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Despite the severe impact of the COVID-19, Maldives was one of the top destinations which witnessed decent tourist arrival amid the pandemic. This study aims to analyze luxury hospitality experiences of guests amid COVID-19 pandemic.

This study is exploratory in nature. This study analyses 4,302 real-time customer reviews using sentiment and thematic analysis with the help of NVIVO 12 plus and Leximancer.

The findings suggest travel products as well as services associated with luxury resorts needs to be revisited. Staff needs to be more professional and must be proactive while redesigning services specially in situations like pandemic. While redesigning services in situations like pandemic, staff needs to be proactive, professional and must follow all protocols. Major negative experiences included long waiting time to avail frill services, privacy intrusion by bloggers and influencers, service quality issues. We recommend enhancing service quality followed by investing more in training and development, increasing the number of foreign languages spoken by staff and disseminating localized culinary experiences will enhance the experience quality with guests.

This study has several limitations: first, this study limited itself to 15 luxury resorts of Maldives, which may not serve as a true representation of all luxury resorts of Maldives. The next limitation of this study is that the authors have collected customer reviews from TripAdvisor only, and the reviews were only in English language.

The findings of the research can be beneficial for the policymakers, hospitality practitioners and academicians who study luxury tourism industry to carve appropriate strategies for enhancing the customers’ luxury experience like leveraging customization in all areas and enhancing service quality, food quality, training and development of employees.

Maldives has become one of the most expensive traveler destinations and is home to world’s most expensive resorts. This study is original in nature and has a forward-looking approach which studies the disruptive effect of pandemic, intangible nature of luxury as a concept can be used by hospitality industry to redesign the luxury customer experience which can improve marketing strategies aiming to potentiate this niche. In addition, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study will be the first one to capture the real customer experiences of luxury resorts of Maldives.

This paper attempts to identify emerging themes that focus on customer experience of culinary tourism of international tourists who opted for food tours in Delhi.

The paper uses a multi-method approach for data collection. A thorough review of literature was conducted followed by gaining insights from the industry experts for the themes and a tentative thematic table was established. Thereafter, secondary data comprising 1,744 customer reviews from world’s leading travel website – Tripadvisor.com was analysed using thematic analysis. Customer’s real-time feedback and industry insights were paired together to gather meaningful and practical insights on customer experiences of food tours in Delhi.

Culinary tourism of Delhi is facing challenge in the areas of infrastructure, hygiene and certain preconceived notions related to brand perception of Indian cuisines. The findings of the study allude that the food tour agencies must be professional with all certifications and attention must be paid to location of food tastings, as it become the representation of Indian food worldwide. The findings also indicate customization is the key to positive customer experience, thereby requiring culinary professionals to understand the customer choices and personalize the food tours accordingly. Online reputation management is another key area requiring attention as electronic word of mouth plays a major role in the hospitality industry.

Although this study corroborates valuable academic findings and practical insights, it has few limitations that can be further investigated in the future. A quantitative study can be conducted to provide deeper insights into the factors of a culinary tour resulting in positive customer experience. Secondly, this study focuses on customer experience of food tours which is one of the forms of Culinary tourism, another elaborate study can be conducted incorporating other methods of culinary tourism such as cooking classes, food festivals, events etc. and delving into insights of customer experience and challenges in those practices.

Themes ascertained in this research paper provide deeper and worthy insights to all the stakeholders which would help them use their tourism resources in best optimal manner. Findings of the study would be valuable to culinary organizations, tourism department and other researchers working in the area of culinary tourism. Also, this study can be quite valuable for the academic researchers. Suggestions of the study will help the government, culinary organizations and other stakeholders to enhance culinary tourist experiences of Delhi.

The study is original and highly appropriate to all the stakeholders to formulate suitable strategic framework to improve customer experience in the field of culinary tourism. Using real customer experiences as data and choosing thematic analysis as a method of analysis further enhance the worth of study by opening the area for further exploration.

In 2020, the world encountered travel restrictions because of pandemic, and the hospitality sector across the globe was one of the most affected industries. The purpose of this study is to further explore real-time experiences of guests who stayed in budget hotels and how pandemic has changed the expectations of its customer segment.

The current study uses netnography to examine customer experience of guests who stayed at budget hotels during the COVID-19 pandemic. A thematic analysis was conducted using NVivo 12 plus on 1,391 customer reviews collected from various travel portals.

The results suggested personalization and hygiene were the most significant themes that influence customer experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors’ analysis revealed that the use of self-service technologies like contactless services during check-in, checkouts and use of Quick Response codes in restaurants and other services would help reduce the perceived risk of guests and enhance the overall customer experience.

The branded budget hotel sector has pumped in lot of money envisaging growth just before the COVID crises emerged. Therefore, the fast recovery is of paramount importance for the sector. Additionally, majority of the pandemic-related studies in hospitality sector have focused on luxury hotels and failed to address the real-time experiences of customers with respect to budget hotels of a developing country. The outcome of this study will be relevant for the budget hotels and policymakers because they face the crucial task of reviving and sustaining enterprises and the industry at large.