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This research aims to grasp hotel guests' motives and potential benefits sought when interacting with other guests, service personnel and residents and examines how these benefits can contribute to the total guest experience.

Mixed methods are adopted for the purpose of this study comprising individual interviews and a questionnaire survey.

Five groups of advantages emerge from individual interviews, including friendliness in interaction, social benefits, information acquisition, curiosity gratification and hospitality services. In the survey, which gathers 326 questionnaires, this study reveals that the five types of benefits derived from hotel guests' interactions could be further categorized into two dimensions: civility (e.g. friendliness and social) and utility (e.g. information, curiosity and service). The study confirms that four out of five potential or expected benefits from this personal interaction is significantly associated with the total hotel experience.

Respondents of this study are culturally homogenous; as a result, multi-cultural settings should be considered for future research.

Tourism and hospitality literature on people's interaction is mostly center around social aspects of interaction. The current study comprehensively explores all expected utilities of interaction, occurring in all sorts of interactions (e.g. customer-to-resident and customer-to-service personnel). Specifically, the findings of this study uncover the underlying factors which prompt the tourists to interact with other people in a lodging setting and examine the relative importance of those underlying factors to the total lodging experiences.

The research objectives were to: (1) examine the relationship among motivations, satisfaction and loyalty with plant-based food dining at destinations; (2) determine if and how the attractiveness of eating plant-based foods moderates satisfaction and loyalty; and (3) investigate potential differences in visitor background information and consumption characteristics.

A survey was conducted at tourist attractions in southern Taiwan and 274 valid questionnaires were obtained. The relationships among motivations, satisfaction and loyalty were investigated when eating plant-based foods during travel. The moderating effects of food attractiveness on motivations and satisfaction/loyalty were measured.

The results indicated a positive relationship between motivations and satisfaction/loyalty in plant-based food dining. Motivations for plant-based food dining were comprised of four domains (physical, cultural, interpersonal and prestige) and satisfaction and loyalty had three (overall satisfaction, intention to revisit and intention to recommend).

The major implications were that motivations had a significant effect on satisfaction and loyalty; food attractiveness did not moderate the effect of motivations on satisfaction/loyalty; and background characteristics influenced satisfaction and loyalty.

Marketers and strategic planners for plant-based restaurants or those with plant-based meal options must make a greater effort to understand the distinctive demographic and dietary characteristics of the people who comprise the core of this market.

This research adds to the very limited literature on plant-based and vegetarian dining in tourism destinations. Furthermore, it tests, partially validates and expands a model by Kim et al. (2009) for consuming local food while traveling. The findings also complement the considerable evidence linking motivations to satisfaction and loyalty when dining.

The demand for efficient and flexible workers is growing in the service industry, with the promise of enhanced revenue generation and customer retention. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the antecedents (i.e. intrinsic motivation (IM)) and consequences (i.e. service performance (SP)) of front line employees’ ambidextrous behaviours, as well as the moderating roles of a proactive personality (PP), emotional intelligence (EI) and extrinsic reward (ER) in the IM-individual ambidexterity (IA) relationship.

A self-administered questionnaire was designed to collect empirical data from 205 flight attendants working at a Taiwanese airline company. Hierarchical regression analysis is used to test the proposed relationships and estimate factor affecting employees’ SP.

The results confirm that IM is positively related to ambidextrous behaviour, which in turn improves SP. EI positively moderates the relationship between IM and IA, while a PP and ER negatively moderate it.

This paper entails useful implications for service providers to better understand front line employees’ ambidextrous behaviours and determine effective recruitment and reward management strategies that reflect the differing employee characteristic.

This study addresses the important issue of ambidextrous behaviours in a service-oriented context by examining whether and how PP, EI and ER moderate the relationships among IM, IA and SP.

This research examines the lodging experience in the context of environmentally friendly hotels by discovering the underlying guest segments. A mixed-method approach is deployed, which first reveals three lodging experience dimensions entailing, functionality, hedonism and social responsibility via in-depth interviews. Subsequently, a questionnaire survey is conducted which gathers responses from 326 guests staying at seven certified green hotels. A cluster analysis based on green lodging experiences is performed that evokes three distinct guest segments labeled as (1) spontaneous guests, (2) active guests, and (3) devoted guests. The study notes that social responsibility is the most important lodging experience across the three resultant segments. The study also finds about 31% of respondents tend not to pay much attention to green lodging operations. It leads to a suggestion that the implementation of green operations may be accomplished in a way not notably compromising certain service expectations by those not profusely aspiring of the notion of green operations. Even though meeting the needs of core customers is a vital task.

To augment the current literature on the memorable travel experience, this research attempts to elucidate the complex meaning of memorable travel experiences. It deploys a qualitative study to interview 17 participants in four study sites in the State of Indiana, US. From the personal interviews, this study discovers five thematic views entailing: (1) social interaction, (2) destination attractiveness, (3) excitement, (4) novelty, and (5) learning. Unlike most memorable travel experience studies in the existing literature which indicates knowledge as one of the components, this study finds that memorable travel experience involves in the learning process, not merely gaining knowledge. Relevance suggestions for future research are provided in the conclusion section.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of perceived value on customer loyalty through affective commitment in the online group-buying (OGB) context. This paper addressed the following questions: what are the factors affecting customer loyalty (i.e. revisit intention and buy more intention); and how do referral rewards moderate the impact of affective commitment on customer loyalty?

All data were collected from OGB websites’ members in Taiwan. The total number of respondents to the online survey was 403. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) to test a perceived value–commitment–loyalty model.

This study shows that three proposed antecedents (i.e. OGB scheme value, hedonic value and social value) can trigger customer loyalty through affective commitment. Monetary savings, a variety of merchandise and aspirational products are all critical OGB scheme value components. The results also show that referral reward importance positively moderates the relationship between affective commitment and revisit intention.

The findings have implications for managing people and work tasks in OGB websites. First, understanding the importance of dimensions of value should enable OGB managers to develop more accurate targeting strategies. This study provides guidance on the design of the platform and the OGB scheme, for the effective allocating of marketing resources. Second, a referral reward mechanism can be a critical CRM tool; in addition to the potential to attract new customers, they can also help to retain existing customers. This mechanism is a very effective method to enhance customer stickiness.

The marketing literature generally recognizes the importance of developing and maintaining long-term relationships with customers. This study is the first one to explore the importance of affective commitment in developing and sustaining loyal relationships in the OGB context. Referral rewards are an important moderator variable: affective commitment has a stronger effect on the revisit intention when the referral rewards are high. The findings of this study provide insights into how OGB website developers can create customer commitment and more effectively retain existing customers through the use of referral rewards.

Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) is very important for consumer decision making; previous international product diffusion studies have investigated eWOM and cultural factors that influence consumers’ acceptance of new products, but they have not adequately compared the differences in these factors between the USA and China. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to compare the impact of eWOM on consumer choices in China and the USA. The authors addressed the following questions: What are the cross-cultural differences in consumers’ eWOM behavior between the USA and China: Which genres of Hollywood movies have better cross-culture predictability in terms of box office performance; and What factors affect the success of Hollywood movies in entering the Chinese market?

Real eWOM data were collected from two online movie review websites, IMDb.com (the USA) and Douban.com (China), from January 2010 to December 2015. In addition, box office revenue information was collected from BoxOfficeMojo.com. The authors used an independent sample t-test to check whether the differences in consumers’ eWOM behavior between China and the USA and different types of movie lead to cultural discount differences. Furthermore, a log-linear regression model is used to examine which factors influence the commercial success of new movies.

There are specific similarities and differences between the American and Chinese movie markets. First, the results show that American consumers are more engaged in online review systems and tend to submit extreme reviews, but Chinese consumers tend to submit moderate reviews on movies, and the eWOM variance there is smaller than in the USA. Second, genres are useful variables as indicators of movie content; the genres of comedy and drama are not popular in the Chinese market. Finally, eWOM variance has a positive impact on box office in China, but eWOM variance has no impact on the US box office. In addition, the interactive effect of the average rating and eWOM variance on sales is positively significant in China. Importantly, the one-star reviews have a negative impact on the Chinese box office, but it has no impact on US box office.

Understanding how cultural factors influence consumer eWOM communication will help managers to better apply this new marketing communication tool to create more aggressive and targeted promotional plans. Marketers may use eWOM behavior to better respond to and target consumers to overcome barriers to the selection of their products by consumers. Therefore, more effective management of eWOM can improve the acceptance of and preference for products in different cultural consumer groups.

This study expands the existing body of knowledge on eWOM and international marketing literature. Clearly, culture is an important determinant of eWOM’s impact on sales. In addition, it provides strategic direction and practical implications for eWOM communication management in cross-cultural settings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the post-adoption stage of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony diffusion, examining usage behavior based on Shih and Venkatesh’s use-diffusion (UD) model.

The research model incorporates technology sophistication, complementary technologies, personal innovativeness, self-efficacy, trust propensity, media exposure, subjective norms, and word-of-mouth (WOM) referrals as UD determinants; rate of use and variety of use as usage variables; intense use, specialized use, nonspecialized use, and limited use as UD patterns; and satisfaction and intention to use future-related technologies as UD outcomes. Data used to test the research model were collected using a web-based online questionnaire form; 360 valid responses were obtained. Partial least squares, multinomial logistic regression, and analysis of variance were used to analyze data.

The results reveal that variety of use, self-efficacy, propensity to trust, media exposure, subjective norms, and WOM referrals increase rate of use, while complementary technologies, personal innovativeness, self-efficacy, media exposure, and subjective norms widen variety of use; variety of use is essential in predicting UD outcomes; when choosing limited use as the reference category, more than half of the UD determinants are capable of predicting UD patterns; and generally, intense users are more satisfied with VoIP telephony, while limited users have less intention to use future-related technologies.

The present study focuses on the post-adoption stage, thereby extending the frontiers of research on the diffusion of VoIP telephony. Academics can obtain some evidence of the explanatory power of the UD model in the context of VoIP telephony use, and practitioners can obtain fresh insights into the dynamics of VoIP telephony usage behavior.