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The purpose of this paper is to offer an up-to-date review of the gaze, proposing new research agendas with regard to the various gazes actively operating at destinations.

The study thoroughly and systematically reviewed the existing literature by gathering papers related to gaze research in tourism contexts. Analysis of existing knowledge is centered around the gaze and a triadic framework among three key stakeholders.

A theoretical schema of the gaze was developed via a thorough examination of existing studies. The framework disclosed the subject of the gaze, be it tourist-initiated and/or host-initiated, and tourist–host interactions. Along with five dominant types (tourist gaze, intratourist gaze, local gaze, mutual gaze and reverse gaze), a triadic framework among stakeholders was further revealed.

The literature review provides meaningful insights into gaze research in the tourism field, representing the first effort to delineate relationships among relevant stakeholders. Further, this study proposes future research priorities related to the tourist–host relationship for destination experience development.

El propósito de esta investigación es ofrecer una reseña actualizada de la mirada del turista y proponer nuevas agendas de investigación sobre las diversas miradas que funcionan activamente en los destinos.

Este estudio revisó de manera exhaustiva y sistemática la literatura existente sobre la mirada del turista mediante la recopilación de estudios e investigaciones relacionados. El análisis del conocimiento actual está enfocado en la mirada del turista y en el marco tripartito entre las tres principales partes interesadas.

A través del examen exhaustivo de los estudios existentes, se desarrolló un modelo teórico de la mirada del turista. El marco revela el objecto de la mirada del turista, ya sea iniciada por el turista y/o por el anfitrión, y las interacciones entre ambos. Junto con los cinco tipos principales de mirada (turista, intra-turista, local, mutua e inversa), el marco tripartito entre las partes interesadas se reveló a detalle.

La reseña bibliográfica ofrece una comprensión a fondo de la investigación y los estudios sobre la mirada del turista, lo cual representa el primer intento de delinear las relaciones entre las partes interesadas. Además, en el estudio se proponen prioridades de investigación relacionadas a la relación turista-anfitrión para el desarrollo de futuras experiencias turísticas.

This paper aims to propose and test a conceptual model of theme park experiences by investigating the relationships among brand experience, self-congruity, flow and brand-related outcomes.

Data were collected from guests who had visited a theme park in the past 12 months. Confirmatory factor analysis, consisting of second-order factor analysis and structural equation modeling with the incorporation of alternative model testing, was employed.

The findings revealed that theme park customers’ internalization of brand experience influenced their attitudinal and behavioral tendency with regard to the brand through self-congruity and flow.

This study provides strategies for theme park designers and marketers under pressure to create a desired experiential setting that motivates visitors to engage in activities through various brand stimuli. Well-designed theme parks can create an optimal state of focus and attention, immersing visitors to the extent that they lose their sense of time and place, affecting their attitude and behavior toward the theme park brand.

Theme parks provide a highly experiential, immersive and personally relevant experience with brand elements. Very few studies have attempted to investigate the consequences of theme park experience from the theoretical perspective of customers’ connection with the brand. This study proposed and validated a conceptual model to capture how theme park experience influenced visitors’ commitment to and active engagement with theme park brands through the mechanisms of self-congruity and flow.

This paper aims to explore the relationships among local food consumption experience, cultural competence, eudaimonia, and behavioral intention. Building upon acculturation theory, need hierarchy theory and self-determination theory, the current study develops a conceptual model of local food consumption as international tourists’ acculturation process.

This study collects data from 305 Chinese outbound tourists and uses partial least squares-structural equation modeling to examine the developed model.

The findings reveal a significant effect of the local food consumption experience, consisting of novel, authentic, sensory and social dimensions, on cultural competence, which subsequently evokes eudaimonia and behavioral response toward local food. The mediating effect of cultural competence is also confirmed.

Destination marketers and restaurant managers should recognize local food consumption as a meaningful tool that contributes to tourists’ cultural competence and eudaimonic well-being during travel. They should strive to craft an indigenous consumption setting and provide employee training on the history and culture of local food, helping tourists understand local food customs and embrace different food cultures.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, very few studies have attempted to examine the meaningful consequences of local food consumption through the theoretical lens of acculturation. This study dives into international tourists’ local food consumption and pioneers a conceptual model to capture how local food consumption experience provokes their eudaimonia and behavioral desires through the mechanism of cultural competence.

Grounded in the theory of mental budgeting, this paper aims to investigate how the regret and perfectionism of exposition attendees influences their purchasing strategy.

This research collected on-site data at a well-established specialty food exposition in China. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were applied to test the proposed model.

The findings confirm the effect of psychological mechanism (regret and perfectionism) on exposition attendees’ purchasing strategy as one that boosts/impairs their confidence in purchasing healthy food at the exposition. Specifically, regret and perfectionism show differential contributions to purchasing strategy dimensions. Variety seeking has a positive effect, whereas price consciousness has a negative effect, on purchase confidence.

Event organizers and exhibitors should understand attendees’ consumption-related psychological mechanism and devise effective management and marketing strategies for optimal consumption experiences at expositions. They can create an informative and worry-free experience that facilitates a pleasant thought process to reduce uncertainty in attendees’ on-site decision-making.

The current research pioneered a unique model conceptualizing the important, yet underexplored, phenomenon of purchasing mechanism in the exposition setting. Addressing the emerging interest in food expositions, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first for examining purchasing mechanism from the perspective of mental budgeting, providing insightful knowledge about how the psychological mechanism affects exposition attendees’ pre-purchase evaluation and confidence toward purchasing healthy food at expositions.

This study aims to analyze the impact of event experience on event satisfaction and intentions to return and recommend the destination.

Relationships among constructs were tested on data gathered from 542 tourists during the America's Cup World Series held in South Italy in April 2013 by using a structural equation modeling approach. Moreover, a multigroup analysis was developed to test the possible moderator factors.

The results revealed that event experience and event satisfaction had positive impacts on the intentions to recommend and return to the host destination. Moreover, nationality, gender and trip motivation emerged as important moderating factors in the relationships among the latent constructs.

The findings of this paper enrich the existing literature and help tourism destination marketers and managers consider the triggering factors of a satisfying mega-sports event for the host destination and the marketing power of the on-site experience.

Practitioners should draw on the insights provided by this study to design destination strategies, particularly by paying attention to how an event experience causes an attendee to return to and recommend the host destination.

This study enriches the existing event literature in several ways. First, it emphasizes the importance of the event experience to the satisfaction level and willingness to return and recommend the host destination for a vacation, supporting the link between an event and its destination. Second, it provides a moderating analysis that offers new insights for marketing the event experience. It offers a multilevel model of mega-event tourism legacy, which opens up new avenues of research. Third, complementing the consumer-based analysis, this research includes the trend of visits (after 2013 to the present) to examine how a mega-sport event has brought about more postevent visits.

This study aims to investigate diners’ self-presentation mechanism as manifested in foodstagramming. Drawing upon the social cognitive and self-presentation theories, this study develops a conceptual model to examine the relationships among food experiential value (i.e. extrinsic value and intrinsic value), self-efficacy, strategic self-presentation and self-presentation outcomes.

The authors adopt a multi-study approach with two empirical studies (Study 1: tourists, n = 254; Study 2: residents, n = 252) and use partial least squares structural equation modeling to test the proposed model.

The results consistently show significant effects of extrinsic value, intrinsic value and self-efficacy on strategic self-presentation, which subsequently evokes perceived enjoyment and behavioral intention. The impact of food experiential value on self-efficacy varies between tourists and residents. The mediating effects of self-efficacy and strategic self-presentation are also confirmed.

Restaurant managers and destination marketers should acknowledge the importance of food experience as expressive capital and recognize self-presentation as a meaningful tool that links restaurant food experience with consumers’ personal branding. Businesses should strive to create a desired experiential setting shaped by food price, restaurant service, food aesthetics and consumers’ feelings, allowing diners to translate these stimuli into self-presentational resources.

This study dives into an important, yet under-examined, phenomenon of foodstagramming. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to theoretically link food experience to foodstagramming behavior via a self-presentation mechanism. Findings provide important theoretical and managerial implications.

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.

Drawing upon an error management perspective, this study aims to examine how in the wake of an information security breach, a hotel’s error management culture influences customer engagement behaviors and trust. The potential moderating effects of the perceived error controllability are also assessed.

This study develops four experimental conditions concerning a privacy breach in Hotel A, where different levels of error controllability and error management culture are manipulated for testing hypotheses. Data collection is administered with the help of Amazon Mechanical Turk.

The findings from 235 former hotel guests show significant influences of error management culture on customer engagement behaviors, which are mediated by consumer trust. No moderating effect of the perceived error controllability is found.

This study stresses the significance of cultivating a high error management culture and communicating it to attract consumers. It also provides guidance to hoteliers for adopting effective error analysis and management approaches, improving customer engagement and, ultimately, enhancing the firm’s performance.

The results of this study expand the error management literature by studying the impacts of error management within the organization to its impacts on consumer-related outcomes. Further, this study contributes to the customer engagement literature by focusing on a series of customer engagement behaviors after a service failure scenario. Third, this study extends previous service failure and recovery literature to credence-related service encounters.

The purpose of this study is to provide a nuanced understanding of Chinese family tourists’ value co-creation by examining three important aspects of family vacation: What do families do during vacation? How do they make meaning of what they do? Do travelers’ role identities within their families play a role in the value creation process?

Upon reviewing related theoretical work, the authors undertook a mixed-method study consisting of both survey data and in-depth interviews.

The analysis revealed three clusters of family interactional content, including We open and share our worlds, We build knowledge and skills and We co-create and co-evaluate, and five clusters of family travelers, including Outdoor enthusiasts, Socializers, Nature lovers, Culture admirers and Relaxation seekers. Family roles, life situations and destination environments also interfaced with family activity participation and family conversations. A family vacation value co-creation process framework with four propositions was, thus, proposed.

Further exploration and validation of the proposed framework and propositions which emerged from the findings of this study are needed. Impacts of various family types and relational dynamics also warrant future investigation.

The results of family interactional and relational well-being facilitated by family vacation are pertinent to academia, industry and public policy-making.

Family vacation can be a positive intervention for the creation of family value and a means of meaning-making. Programs that integrate multiple family roles and address family-level value propositions would be collectively enriching.

The current study initiated a pioneering investigation by providing a depiction of how family travelers experience and make sense of a shared tourism experience, along with their value perceptions in such a co-created consumptive scenario.

This study aims to investigate the antecedents of frontline employees’ boundary-spanning behaviors in the hospitality industry. Anchored in transactional stress theory, affective events theory and motivation theories, a conceptual model was built to explore the impacts of hindrance stressors on boundary-spanning behavior.

Data were collected from frontline employees in the hospitality industry in the USA. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used.

The findings revealed that despite hindrance stressors’ negative indirect impact on frontline employees’ boundary-spanning behaviors, intrinsic motivation worked effectively to reduce hindrance stress and influence subsequent emotions leading to boundary-spanning behaviors.

This study provides substantial and detailed strategies for hospitality practitioners who are pressed to alleviate the hindrance stressors from which frontline employees frequently suffer, foster employees’ positive emotions and ease negative emotions while promoting boundary-spanning behaviors. Cultivation of employees’ intrinsic motivation and emotional management is encouraged, as is effective organizational structure and management intervention. All of these are deemed helpful in buffering employees’ work-related stress while motivating them to go above and beyond their nominal duties.

Very few studies have examined how “bad” hindrance stressors affect boundary-spanning behaviors. Rather than suggesting that hindrance stressors are relevant only to counterproductive behaviors, this study extends both the stress and boundary-spanning literature by uncovering the impact of hindrance stressors on frontline employees’ boundary-spanning behaviors while accounting for the roles of workers’ motivation and emotion.