Guest editorial

Citation

Law, R., Fong, L.H.N., Koo, C. and Ye, B.H. (2017), "Guest editorial", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 29 No. 2, pp. 646-647. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-11-2016-0635

Social media in hospitality and tourism

Welcome to International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management’s (IJCHM’s) special issue on social media in hospitality and tourism. I would like to pay special thanks to our guest editors Rob Law, Lawrence Hoc Nang Fong, Chulmo Koo and Ben Haobin Ye for putting together this very strong and timely special issue. The articles included in this special issue should be well received by scholars, students and practicing managers in our field.

Fevzi Okumus

Editor-in-chief

The global prevalence of social media in recent years has fundamentally changed the ways of communication among individuals and in the business landscape. Social media provides industry practitioners in different sectors ideal opportunities to obtain, satisfy and retain their customers in a more efficient manner. At the same time, social media offers hospitality and tourism academic scholars a wide spectrum of research opportunities. Riding the wave of social media, a vast body of knowledge in social media-related topics has been accumulated in the recent hospitality and tourism literature. However, only a limited number of studies have been conducted on the factors that contribute to the propagation of electronic word-of-mouth through social media and user-generated content in the hospitality and tourism context. In addition, research on value creation and satisfaction generation through social media has not received due attention from tourism and hospitality scholars. To provide a basis for understanding the trends and issues that are related to social media in hospitality and tourism, the IJCHM presents a special issue that comprises nine articles, each focusing on a specific topic and providing important theoretical and practical implications to the industry.

More than 30 submissions were received for publication consideration in the special issue, and this number reflects the popularity of this research topic in the area. After multiple rounds of rigorous peer review for selecting articles with the highest quality, nine full-length papers were included in this special issue. The articles covered a wide range of topics, and they were authored by researchers who are affiliated with research institutes from Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania, thus representing most of the major continents.

Co-authored by Edward, Cheng, Wong, Zhang and Wu, the first paper of the special issue examines the knowledge sharing structure and coproduction of trip-related knowledge through online travel forums. Dickinger, Lalicic and Mazanec’s paper illustrates the discrimination between positive and negative reviews based on single word items. The third paper was written by Chung, Lee and Song, and it examines consumers’ impulsive buying behavior of restaurant products in social commerce. Zhang and Abound-Omran’s work on generation Y’s word-of-mouth in social media is the fourth paper on the special issue. MacKay, Barbe, Van Winkle and Halpenny’s paper focuses on social media activity in a festival context. The next paper, co-authored by Lee, Jeong and Lee, uses a text mining approach to analyze how emotional expressions affect the perceived helpfulness of online hotel reviews in social media. The study of Kim and Park compares social media review ratings and traditional customer satisfaction in their ability to predict hotel performance. The eighth paper, which was co-authored by Wu, Shen, Li and Deng, examines the effect of temporal contiguity cue and power on consumer responses to online reviews. The last paper was written by Yang, Hlee, Lee and Koo, and it investigates the effects of the two presentation formats of online reviews on review usefulness and review enjoyment.

We would like to thank all the contributors for their submissions. We extend our gratitude particularly to Prof Fevzi Okumus, the Chief Editor of IJCHM, for supporting the idea of this special issue and for continuously providing valuable advice. In addition, this special issue would not have been possible without the considerable effort from a group of international reviewers. The reviewers’ time and effort in carefully reviewing the manuscripts and offering their professional comments for improvement are instrumental in raising the overall quality of all papers included on this special issue. We also thank Dr Roy Zhao and Ms Sunny Sun for their untiring technical assistance throughout the entire process. This special issue has become a real product primarily because of the involvement of these people.

The high-quality papers on this special issue cover different topics in social media in hospitality and tourism, and they provide practical implications in different areas. We trust that readers will find this special issue informative and useful. Most importantly, we hope that this issue offers significant insights for future developments in tourism and hospitality management.