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This study aims to explore how the treatment, well-being and satisfaction of health tourists are affected by what is characterized as the hospitality culture of health care.

A qualitative research design focusing on in-depth semi-structured interviews was conducted with 28 Omani health tourists who visited Iran and received health-care services. Data were analyzed thematically using ATLAS.ti software.

The results revealed that a caring health professional is essential for patient healing and well-being. Cultural congruence is enhanced through effective communication between patients and health-care service providers. Additionally, a hospitality-certified workforce is essential for customer satisfaction and overall well-being. Finally, a hospitality-style approach and home-like atmosphere improve patient rehabilitation and performance.

The study’s exclusive focus on Omani health tourists necessitates caution in generalizing findings. Future research could encompass more diverse populations and inclusive samples to broaden applicability.

The study highlights the key role of hospitality culture in the health-care sector, emphasizing the significance of building a culturally sensitive and hospitable environment to improve patient satisfaction and overall well-being. This includes the creation of welcoming environments and customized health-care experiences congruent with patients’ cultural values and beliefs.

The study emphasizes the crucial role of hospitality culture in health tourism and the potential to create a culture of care and respect in health-care settings, addressing patients’ holistic needs beyond physical amenities and enriching the patient experience. It also applies Leininger’s Culture Care Theory to hospitality, providing a novel viewpoint on culturally congruent, safe and meaningful care for health tourists.

This study aims to examine international tourists’ local African food consumption experiences by using an attribute–benefit–value–intention (ABVI) framework.

A total of 336 respondents were collected in Ghana, Africa. A series of quantitative research methods were used in the data analysis to explicate the relationships.

By assessing critical structural relationships, 8 out of 14 hypothetical relationships were found to be empirically supported. They include the paths between food novelty, restaurant quality and food quality as antecedents of epistemic value, the path between restaurant quality and food quality and the path between restaurant quality and consumption value.

This study establishes the psychological mechanism behind tourists’ local food consumption experiences and further extends the utility of the consumption value theory and ABVI framework into the local food experience context. It confirms that tourists’ local food consumption experiences involve a sequential psychological process involving local food attribute evaluation, benefits sought, consumption values and future intention. This study offers a thorough explanation of variables that are crucial to promoting indigenous ethnic food consumption experience.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of the Internet, and more specifically social media, on franchise business models.

A review of both franchising and Internet literatures enables the creation of a simple model that distinguishes between surface waves, highly visible innovations that influence a restricted set of franchise business models, and deep waves that have a broader and more long-lasting influence on all franchises.

The first Internet era had a surface wave, online selling, that impacted relatively few franchises, but the deep wave of the wide availability of information and training materials has had a broader and more sustained impact on franchise systems. Similarly, Web 2.0’s social element has created a surface wave, the shared economy for hotels and cars, that affects relatively few franchises, but the deep wave of user-rating Web sites and Apps promises to have a broader and more long-lasting influence.

This paper enables researchers identify potential research topics, highlighting the need to determine the impact of social media on how consumers perceive quality and the influence this has on their ongoing behavior.

This paper helps practitioners understand how the Internet influences the competitive balance between franchised and non-franchised businesses. Hence, it will be of interest to any large organization that offers high quality decentralized products or services, as they typically either franchise or compete with franchised businesses. As well, for entrepreneurs considering investing in a franchise, this paper will help identify which business models are more sustainable in the face of Internet innovation.

The surface wave/deep wave model is a new approach to analyzing the long-term impact of the Internet on all decentralized businesses.

This study aims to explore how hotels adapt their business models as a strategic response to crisis situations. It sheds light on the processes and methods of business model adaptation during severe crisis situations, such as the COVID-19 outbreak.

A single-case study was conducted. Data were collected from the owner/manager of a boutique hotel chain in Chiang Mai, Thailand through an extensive interviewing process. The authors also examined corporate documents. The authors then re-organized the material as a coherent narrative about how the company navigated the COVID-19 crisis.

The findings show that the hotels in the study adapted their business models by cutting costs through stopping non-essential operations, increasing non-room revenues and adding new revenue channels, bringing in cash from advance bookings, securing financial support from creditors, leveraging government support and training staff for the “new normal.”

Few previous studies have focused on business model adaptation during the COVID-19 crisis. The investigation of this largely neglected area provides two main contributions. First, it extends the literature on crisis management in hospitality firms by examining business model adaptation patterns and processes during unprecedented crisis conditions. Second, it provides managerial insights and a business model adjustment framework to help practitioners in urban settings in their efforts toward recovery from the COVID crisis.

This study aims to progress scholarly understanding of the staycation phenomenon by examining customer segments and documenting local customers’ attribute preferences.

A stated choice experiment is used to examine customer preferences for staycation package attributes. Latent class discrete choice modeling is deployed to classify customers into market segments based on their preferences. The profile of each segment is enhanced by documenting customer characteristics and consumption styles.

Six prominent market segments are identified using a combination of sociodemographics, consumption styles and staycation attribute preferences. The findings draw on consumer experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic to generate theoretical insights into preferred staycation packages. Empirically, the estimation results from the research framework and choice experimental method demonstrate that staycation market segments exhibit distinct preference structures.

Practitioners and policymakers can incorporate the findings of this study in designing and/or assessing staycation packages. This can ensure differentiated products for defined segments that resonate within local communities through positive word of mouth, thus offering prospective spillovers to visiting friends and relatives.

This is a pioneering study on preference heterogeneity from the customer perspective, with a focus on staycation markets. The findings can encourage and assist hotel sector leaders to capitalize on local market developments to achieve a more resilient hospitality business model.

Crisis planning and improvements to business resilience are increasingly significant aspects of hotel management. This study investigates the crisis preparation of hotel managers in Malaysia and how their perceptions affect crisis planning and preparation.

A qualitative research method of semi-structured interviews with 24 hospitality managers in Malaysia was conducted. Data were analysed thematically using ATLAS.ti software, version 8.

The findings showed that crisis preparation among Malaysian hospitality firms is relatively neglected. Hotel crisis preparation schemes are greatly influenced by senior managers' intentions and organizational culture. Organizational resilience also has a significant role in hotel crisis planning and preparedness. Interestingly, in terms of long-term adaptation, hotels were less inclined to be “learning organizations” and managers were reluctant to change their organizational established structures, core beliefs and practice sustained resiliency in crisis preparation.

Understanding the crisis preparation of hospitality managers is important to develop effective strategies for different crises considering their severity and urgency. This study identified influential organizational and personal factors which affect crisis preparation of hospitality managers in Malaysia. The study further recommends a proactive mindset in crisis preparation of hotels.

Crisis preparation of hospitality managers had received limited attention, and this study highlights how managers consider crisis planning and preparation.

Scholars have rarely applied an embodied perspective when studying hospitality experiences. They have given even less attention to methodological considerations. This paper aims to introduce Zaltman’s Metaphor elicitation Technique (ZMET) to explore various domains of the embodied experience.

In demonstrating the applicability of the ZMET procedure to understanding embodied hospitality experiences, the researchers present a study of emotional encounters that involve the dining experiences of Chinese tourists with Western cuisine. The focus of the paper is on data collection, i.e. detailing the step-wise procedures of ZMET that have received minimal scholarly attention.

Through the medium of this empirical study, the ZMET example uncovers deep metaphors and answers previously unanswered questions about embodied experiences. The detailed information and nuanced insights that are generated through this ZMET application offer the prospect of enhanced understanding of the hospitality experience.

This investigation contributes an innovative research method to the embodied experience in the hospitality and tourism context.

This study draws on the service-dominant (S-D) logic paradigm to examine value co-creation and co-destruction. As these phenomena are driven by positive and negative “customer-to-customer” (C2C) interactions, this paper aims to examine their influence on tourist perceptions of service quality and how they shape affective responses toward tourism and hospitality services and brand loyalty.

Following a comprehensive literature review, the authors used convenience sampling to gather a large sample of tourists at Shanghai Disneyland, a recently opened and already popular international tourism attraction. Structural equation modeling was used to test for direct and moderated relationships.

The findings indicated that positive and negative C2C interactions have significant though differential impacts on customer responses. Furthermore, it was found that visitor arousal mediated the relationship between service quality and brand loyalty. Prior experience was identified as a moderator in the co-creation and co-destruction process during service encounters.

This paper is one of the first to examine the concept of co-destruction in the tourism and hospitality context. It contributes to the literature by demonstrating the merits of proactive service provision by tourism operators, taking account of both the co-creation and co-destruction of value.

The study extends the literature by taking account of both positive and negative C2C interactions when examining co-creation and co-destruction in the context of service encounters. It also contributes to knowledge by assessing the asymmetry of such interactions in the context of the customer experience.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an extensive analysis of contributions to scholarly research on decision tools.

A systematic literature review was used to collect data from 47 articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals between 1980 and 2017. Co-citation analysis was adopted to analyse recent trends in research on decision tools and recommend a framework that places such research into three categories: mature, intermediate and nascent.

The research revealed that a majority of the studies on decision tools describe decision tool implementation in a single company or setting. It also provided a clear presentation of recent trends in the decision tools literature by categorising and comparing papers according to various salient features. The study of decision tools is classified into four macro clusters: conceptualising and defining decision tools; exploring the implementation of decision tools; understanding the relationship between decision tools and other disciplines/approaches/initiatives; and discovering the outcomes of decision tools. Furthermore, the framework proposed in this paper will help scholars identify issues that merit additional theory-building and/or theory-testing research.

To the authors’ awareness, this is the first paper to have adopted both a systematic literature review and co-citation analysis to identify the dominant trends and significant gaps in the field of decision tools research.

This paper aims to explore gender disparities in the production of tourism knowledge with particular reference to academic journals.

Authorship and co-authorship analyses were conducted of data extracted from articles and research notes published between 1965 and 2016 in 25 hospitality and tourism journals.

Gender imbalances are evident in the production of knowledge, though the disparities appear to be decreasing. While heterophilic research collaborations (those between men and women) show some evidence of higher productivity, homophilic collaborations (between males) have greater impact. The findings highlight gender imbalances in international collaborations, in SSCI listed journals, in first authoring and by country. There is evidence of higher collaborative levels among male authors and the differences have increased over time. The positioning of men and women within tourism scholarly networks shows no marked differences.

This data-driven analysis provides decision makers and policymakers with evidence to support well-targeted programs that advance female contributions in hospitality and tourism research collaborations. For example, senior academics and University administrators might offer support for female researchers to become more actively involved in hospitality and tourism research groups and projects. Universities or schools might also seek to encourage collaborations between male and female researchers in their performance indicators.

This study is one of the first to examine gender disparities and positioning in collaborative hospitality and tourism research.