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This chapter aims to determine the marketing practices of kid-friendly hotels in Turkey by utilizing descriptive analysis. A total of 77 kid-friendly hotels operating in Turkey were surveyed through the examination of their websites. This chapter adopts a descriptive approach in defining marketing practices of kid-friendly hotels. The findings showed that various facilities and services are offered in kid-friendly hotels under the categories of “room options for children,” “food and beverage options for children,” “activities for children,” “price options,” and “children’s health and safety.” Although the results cannot be generalized beyond the scope of the study, this chapter revealed the current status of marketing to children in kid-friendly hotels operating in Turkey. Marketing implications are provided for practitioners and recommendations for future research are also discussed.

In jam festival music scenes, participants build elaborate networks that connect members formally and informally between music events. Largely regional in scope, participants form these networks to develop and perform scene identities and cultivate intimate social relationships. Emerging through cultivated “crews” and “camps,” members build hubs of interaction that sustain and persist well beyond the festival event to create a vital sense of belonging and place. While the affective relationships formed at music festival events tend to be temporary, diffuse, and episodic, scene networks provide a “portable” interactional infrastructure that promotes relational continuity and persistence. These networks also provide more pragmatic benefits to networked members in the form of social and subcultural capital exchanged for symbolic and material rewards within the scene. Drawing from nearly 20 years of formal and informal participant observation in festival scenes, I provide an analysis of these networks and articulate common practices that drive their formation and continuation.

This paper aims to understand how guests’ trip purpose and hotel star rating influence the effects of the value for money perceived at hotels and service quality on guest satisfaction and word of mouth (WOM) recommendation.

Using TripAdvisor, 25 Singaporean hotels were randomly selected for the study, which yielded hotel reviews from 2,040 respondents. Hierarchical and logistic regression analysis was conducted to investigate the relationships proposed in the study.

Results indicate significant differences between leisure and business guests’ perception of value for money and service quality at hotels with various star ratings. While perceived value for money and service quality were found as significant predictors for both leisure and business guests’ satisfaction and WOM, the effects were moderated by the hotel star rating. Despite the significant effect of hotel star rating on guest satisfaction, the study found no significant relationships between hotel star rating and WOM for leisure and business guests.

The findings suggest that managers in the hotel industry should understand the purpose of guests’ trip and offer services based on their expectations. As the star rating of a hotel creates certain expectations for both leisure and business guests, providing an appropriate level of services and assuring value for money in accordance with the hotel rating contributes to guest satisfaction and WOM recommendation.

This study contributes to the hospitality literature by investigating how hotel star rating moderates the relationship of value for money and service quality on leisure and business guests’ satisfaction and WOM recommendation.

This paper aims to investigate how brand identity is co-created, with a specific focus on how employees contributed to the process in a five-star hotel setting. The focus of this study is on understanding how two hotels planned and executed their brand identity strategy simultaneously, differentiating one from the other and how employees actively participated in this process.

A longitudinal case study approach was adopted, centred on building the identity of two luxury hotels owned by a single company in Seoul, Korea. Various organizational documents were collected and analyzed to understand the brand identity of the hotels and how brand co-creation has been implemented. In addition, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 42 employees to understand the brand co-creation process from their perspective.

The brand co-creation process of the hotels was conducted simultaneously and evolved over the following four phases, with employees’ roles varying in each phase, namely, establishing a clear brand identity strategy; designing and selecting sensory identity; aligning organizational identity; and delivering brand identity through external communication. Employees that participated in brand co-creation enhanced their brand knowledge, developed emotional bonds with the brand and were motivated to deliver the brand identity. Furthermore, those that immersed themselves in the new brand identities were able to enable positive guest perceptions towards the brand image, which consequently enhanced employees’ pride in their work.

This research advances the brand management literature in defining branding and brand identity elements, as well as emphasizing the importance of consistent branding. In addition, the current study expands the scope of internal branding, highlighting the process of brand co-creation and the role of employees as active participants. Moreover, it reveals that employees’ participation enhances not only their brand knowledge but also their emotional bonds with the brand. The proposed conceptual framework demonstrates the flow of branding elements, brand identity elements and the “infinite loop” of employee participation in brand co-creation.

The case study approach adopted here enables an in-depth investigation of employee participation in brand co-creation, including their different roles and activities in the process; a phenomenon that has not been adequately explored in previous research.

The purpose of this paper is to verify the hypothesis that seasonality in the peer-to-peer (p2p) market for tourist accommodation is smaller than the existing in conventional markets, taking the case of the island of Majorca as a reference. This paper will also determine the role of professional hosts in the management of prices and in the marketing of accommodation according to seasonal demand variations.

From the information obtained through web scrapings of Airbnb listings and from data provided by official statistics, comparable indicators of seasonality are developed. Likewise, econometric estimates are provided to detect differences regarding the determination of accommodation prices between professional and nonprofessional hosts.

The p2p market is less subject to seasonality than the conventional one. In the particular case of Palma de Majorca, fluctuations in accommodation demand are even smaller than in the rest of the island's municipalities. Professional hosts apply marketing techniques related to price and product promotion and are sensitive to demand variations altering prices and responding to the economic stimuli in this way. At an academic level, these findings suggest, on the one hand, the relevance of considering the heterogeneity of the touristic market when constructing theoretical models. And, on the other hand, basic economic principles should be applied to explain agent behavior in the p2p market.

This work does not use a direct demand measurement. Instead, it approximates demand through the reviews left by guests in p2p markets. At least in the case of the island of Majorca, the touristic demand represents a reduced percentage of touristic demand in total.

So far, both public and private strategies to combat seasonality have focused on increasing occupancy in conventional accommodation. Still, the fact that hotel demand and private accommodation demand are different has relevant implications for price management, touristic products, supply planning and the implementation of marketing campaigns. Also, advertising could be aimed at alleviating the undesirable effects of seasonality.

The evidence presented helps the design of public policy strategies aimed at mitigating the problem of seasonality in touristic demand to accommodate it to social preferences in each area.

This is the first piece of research, as far as we are aware of, that addresses the phenomenon of demand seasonality in the p2p market for tourist accommodation. In addition, a comparison is made with the seasonal patterns that characterize the conventional hotel market. New ideas are provided for the design of a comprehensive touristic policy in which both markets are considered.

Where tourism research related to families holidaying with young children in coastal mass tourism destination is scant, this paper aims to explore accommodation constraints and needs of European parents who holiday with young children.

Fourteen in-depth interviews were conducted with parents of young children who have just completed their family vacation in the island of Sardinia, Italy by positioning the interviewer at the boarding area of the Olbia Costa Smeralda airport.

The analysis returned five key themes: location of accommodation, quality of interactions, child-friendly amenities, safety and family-oriented programmes.

Within these five themes, seven new attributes were identified and contribute to the current literature on accommodation preferences of parents travelling with young children. The findings also suggest that this is a distinct segment within family tourism and should not be treated homogeneously with families with older or adult children. Finally, the data highlight the distinctions between Asian and Western parents in terms of their accommodation needs.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the fast‐growing virtual world, focusing on the appeal of these environments for the “digital native” generation and the growth of Second Life.

The paper examines the latest research on virtual worlds and Second Life, examining the corporate presence “in‐world,” as well as the economic, technical, legal, ethical, and security issues involved for companies doing business in the virtual world.

The paper shows that Second Life and virtual worlds hold great opportunities, along with significant downsides, for companies.

The research is limited by the very fact that this is a fast‐developing, fast‐changing area, constantly generating both new opportunities and new issues/challenges.

With projections that 80 percent of all internet users will be involved in virtual worlds by 2011, it is important that executives and academicians be knowledgeable about these 3D internet environments.

The paper traces the development of virtual worlds in the larger context of the growth of online gaming as a form of entertainment and interaction. It takes an objective look at the benefits and pitfalls for organizations looking to engage in Second Life and other virtual worlds.

This paper aims to analyze factors based on organizational knowledge management (KM; transactional memory systems and knowledge-oriented leadership [K-OL]) that help firms to mitigate conflicts based on task management at work, with the aim to improve their innovation capabilities (IC). The knowledge-based view of the firm, conflict management theory and cognitive collective engagement theory have been used to build a model of relationships that connects the development of positive KM contexts and management of dysfunctional conflict with IC improvement.

Data survey collected from inland hotel establishments in Spain is used to test seven hypotheses by means of structural equations modeling, applying the partial least squares technique. Direct, indirect and mediating relationships between variables are examined from the structural path model.

The results confirm that, as expected, IC improve when K-OL and transactive memory systems (TMSs) are properly implemented by hotel establishments, which leads them to reduce negative effects of task management conflict (TMC). Significant direct effects are found between the key variables of the study and also a significant indirect effect between K-OL and IC through TMS reinforcement and the mitigation of TMC.

This paper provides useful ideas for hotel managers about how to improve KM contexts in their establishments while avoiding TMC. Efforts devoted to creating those contexts by hotel establishments are shown to be effective to improve their IC and create competitive advantages.

The analysis of IC improvement by studying TMC mitigation had not been researched to date by the KM literature. The consideration and testing of a model that integrates KM-related tools such as K-OL and TMS to avoid TMC in the hotel industry is the main contribution of this study.

While the COVID-19 virus has been spreading worldwide, some studies have related the pandemic with various aspects of accounting and therefore emphasized the importance of accounting research in understanding the impact of COVID-19 on society as a whole. Recent studies have looked into such an impact on various industries such as retail and agriculture. The current study aims at applying a sociological framework, sociology of worth (SOW), to the gaming industry in Macau, the largest operator of state-allowed gambling and entertainment in China, which will allow for its development during the COVID-19 pandemic to be charted.

The study uses the theory of SOW as a framework and collects data from various sources, such as the government, gaming operators and the public, to create timelines and SOW frameworks to analyze the impact of the virus on the gaming industry and the society as a whole.

Detailed content analysis and the creation of different SOW matrices determined that the notion of a “lonely economy” during a time of a critical event may be ameliorated in the long term through compromises of the different worlds and actors of the SOW.

Though largely theory-based, this study offers a thorough account of the COVID-19 incident for both the government and the gaming industry to reflect on and to consider new ways to fight against degrowth caused by disasters or crises.

The SOW framework divides society into different worlds of different worths. The current study shows how the worths of the different worlds are congruent during normal periods, and how cracks appear between them when a sudden crisis, such as COVID-19, occurs. The article serves as a social account of how these cracks are formed and how could they be resolved through compromise and reconstruction.

This study is a first attempt to apply SOW to a controversial industry (gaming) while the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are ongoing. It offers a significant contribution to the social accounting literature through its consideration of the combination of unprecedented factors in a well-timed study that pays close attention to analyses and theoretical elaboration.