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This study aims to propose a comprehensive causal model to examine the relationships between customer experience and four key factors in brand building, i.e., brand loyalty, brand trust, brand affect and brand involvement. The dimensionality of customer experience in full-service hotel is also particularly examined in relation to brand building.

Three steps of data collection were used: interviews of 50 customers on their experiences of staying full-service hotels, a small survey of 176 hotel guests to establish the measurement scale of customer experience and a major survey of 732 hotel customers in ten major Chinese cities to test the model of brand loyalty.

Customers’ experiences with full-service hotels are proposed to be categorized into functional, affective and social. There is a chain effect from customer experience to brand trust and to brand affect and then to brand loyalty. The brand involvement does moderate relationships between customer experience and brand trust and brand affect but not brand loyalty.

For full-service hotels, social and functional experiences are critical in building brand loyalty, and therefore, they need to be the focal points in the enhancement of customer experience. Also, hoteliers are advised to develop emotional connections between the customers and the hotel brand – an effective way of building trust and affection.

According to the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first few studies to link customer experience to brand loyalty with comprehensive causal effect analysis. This study also contributes to the knowledge of customer experience in the context of the full-service hotel sector.

The purpose of this paper is to deconstruct the multi-faceted dimensions of Chinese travellers’ image of boutique hotels with a large amount of online textual data from social media (53,427 reviews written from 2014 to 2018), reinforcing the value creation of user-generated content via social media.

With the aid of Python, a computer language, online textual reviews (53,427 reviews) of 86 high-end boutique hotels in seven cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Chengdu, Qingdao and Sanya) were collected from the top-ranked online travel agency in China, Ctrip.com. Then, the overall perceived image of boutique hotels was revealed with the aid of Python.

The results showed multiple dimensions of the image of boutique hotels. The overall image can be grouped into eight dimensions (room, service, food, environment, entertainment, location, price and value, and uniqueness). An affective image based on eight dimensions was further developed in the Chinese boutique hotel context. It appears that online data from social media are beneficial for hotel managers to learn travellers’ overall perceptions of boutique hotels and help put more effective management strategies in place in the hospitality industry.

The relationship between cognitive image and affective image should be further investigated in future research. Theoretical implications are discussed from both cognitive image and affective image perspectives in the boutique hotel context. Managerial implications are highlighted to help industry managers understand the travellers’ perceptions of the hotels, via online data from social media, and put more effective hotel strategies in hospitality industry.

By using textual online data from social media, this paper deconstructs both the cognitive image and the affective image of boutique hotels. The dimensions of the most frequently mentioned concepts related to the Chinese boutique hotel industry are profoundly deconstructed, as is the uniqueness of the image of boutique hotels. The work is valuable for promoting effective marketing strategies in the hotel industry.

Innovation through tradition (ITT) is an increasingly important area of research particularly in the creative and cultural industries. The purpose of this study is to develop a process framework of ITT for rural heritage bed and breakfast (B&B) sector and investigate the antecedents and challenges of ITT implementation.

Nine heritage B&Bs displaying successful ITT in Songyang county in China were selected as the research site. Multiple cases of B&B were interviewed, and some observations were conducted. This study adopted the process-oriented reflexive critical incident technique to collect qualitative data and analysed it thematically.

Based on the findings, a five-phase innovation framework is proposed to demonstrate how ITT could be achieved in practice. These phases are idea generation, idea evaluation, initial implementation, continuing implementation and sustaining improvement. Three key antecedents (experience corridors, networks and institutional pressures) of ITT implementation were also identified.

This study has showed that rural heritage B&Bs can differentiate themselves from competition by the means of ITT. This study proposes a process framework for this kind of innovation bringing to light the required steps, the antecedents and key activities which the practitioners should pay great attention. This study highlights the needs for continuing and sustaining innovations in the long term.

This study proposes a novel five-phase process framework of ITT to encompass the innovation activities in heritage setting. For practitioners, this study recommends enhancing the sensing capability of local entrepreneurs through personal travel experience and establishing business networks as the key antecedents of a successful ITT under rural heritage setting.

Focusing on the supply side of peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation service sector, this study identifies the emerging types of micro-enterprise operators in the growing Chinese market, and investigate their respective operational risks and coping strategies.

A qualitative study was adopted to explore the micro-enterprise in peer-to-peer accommodation in China. Twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore the operators' behaviors in the service sector.

Based on the types of property ownership and forms of interaction, four groups of operators were identified, i.e. hospitable sharers, remote sharers, roommates and butlers. This study uncovers their operational risk factors (safety, cost, legal and social, psychological) and respective coping strategies.

Most prior studies on P2P accommodation sector are conducted from the demand side about customer behaviors. This study not only enhances the understanding of the hosts in the sharing economy by developing a novel typology of operators, but also provides insights into the operational behaviors on an individual operator perspective.

In a volatile and highly dynamic business environment, supply chain operations face various challenges. This study, grounded in dynamic capability theory (DCT), investigates how supply chain collaboration (SCC) and supply chain transparency (SCT) influence the relationship between supply chain finance (SCF) and supply chain resilience (SCR) in manufacturing firms. This demonstrates the intrinsic mechanism between SCF and SCR, which provides insights for relative research.

The quantitative research approach was utilized. Employing data collected from 289 Chinese manufacturing firms, structural equation modeling is conducted to test the theoretical hypotheses.

The research findings have revealed that SCF has a positive impact on SCC and SCT and SCC has a positive impact on SCT. Moreover, both SCC and SCT can improve SCR, and SCT plays a positive mediating role between SCC and SCR.

This study provides insightful ideas for managers in enhancing SCR by considering SCF. Moreover, this study highlights the concrete responses firms should do to improve SCC and SCT, thus managers can develop more effective strategies to optimize SCR.

This study contributes to the extant literature on improving SCR through SCF, considering the two dimensions of dynamic capability (i.e. SCC and SCT), which explains the intrinsic mechanisms by which SCF affects SCR. This study also broadens the scope of application of DCT.