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The purpose of this paper is to identify push and pull factors that motivate decision makers to choose wedding banquet venues, and to explore the relationships between the motivational factors and demographic information.

The initial questionnaire was pre-tested involving a sample of six graduate students in a hospitality management program of a major university in the Midwestern USA. The wordings were changed based on their feedback. The final survey was consisted of three sections: push motivations, pull motivations, and demographic information. In the first section, 13 push motivation statements were employed to investigate decision makers' reasons for selecting a wedding banquet venue.

The four push factors identified included “seeking relaxation and knowledge,” “fulfilling prestige,” “escaping from daily routine,” and “social networking.” The six pull factors were composed of “budget,” “atmosphere,” “facilities,” “wedding services,” “transportation,” and “service and quality.”

The study helps event industry practitioners understand consumers’ motivations of choosing wedding venues and predict consumers’ behavior. It further suggests marketing strategies to effectively communicate with existing and potential consumers.

The existence of a wedding organizer plays an essential role in realizing the dream wedding of the bride and groom and the progression of a family-centred structure. The wedding organizer industry is one of the business sectors that experienced a significant impact during the COVID-19 pandemic due to various policies restricting mobility and interaction. This study aims to answer research questions: What challenges are experienced by wedding organizers in the context of COVID-19? What factors drive entrepreneurial resilience for family business continuity in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic?

This study uses a qualitative research design through semi-structured in-depth interviews with eight wedding organizers in Indonesia with questions centred around the context of the family in the event.

This study found several challenges faced by wedding organizers, including personal barriers and environmental challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The four drivers of entrepreneurial resilience of wedding organizers in dealing with the COVID-19 crisis include entrepreneurial motivations, entrepreneurial characteristics, firm strategies, and environmental support. These factors create a positive interaction effect for the continuity of the wedding event organizers.

This study contributes to the literature by providing valuable insights into the broader entrepreneurial resilience issue and offering practical recommendations for wedding organizers and other entrepreneurs facing similar challenges. This study has both academic and practical implications in providing event management guidance and future avenues of research in this field.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a benchmarking framework to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the hotel industry, in a multi‐period context, with consideration of perishable traits and carry‐over activities. The sustained high performers in the case study are identified and their business strategies are discussed.

The dynamic DEA (data envelopment analysis) approach is used to identify the multi‐period sustained high performers. The super‐efficiency DEA approach is employed to conduct a thorough ranking under an input‐output‐consumption structure. The supplementary analysis is further implemented to help elucidate the benchmarking results.

In total, nine out of 80 international tourist hotels in Taiwan during 2006‐2010 are identified as the sustained high performers. These hotels have diverged business strategies in terms of employees (intensive versus economical labor forces), products (room versus F&B (food and beverage) services), prices (extremely expensive versus very inexpensive room rates), guests (business versus tourism guests), and others (e.g. location advantages).

This study contributes to benchmarking literature and to hotel industry in several aspects. Compared with conventional single‐period benchmarking in efficiency aspect only, the proposed multi‐period benchmarking framework under input‐production‐consumption structure can take into account the carry‐over activities, account for perishable traits, provide more robust results, and add more useful information to facilitate the hotel managers to ameliorate the efficiency and effectiveness. The proposed framework should be readily applied to other service industries (e.g. transport).

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the evolution of wedding-related consumption of urban families in China during the past 50 years.

This study used qualitative and quantitative approaches to collect and analyse data from 157 families in China. Data collection occurred through semi-structured interviews and questionnaire surveys.

The findings are as follows: average wedding expenses per family have increased, mainly as a result of the substantial growth of indirect wedding costs; the percentage of total wedding expenses represented by direct costs pertaining to the ritual is trending downwards; the percentage of total wedding expenses borne by the groom’s family is much higher than that borne by the bride’s family, and the gap is enlarging; the proportion of newlyweds living with parents was more than 50 per cent in the 1970s and 1980s, decreased to 10 per cent in the 1990s and began slightly increasing again after 2000.

The authors used signal investment theory to explain the fact that the groom’s family bears more of the wedding expenses than the bride’s family does, but more evidences are needed to verify the theory.

This study contributes to the understanding of evolution of wedding consumption of urban families in China, as well as how social and economic factors influence wedding consumptions in different ages, an area with limited previous research. The authors also propose signal investment theory as an alternative explanation to current wedding consumption theories to justify the phenomenon.

Drawing on infrequent purchase and university selection literature, the purpose of this study is to make theoretical contributions to the identification and comprehension of the ‘once-in-a-lifetime purchase’ (OILP) phenomenon.

Data derived from in-depth interviews with 34 Taiwanese and 11 Chinese students over two phases suggest that an OILP qualitatively differs from other purchases.

The principal traits of OILP are quadripartite in character: zero-repurchase intention; permanency of purchase; high social pressure and extensive information search. The results contribute to the theoretical understanding of the higher education (HE) sector as one type of OILP provider, and managerial implications are discussed specifically for the HE institutions.

Marketing managers of HE institutions should be cognisant of the range of information collected by prospective OILP customers from a variety of different sources. Prospective students who are OILP customers perceive non-marketing information as more reliable than marketing promotional materials and will better assist them during their decision making.

The paper makes explicit theoretical and instrumental contributions to our identification and comprehension of the OILP phenomenon, thus shedding new light on studies of consumer purchase decision literature. It also extends previous understanding of HE marketing by showing that choosing an HE degree is, in fact, an OILP and, as such, requires a new way of approaching prospective students as consumers.

The article offers an empirical investigation of the incidence and scale of household marriage overspending around the world, and the governments' reaction once the problem emerges.

This study relies on regression analysis of open source data from legislation, mass media, and judiciary hearings for 141 countries. In the Phase 1 logistic regression of cross-country large-N data is used to identify country-incidence of marriage cost escalation. In the Phase 2 ordered logistic regression is used to uncover statistically significant factors that predict the probability of alternative government reactions in 87 countries which experience marriage cost escalation.

In a strong collectivist sociocultural environment, driven by informality, the rise of middle classes, combined with the decline of traditional hierarchies, and limited opportunities for economic mobility motivates households to enter emulative wedding spending, thus leading to overspending. Governments' reaction depends on available policy resources, and the economic scale of the problem.

The research findings suggest that rising living standards in the developing countries are more likely to escalate wedding costs, and consequently reinforce traditional values.

Academic literature links marriage-related overspending to armed insurgency, child marriage and decreasing state efficiency. Despite the problem's scope, existing research has not comprehensively addressed both its causes, and cross-country differences in government reactions to it. The article addresses both of the mentioned gaps, by offering a conceptual model of marriage cost escalation.

In this work, the authors present a review of mobile applications for event management available for smartphones with the iOS operating system. The objective of the work is to carry out an analysis of these applications, offering an educational point of view and filling a gap in the doctrine, as the authors are dealing with an academically still new subject.

First, the authors conducted a literature review regarding the impact of technology on event organizations. Second, the authors analysed mobile applications for event management, the results of which are presented in this paper. Particularly, its main characteristics, strengths and weaknesses are analysed. Finally, the authors present the design of an activity with one of the beforehand analysed applications, in order to see its contribution to event management education.

It has been possible to improve learning and acquire specific skills related to the subject of study. Specified event management applications offer a wide range of advantages to facilitate the planning and management of events.

The study provides practical implications for managers in the hospitality industry.

This study provides a deeper insight into the functionalities and usefulness of event management mobile applications.

This research aims to contribute to the transformative service research (TSR) literature by examining how customer participation in the service process influences their service experience and eudaimonic well-being, as moderated by customer empowerment and social support.

In the contexts of wedding (n = 623) and tourism services (n = 520), two surveys were conducted to test the hypotheses using mediation and moderation analyses.

Customer participation had a positive effect on their well-being, as mediated by service experience. These effects were moderated by customer empowerment and social support. Specifically, customer empowerment negatively moderated the relationship between customer participation and their service experience for both services. In addition, the moderating effect of social support on the relationship between customer participation and service experience was positive for the wedding service but negative for the tourism service.

The findings imply that firms should encourage customer participation to enhance their service experience and well-being. In addition, the firm could judiciously empower customers by adapting to the level of customer participation. Furthermore, depending on the complexity of the service required to produce the expected service outcomes, the firm may encourage the customers to engage their social network for support.

This research uses the service ecosystem perspective to examine the roles of the customer, the firm and the customer's social network in shaping their service experience and well-being for two common and important mental stimulus services, enriching the authors’ understanding on the role mental stimulus services play in enhancing consumers' eudaimonic well-being.

This paper aims to highlight how facilities can enhance the strategic competitive position of a business organisation.

The methods of investigation used in this study include observation, in‐depth interviews and secondary data.

This case study has shown that both hardware, i.e. facilities and software, i.e. business philosophy of the organisation are important to enhance its competitive position.

This study has looked at only one case. Future research may use the same five‐force model to assess and determine the contribution of facilities to the competitive position of a business organisation.

This study hopes to create more awareness among senior management of the strategic importance of facilities to a business's bottom‐line.

Using a strategic management model, this paper illustrates the contribution of facilities management to the broader corporate goals.

The purpose of this paper is to revisit our original paper published over 20 years ago and reflect on its purpose, contribution and what we can glean that might have implications for future research.

A Google Scholar search showed that the article was cited 74 times. We discuss some of the contexts in which it was cited and identify two research themes that have emanated from this paper and hold promise for future research.

We discuss two of the several contexts in which our research is discussed. These include the differential ways in which cues are used in a services context, including the ways in which different cues are used to evaluate services and how cues are used to develop consumer expectations.

The study, which was cited 74 times according to Google Scholar, was formative in terms of discussion of, for example, how a variety of cues influence customer expectations and service evaluation, and how categories of cues, such as marketer controlled versus non-marketer controlled and personal versus non-personal, impact outcomes. The retrospective analysis was helpful in both reflecting on the status quo on some of these issues and suggesting directions for future research.