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This study aims to explore how haute cuisine excellence is and can be self-represented on the websites of three-star restaurants and juxtaposed onto the websites of external authoritative food guides.

In total, 26 French Michelin three-star restaurant websites and their reviews in the prominent Michelin and Gault and Millau dining guides were examined. This data was then processed using lexicometric software.

Five semantic universes emerged, showing that restaurants and dining guides do not emphasize the same elements of culinary excellence. While restaurant websites emphasize the charismatic leadership role of the chef through family history, professional recognition and vicarious learning, the two iconic guides are far from rating the criteria they claim to: For the Michelin Guide, criteria other than cuisine appear central. Conversely, Gault and Millau, far from its nouvelle cuisine principles advocating democratization at lower cost, insists on fine products.

It remains essential for restaurants to use a repertoire of cultural components and symbols, capitalize on the charismatic and architectural roles of their chef and showcase fine products that are representative of classical cuisine. Storytelling and dynamic narrative add-ons, regularly updated on large-audience social media, appear central to increasing restaurants’ perceived value, communicating innovation and attesting to their singularity and uniqueness.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical study to overlap the lexical perspectives of three-star restaurants and iconic guides’ websites.

The use of information technology (IT) in the hospitality industry is driven by the need to improve and refine customer service. However, it is unlikely that new IT will be successfully implemented if employees' roles and emotions are overlooked. The purpose of this study is to examine the interplay of negative emotions (anger and fear), coping strategies (venting anger and psychological distancing), perceptions of an IT innovation and intention toward adopting it.

A research model is developed based on the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion, coping theory and innovation diffusion theory. An online survey was conducted among employees working for hotels that had deployed a new reservation system, and 234 responses were collected.

The results indicate that employees' negative emotions (anger and fear) have negative and significant effects on their perceptions of adopting a new reservation system through coping strategies (i.e. venting anger and psychological distancing). Furthermore, employees' perceptions of adopting an innovative reservation system have a positive effect on their adoption intention toward the system.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research to address the impact of distinct emotions on IT innovation adoption, as well as explaining the relation between affective and cognitive effects. The findings demonstrate the importance of examining negative emotions in IT innovation adoption. In addition, the model developed in this study confirms that an appraisal tendency approach better specifies the conditions under which different emotions are triggered to predict and explain how emotions relate to IT use through adaptation behaviors when compared with a valence-based approach.

This purpose of this study was to explore two key issues in experiential marketing from an organizational perspective: the management of “strategic experiential modules” and the management of “service encounters” specific to a memorable experience for children in urban luxury hotels.

An integrated model combining managerial and practice-oriented frameworks was used to study how luxury hotel managers design and create memorable experiences for children. The study took a qualitative approach in collecting in-depth data and interviewed 35 managers of five-star luxury hotels in Paris. The data were processed using the Alceste software, an automated lexical program that analyzed the co-occurrence of words and sentences.

With regard to the integrated model, the analysis of the interviews distinguished four main dimensions, which accounted for more than 84 per cent of the original textual data. Three dimensions, related to emotional-sensorial-physical experiential modules, described how managers strategically managed the child experience and journey while at their hotel. A fourth dimension was also identified in relation to the upstream of the service encounter. The findings highlighted a significant gap in how hotel managers were managing the experiences of children under 12 years of age and that further incorporation of various touchpoints is needed to improve the management of the service design.

This study demonstrated the applicability of the proposed integrated model, which offers valuable marketing implications for luxury hotel managers. It is suggested that more research on the management of the child experience and journey is conducted in the future.

To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, this is the first empirical study to combine these two frameworks to study the management of the child experience and journey in the luxury hospitality sector.

This paper aims to capitalize on a linguistic perspective to analyze the rhetoric of French leaders about organizational change.

To address the research questions, the authors opted for a lexical content analysis. They use Ford and Ford’s (1995) change conversational framework and the speech act theory to analyze French CEOs’ letters to stakeholders, over the period 2007-2012.

The authors find that leaders’ rhetoric consists of three types of change conversations, namely, initiative, for understanding and for performance, that were underpinned by a network of assertive, expressive and commissive speech acts.

The results reveal that the communication of change to external stakeholders can be characterized as supportive change conversations, offering assurance on the necessity, appropriateness and expected benefits of change.

This paper is the first work, in the French context, which integrates change conversations and speech act perspectives to examine the way leaders communicate with external stakeholders through CEOs letters. Previous research focused specially on communicating change with internal stakeholders.

Whereas past research has been valuable in explaining how “perceived usefulness” (PU) and “perceived ease of use” (PEU) constructs lead to technology acceptance and refusal behaviors in organizations, it has not explored the antecedents of these two factors. The purpose of this paper is to propose an interpretive approach to the study of front-line employees’ sense making of technological change as well as the understanding of behavioral and psychological origins of PU and PEU.

This study analyses a major transition in work mode induced by an IT innovation implemented within a leading French hospitality company. A qualitative method was employed to answer the research questions. The data were collected using 22 in-depth semi-structured interviews from front-line employees and their line managers in five 4-star hotels in Paris. The participants were asked how they made sense of the technological change and what they consider when they judge the usefulness and the ease of use during the implementation of change.

The analysis revealed that employees’ acceptance of technological change is paradoxical and shaped by a continuous process of sense making when using the IT innovation. The findings also suggest that PU can be explained by factors like job relevance, PEU and output quality. Anxiety, playfulness, perceived enjoyment, objective usability and facilitating conditions were identified as antecedents of PEU.

The paper reports the effect of perceptions of social influence, system characteristics, individual differences and facilitating conditions on PU and PEU constructs in IT adoption process. It is among the first to examine the antecedents of such beliefs in the hospitality industry through the use of a qualitative method. It also shows that that three variables – result demonstrability, computer self-efficacy and social influence process described by subjective norm and image – did not play a significant role in influencing the intensions of using the system through PU and PEU.

Understanding the antecedents of the two key predictors in technology acceptance models allows managers to implement efficient adjustments and interventions in order to positively influence employees’ IT innovation acceptance and use.

This qualitative study contributes to open the black boxes concerning the conceptualizations of PU and PEU. It advances the understanding of the employees’ acceptance of IT innovation.

From experiences recollections, this study aims to explore the place of emotions in the souvenir’s step of the family consumption process of luxury hotels stays.

To explore the emotional dimension, this exploratory research is based on a triple qualitative approach (software, manual and a psychology-based approach). In total, 1,055 e-reviews, following a family stay in four- and five-star hotels, were collected.

The findings highlight an omnipresent emotional dimension in the recollections of experiences of consumers who have travelled with their families. These emotional traces differ according to the hotel’s positioning. Overall, positive emotions are much more prominent in the most luxurious hotels, while negative emotions are more related to the four-star hotels. Moreover, the four-star hotels reviews mainly associate emotions with the tangible aspects of the offer. Those in five-star hotels are more structured through intangible aspects.

The study of family decision-making dynamic, with a focus on the role of each family member, is a first perspective. That of experiences recollections apart from the digital approach is also to be considered.

On the one hand, the objective is to extend the literature about the role of emotions in a service consumption process, and especially in a family context, trying to understand the post-purchase step of these customers. On the other hand, it is interesting for hotel managers to identify to which aspects of the offer (e.g. comfort, room, catering, decoration) the emotional traces that have remained in the customers’ memory are associated.

This study considers the family unit in a new way, that of its emotional memories’ traces of luxury hotels experiences. The post-consumer stage of the purchase process based on many spontaneous online reviews analysis is investigated.