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While the value of stakeholder involvement in destination marketing and branding has been emphasized, little research has been conducted on the inner workings of collaborative initiatives. Based on the case of the Athens Tourism Partnership, Greece, this study aims to map the value co-creation process as it unfolds in joint destination marketing and branding initiatives.

To capture the way partners collaborated to create the brand of the city, this study collected data through participant observation and analyzed it using Classical Grounded Theory principles.

The study reveals the different types of relationships and their characteristics that develop when an airline-airport-destination authority partnership is established to enhance destination brand and the potential dynamics of the collaborative initiatives.

The FiNE framework has been developed and can guide stakeholders who wish to collaborate to co-create the destination brand. This study offers theoretical and practical implications for destination authorities and tourism stakeholders to initiate, manage and implement collaborative initiatives that may empower the destination brand and deliver win-win outcomes.

This paper aims to examine developments in tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic using the hotel sector in the North-East of England as the area of study. The country has attracted a lot of attention not only because of its importance as a tourism destination but also due to its rather controversial management of the pandemic at least in its early stages.

Fifteen semi-structured interviews based on ten open-ended questions were conducted with North East of England-based hotel managers of international brands on the level of their hotels’ preparedness to effectively deal with pandemic cases. The interviews took place in August and September 2020 with participants kept anonymous.

Meeting new operational and bureaucratic requirements added to the cost structure and proved a major challenge for managers who saw their hotel occupancy rates and revenue collapsing within a short period of time. Innovative and aggressive pricing strategies were introduced to lure especially younger travelers in the absence of business clientele. Staff were made redundant and/or asked to work overtime making effective human resource management very difficult.

This is one of the first research attempts to highlight the importance of the COVID-19 pandemic for the hotel sector in a major region of the UK. The paper also attempts some generalization by discussing managerial implications and suggesting a possible way forward for the hotel sector. Developing resilience by building on previously used successful business practices proves of essence.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the implicit prices of hotel attributes in different time periods and different markets.

With data from the travel meta-search engine, this paper chose 3- to 5-star hotels in Beijing’s central business district and use hedonic price models.

The results suggest that the attributes with significant implicit prices differ in different time periods; the same attributes with different implicit prices in different time periods; the same attributes with different implicit prices in different market segments.

This study may help to explain the different findings on the relationship between the attributes and room rates of Chinese star-rated hotels in different time periods, and will be useful in both revenue optimization efforts and the design of new hotels projects.

The purpose of this paper is to present the architectural principles and the services of the D-NET software toolkit. D-NET is a framework where designers and developers find the tools for constructing and operating aggregative infrastructures (systems for aggregating data sources with heterogeneous data models and technologies) in a cost-effective way. Designers and developers can select from a variety of D-NET data management services, can configure them to handle data according to given data models, and can construct autonomic workflows to obtain personalized aggregative infrastructures.

The paper provides a definition of aggregative infrastructures, sketching architecture, and components, as inspired by real-case examples. It then describes the limits of current solutions, which find their lacks in the realization and maintenance costs of such complex software. Finally, it proposes D-NET as an optimal solution for designers and developers willing to realize aggregative infrastructures. The D-NET architecture and services are presented, drawing a parallel with the ones of aggregative infrastructures. Finally, real-cases of D-NET are presented, to show-case the statement above.

The D-NET software toolkit is a general-purpose service-oriented framework where designers can construct customized, robust, scalable, autonomic aggregative infrastructures in a cost-effective way. D-NET is today adopted by several EC projects, national consortia and communities to create customized infrastructures under diverse application domains, and other organizations are enquiring for or are experimenting its adoption. Its customizability and extendibility make D-NET a suitable candidate for creating aggregative infrastructures mediating between different scientific domains and therefore supporting multi-disciplinary research.

D-NET is the first general-purpose framework of this kind. Other solutions are available in the literature but focus on specific use-cases and therefore suffer from the limited re-use in different contexts. Due to its maturity, D-NET can also be used by third-party organizations, not necessarily involved in the software design and maintenance.

Destination recommender systems need to become truly human‐centric in their design and functionality. This requires a profound understanding of human interactions with technology as well as human behavior related to information search and decision‐making in the context of travel and tourism. This paper seeks to review relevant theories that can support the development and evaluation of destination recommender systems and to discuss how quantitative research can inform such theory building and testing.

Based on a review of information search and decision‐making literatures, a framework for the development of destination recommender systems is proposed and the implications for the design and evaluation of human‐centric recommender systems are discussed.

A variety of factors that influence the information search and processing strategies that influence interactions with a destination recommender system are identified. This reveals a great need for data‐driven models to inform recommender system processes.

The proposed framework provides a basis for future research and development in the area of destination recommender systems. The paper concludes that the success of a specific destination recommender system will depend largely on its ability to anticipate and respond creatively to transformations in the personal and situational needs of its users. Such system intelligence needs to be based on empirical data analyzed with sophisticated quantitative methods. The importance of recommender systems in tourism marketing is also discussed.

Studies show that internet has become a major force propelling growth in tourism sector in many countries. An appropriate diffusion of the information and communication technology (ICT) services can facilitate visibility of hotels and lodges on search sites and third-party booking websites and thus influence demand. It also helps leverage the use of social media for promotion and customer acquisition purposes. Recently, Myanmar, with impressive historical world heritage sites, is witnessing a tourist boom; more hotels are opening up and achieving competitive advantage by offering free internet connectivity to guests and locating their premises in the vicinity of an ICT infrastructure. The purpose of this paper is to investigate ICT readiness to support the lodging industry in Myanmar by focusing on one sub-index of the Network Readiness Index (NRI, a term heavily used by World Economic Forum). The paper focuses on the “Network Use” component of NRI, pertaining to the effect of the “quality of the Internet connection” available to lodges, and its association with the following dimensions: customer service: the availability of ICT services to guests, such as internet connectivity and availability of ATM in the vicinity; digital marketing: the use of social media, keeping records of guests and analyzing aggregate data to extract business insights; and business-to-business online booking: the use of online booking via major third-party intermediary websites like Expedia, Booking.com and Agoda.com.

Surveys were conducted in three major touristic cities in Myanmar: Bagan, Mandalay and the capital city, Nay Pyi Taw. A total of 101 valid questionnaires were used. Survey questions were centered around the following themes: internet connection problems, digital marketing activities, and online booking directly or via third party digital intermediary. The data are presented and interpreted by descriptive statistics and regression analysis.

Though, Myanmar is new to internet and commercial use of ICT, the awareness of the importance of leveraging social media and online booking for business development is surprisingly high in the lodging sector. On average, about 80 percent of surveyed hotels are present on the WWW through a dedicated hotel website. However, most websites lack an online booking capability. As a result, and due to a global trend, online booking through third-party intermediaries has become the dominant option for hotel booking arrangements in Myanmar. Agoda, founded in Bangkok in 2002, was found to be the number one choice for online booking intermediary in Myanmar, followed by Booking.com. Analysis of the logistic regression revealed that it was highly likely that areas around ATMs have better internet connectivity. As expected, it was also found that it is very unlikely that hotels reporting a problem in internet connectivity will be able to provide internet service to their guests. Despite the presence of problems in internet connectivity in Mandalay and Bagan cities, located away from the capital; most hotels in these cities resort to leveraging social media for promotion and customer/guest development. The analysis also revealed that cities located away from the capital are more aggressive in leverage online third-booking intermediaries.

While researchers were hoping for a higher participation rate in the survey, especially in the city of Mandalay, data collection was challenging, a number of hotels/lodges denied participation. This may have some implications on the generalization of results. However, over 70 and 45 percent of hotels/lodges in the capital city and the ancient city of Bagan, respectively, had participated in the survey.

Tourism has a great potential for growth in Myanmar. This research recommends ways to achieve and sustain competitive advantage for the lodging sector, which is vital for tourism.

Though a considerable research exists on tourism and the recent advances of the ICT sector in Myanmar, the country’s readiness for the actual usage of the internet for the development of tourism has not been specifically addressed. This paper explores this with compelling research findings useful for policy makers as well as players in the tourism sector.