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The global aim of this paper is to provide managerial and theoretical contributions in order to guide retailers in their decision to invest in interactive storefront technology and to fill in the gaps in the literature in regards to the influence and the role of exterior atmospheric variables in brick-and-mortar retail experience. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of interactive technology in window displays and its influence on consumers’ affective responses, expected shopping experience and behavioural intentions at the point of sale.

The design of the study is founded in the presence (=1) vs absence (=0) of interactive technology in the window display. A partial least squares–structural equation modelling (PLS–SEM) approach is used to analyse the structural model and the correlations between the variables.

This paper finds that the technology has a significant influence on arousal, and that expected shopping experience has a significant influence on patronage intentions.

This study was conducted on French individuals in a tourist bureau setting. The study should be replicated in other retail settings in order to improve the generalisation of the findings.

This study is the first to experimentally test the influence of an interactive storefront display in retailing. This paper also contributes to the retailing literature on exterior atmospheric variables.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of scent congruence with the brand image in the formation of consumers’ reactions to the atmosphere of a place.

Using a factorial design (i.e. scent congruent with the brand image, scent not congruent and control), an experiment was conducted in a multi-service and hospitality space welcoming both local consumers and tourists (N = 303).

The findings show that when the scent is perceived as congruent with the brand image, reactions in the store are more favourable. It is not enough to use a scent that “smells good” or that is congruent with other factors (e.g. sensory environment); the scent must be perceived by consumers as consistent with the brand image. Findings also reveal that the diffusion of a scent congruent with the brand image improves guest satisfaction, intention to revisit and perceptions of the product and service.

The limitations are both the emphasis on direct links and the focus on a French brand (café/co-working space franchise). It would be appropriate to extend the research to other contexts.

The findings show how important it is for hospitality organisations to use scents to generate a positive impact on their guests. Hotel, restaurant and café managers wishing to enhance customer reactions through the creation of an olfactory atmosphere should take scent congruence with the brand image into consideration.

The study of the effects of the atmosphere on consumer behaviour as a function of olfactory congruence with the brand image uses in-situ experimentation (café/co-working and food and beverage area).

This study contributes to greater understanding of the senior market and the cultural differences regarding aging in Western and Asian cultures. The review of the literature highlights the cultural differences toward the concept of aging in Asian and Western countries and describes a useful age concept for investigating senior consumers, namely, that of subjective age. The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of subjective age dimensions on seniors’ behavior and to assess the role of culture as a moderator of this influence.

Data were collected in France and Mainland China and consisted of answers to 300 questionnaires for the French seniors and 264 questionnaires for the Chinese seniors. Two dimensions of subjective age were measured: cognitive age and ideal age, along with travel motivations and travel perceived risk.

The study provides valuable information regarding the Western and Asian senior markets. Subjective age dimensions prove to be related with seniors’ behaviors (perceived travel risks). The present study also demonstrates that nationality has a moderating role on this relation. This theoretical contribution will have to be confirmed by other studies in Asian and Western countries; it opens the door to new research on Chinese/Asian seniors involving these age variables.

The study gives academics and managers insights on the influence of subjective age on seniors’ behaviors in European and Asian cultural contexts.

The practice of pricing with numbers ending in nine (“nine‐ending”) has been little studied. It now seems well established that, under certain conditions, the practice of such pricing strategies has a particular effect on sales, especially inciting the customer to buy products that are more expensive. The research design for explaining such an effect would depend on the price encoding mechanisms, namely, the emphasis of focusing attention, which decreases when reading from left to right, leading to only partial memorization of the price. This would favour the leftmost digits, thus leading to errors of evaluation or estimation of the starting price. A new experiment was carried out to test this possibility. Subjects had to estimate the discount rate of products in a sale, according to whether the starting price was a “rounded” figure or “odd‐ending”. Assuming the first digit of the price is memorized, we might expect that a round starting price leads to an overestimation of the amount of the offered discount. The results provide evidence in support of this hypothesis, enabling us to gain a more accurate knowledge of the processes used for estimating the starting price.

This paper aims to report the findings of an empirical research focusing on Hong Kong online users’ intention to book online tourism products with latest figures. Focusing on the technology acceptance model (TAM), this case study extends the recent research with providing insight regarding the online users’ perceptions of TAM dimensions and how these dimensions are perceived among different demographic groups and Internet usage characteristics with latest figures in Hong Kong, a major tourism destination in Asia with many world-class hotels.

A total of 213 Hong Kong online users were surveyed in March and April 2013 in Hong Kong business districts.

Findings reveal that most respondents who use the Internet for booking online travel products are young, and people above a certain age are not likely to favor booking tourism products online. They are more likely to stick to traditional personal service. Perceived usefulness of the Internet is found more influential than its ease of use in forming a usage intention, and ease of use is perceived more important by jobseekers, student and employees than the other profession groups. In addition, respondents who use the Internet every day and did purchase online tourism product perceived usefulness more important than ease of use.

The generalization of this research is limited by its sample size and number of questions.

The study gives a new perspective by linking TAM with intention to book online in Hong Kong. The paper would be of interest to the Web site planners or online tourism practitioners to consider Web site usefulness as much as its ease of its use, as both usefulness and ease of use of tourism Web sites are strong predictors of intention to book online.

This research aimed to fill several gaps in the tipping literature which has overlooked the server's perspective in identifying and understanding variables that influence a tip amount and therefore where they concentrate their efforts during the service encounter. Furthermore, the extant literature has theorized how or why certain variables influence the tip amount, but these studies fail to capture insight from server's which would supplement the theory and provide a more in-depth understanding of the mechanisms at play.

This study adopts a grounded theory approach using semi-structured one-on-one interviews with tipped restaurant employees who were identified and selected using snowball sampling. Content analysis is employed to code and categorize the data.

The content analysis revealed five categories where servers focus their time and effort to earn tips: service quality, connection, personal factors, expertise and food quality. The server's personality was identified as a variable the tipping literature has largely ignored as a determinant of the tip amount. Server's shift their style of service for groups of eight or more people, and for regular customers, who must dine in the restaurant at least once per week. Lastly, despite the many drawbacks associated with working for tips, servers would not want to replace it with any other method of compensation.

This is the first qualitative study focused on understanding the server's role in the service exchange relationship since McCarty et al. (1990) study. The results provide new insights on the often-studied variables from the tipping literature.

Tipping within the foodservice industry has traditionally been reserved for full-service restaurants. However, there is a growing trend of tip requests at limited-service restaurants, where tipping occurs prior to consuming the product. This research aims to examine the effect of a point-of-sale tip request at limited-service restaurants on return intentions via customer irritation. It also aims to analyze the moderating effects of check amount and perceived deservingness.

Four online scenario-based experiments were conducted to test the hypotheses. Participants were recruited from MTurk for all experiments (N_Study 1 = 152; N_Study 2 = 296; N_Study 3 = 206; N_Study 4 = 134).

Studies 1 and 2 suggested a negative impact of presenting a tip request on return intentions, with customer irritation as the underlying mechanism. Study 3 found the indirect effect was significant only when the check amount was low. Study 4 found that perceived deservingness of a tip also moderated this effect; the indirect effect was significant only when customers felt the employee did not deserve a tip. The effect was attenuated when customers felt the employee deserved a tip.

This paper contributes to the underexplored area of tipping behavior in the limited-service context. The findings contrast extant research on voluntary tipping at full-service restaurants, thus advancing theory by suggesting the consequences of tip requests are contextual and providing practical insights to limited-service establishments contemplating whether to begin requesting tips.

This paper aims to explore the types of perceived risks involved with using drone food delivery services. Furthermore, this study investigates the relationship between perceived risk and image of drone food delivery services. Lastly, this study examines the effect of image of drone food delivery services on desire, intentions to use and willingness to pay more.

This study collected data from 331 respondents in Korea. Before the start of the survey, the respondents were given a video, which made it easier for them to understand drone food delivery services.

The three types of perceived risks (i.e. time risk, performance risk and psychological risk) have a negative influence on image of drone food delivery services and, thus, aids in increasing desire, intentions to use and willingness to pay more.

The concept of perceived risk was applied to the context of drone food delivery services in this study in combination with other understudied concepts, image, desire, intentions to use and willingness to pay more. This study is one of the first studies that applied those significant concepts to the context of drone food delivery services, even though there are a large number of papers in the technology field. Thus, the findings of this study will be important to foodservice companies when building successful drone food delivery services.

Through a critical synthesis and reflection on the theoretical foundations and empirical evidence related to sensory marketing, this study aims to offer meaningful insights for hospitality operators and provides future research directions on sensory marketing in hospitality.

Building on an extensive review of sensory marketing studies across disciplines, this paper presents critical discussions of the theories and findings on the five senses in the context of hospitality.

The critical synthesis and discussion indicate that sensory marketing is highly relevant and applicable to operations in various hospitality sectors such as hotels and restaurants. Still, empirical evidence is required to lend support to the discussions. Although scholarly interest in sensory marketing has surged in the past decade, some research streams, such as sensory incongruence, cross-modal correspondence and sensory intensity, have yet to be extended. These under-researched areas provide directions for future hospitality research.

Through discussions of empirical evidence related to the five senses, mental simulation, cross-modal correspondence and sensory congruence, this paper provides implications for managing customers’ sensory experiences and behavior in hospitality settings.

Despite the increase of research on sensory marketing in the past decade, its full implications in the context of hospitality remain unknown. Through a critical synthesis and reflection on the hospitality literature, this paper offers research directions for a systematic expansion of sensory marketing.

The purpose of this research is to study the influence of self-service technologies (SST) on cross-buying and word-of-mouth. This study tests the direct impact of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use on cross-buying and word-of-mouth. Further, this study also tests the mediating role of e-service quality for the aforementioned relationships. The study has been undertaken in the context of retail banking in an emerging market, India.

A cross-sectional survey research design was used to collect data from 235 customers of retail banks in India. The data were analysed using IBM AMOS 23.0 taking structural equation modelling (SEM) approach to test the hypothesised relationships.

The findings of the study suggest that both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use influence cross-buying and word-of-mouth. E-service quality partially mediates the relationship between perceived usefulness on cross-buying and word-of-mouth. E-service quality partially mediates the relationship between perceived ease of use and cross-buying but does not mediate the relationship between perceived ease of use and word-of-mouth.

This study shows that managers need to focus on perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use in order to ensure cross-buying and promote word-of-mouth recommendations by customers. Also, managers will be able to enhance cross-buying and promote word-of-mouth recommendations if e-service quality delivered by the bank is perceived to be good by customers.

This study contributes to the literature on SST and offers empirical evidence to show that perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use can influence cross-buying as well as word-of-mouth. Previous studies have shown that SST usage can foster loyalty, and the present study offers new evidence on the outcomes of behavioural loyalty. The study has been undertaken through responses taken from retail bank customers in an emerging market. This study also contributes to the literature on SST by testing the mediating effect of e-service quality for the above-mentioned relationships.