumers’ opinions through online review mining. The UGC with consumers’ opinions to hotel services can be continuously collected and analyzed by hoteliers. Therefore, this paper demonstrates how to apply the hybrid approach integrating Kansei engineering and online review mining to hotel service development.

The paper aims to find the preferences of different tourist type. Since, COVID-19 pandemic has brought the international hospitality industry to a standstill, there are some early signs of recovery. For this industry’s long-term recovery, the tourists’ changing preferences need to be analyzed. Moreover, with different types of tourists, a more nuanced and in-depth study is required to analyze the preferences of each tourist type.

The research focuses on the changing preferences of the tourist by comparatively analyzing the pre-COVID-19 and current COVID-19 phase. The study extracted online data from TripAdvisor and identified themes by applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA).

The study’s findings confirmed the change in preferences of the different types of tourists during the COVID-19 pandemic by performing thematic analysis. New themes emerged in the pandemic phase, providing more insights into tourists’ changing preferences in the current COVID-19 phase. The study also found that specific dominant themes in the pre-COVID-19 phase were replaced by new themes in the current COVID-19 phase.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to compare the pre-COVID-19 and current COVID-19 phase themes to decipher the new themes that managers of the hotels should consider to win back tourists’ confidence during the pandemic. The unraveling of changing preferences of the different tourist types in the current COVID-19 pandemic is the novel contribution of the study.

在 COVID-19 大流行期间改变游客对酒店业的偏好

COVID-19 大流行使国际酒店业陷入停顿。虽然有一些复苏的早期迹象, 但对于这个行业的长期复苏, 还需要分析游客不断变化的偏好。此外, 针对不同类型的游客, 需要进行更细致和深入的研究来分析每种游客类型的偏好。

该研究通过比较分析 COVID-19 之前和当前 COVID-19 阶段, 重点关注游客不断变化的偏好。该研究从 TripAdvisor 提取在线数据, 并通过应用隐含狄利克雷分布 (LDA) 确定主题。

该研究的调查结果通过进行主题分析证实了不同类型游客在 COVID-19 大流行期间偏好的变化。大流行阶段出现了新主题, 为游客在当前 COVID-19 阶段不断变化的偏好提供了更多见解。该研究还发现, COVID-19之前阶段的特定主导主题被当前 COVID-19 阶段的新主题所取代。

该研究首次比较了 COVID-19 之前和当前 COVID-19 阶段的主题, 从而为酒店管理者在大流行期间赢回游客的信心提供了应该考虑的新主题。研究发现在当前的 COVID-19 大流行中不同游客类型的偏好的变化是该研究的新贡献。

Family holiday decision-making (FHDM) is a process composed of several stages. This paper aims to describe two objectives: to identify at each stage the roles in couples, the main decision-maker in the case of family holidays; and to determine the most influential variables.

To identify the roles played by the partners, a frequency analysis has been conducted, which provides a graphic representation of the so-called feasibility triangles. The technique selected to identify the variables that explained the decision structure was binary logistic regression. In total, 375 useful dyads of questionnaires were received.

Holidays follow a joint decision-making process in the initiation phase and in the final decision, while the search for information is carried out equally by either partner. The woman’s work situation, the type of destination travelled to and the difference in education levels between them are the variables that best explain how couples decide on their family holidays.

A better understanding of the FHDM process will help tourism companies to improve their marketing campaigns.

The characteristics of the sample composed of 375 couples whose members completed a questionnaire separately have allowed not have to rely on one response per household, which adds reliability to the results. This sample is higher than the one of many reference publications on the subject. Furthermore, this paper revealed differences between male and female perception.