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The aim of this paper is to gain insight into the implications of the proliferation of social software like blogs, message boards and consumer review sites, etc. and its consequences for the hotel industry.

The paper draws on literature from journals, periodicals and other relevant literature for theoretical underpinnings and links it up with data gathered from online sources like blogs, message‐boards and consumer review sites.

The findings indicate that, with proliferation of blogs, message boards, and other such sites, hotels are increasingly losing control over what gets written about them online. It is important to be aware of the trend and have strategies in place to deal with the fast emerging medium of information sharing.

The phenomenon of social software is explained with its implications for business and suggestions about how to deal with it.

The paper brings into focus the nascent trends of social software and the changes in the way consumers may access information. The paper tries to bring forth a systematic overview of this emerging area.

The purpose of this study is to empirically validate the relationships between social Web, integrated marketing communications (IMC) and overall brand equity and to test the moderating role of national culture on these relationships.

Data were collected among 475 customers and analysed using the LISREL and partial least squares (PLS) techniques and non-parametric methods.

Strong positive and significant relationships are found between social Web and IMC on the one hand, and IMC and brand equity on the other, the second relationship being even stronger than the first one. Moreover, national culture is found to exert a statistically significant moderating effect on both relationships.

The findings of this study contribute to the wider knowledge and theoretical understanding of both technology and marketing communications potential in the development of brand equity. The results therefore suggest that brand equity requires a representative brand name and consistent meaning of the brand sustained by social Web and the integration of marketing communications.

Consistency in marketing communications can be considered as a primary basis for brand equity building in companies. Moreover, efficient management of the user-generated content available in social media platforms represents a great challenge for marketers.

Although the connection between social Web, IMC and brand equity was founded in theory, there is a lack of empirical contributions on the causal relationships among these constructs. This gap is filled by the current empirical contribution. Another significant insight of this work lies in considering the role of national culture in the IMC research.

This paper aims to understand the perceptions and practices of small accommodation providers regarding the growing area of user‐generated content (UGC) web sites.

A total of eight small hospitality enterprise cases of four classifications were selected using a purposive stratified sampling procedure. On‐site semi‐structured interviews are the main source of information.

Empirical findings indicate that there is a divergence among small accommodation providers with regard to UGC web sites. It finds that small accommodation provider views are varied as to the influence of UGC web sites on traveller decisions. It also shows that some providers are using innovative, proactive practices to respond to UGC web sites, whilst others have limited awareness of the internet and are currently not responding.

The generalisation of this research is limited by its sample size. The research implications are that more research using a more representative sample must be completed on the topic to verify findings.

With great diversity in the awareness and responses of small accommodation providers to changes on the internet for firms not to suffer a competitive disadvantage, they must, at least, stay abreast of developments on the internet, in particular fast‐growing UGC web sites.

Minimal research has been completed on the perceptions and practices of accommodation providers regarding UGC web sites, despite the importance the web sites are thought to have on traveller decisions. This paper should be of interest to tourism hospitality practitioners as well as academic researchers to better understand how practitioners are responding to the emerging issue of UGC web sites.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the significance of TripAdvisor on reputation within the hotel industry. TripAdvisor encapsulates key themes in establishing an online reputation strategy in an evolving digital landscape.

Through the use of an exploratory case study, data were gathered primarily by means of a series of expert interviews within the hotel industry in Cyprus, today a mature holiday destination in Europe. Further data collection included a document search of presentations, annual reports, past surveys and sales and marketing literature from the examined industry.

Hotel communication practitioners are fully aware of the impact of social media in managing reputation. Constant monitoring, prompt responses, training and transparency were identified as key factors. Online reputation management needs to be taken into consideration when designing a comprehensive integrated communication strategy.

Congruence amongst interviewees in certain areas could be on account of the homogeneity of practitioners, of their background and training and of similar organisational cultures across the locale of study. This leads to limits in the generalisations from this study’s findings.

Encouragement and training of employees were amongst the primary suggestions that emerged. An internal and external environmental scan, recognising possible strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, which could assist in the effective engagement and monitoring of the organisation’s online presence, were also suggested.

The uniqueness of the study lies in its exploration of reputation management of a well-known traveller’s platform by addressing social media content in both a proactive and reactive manner.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights on integrated marketing communications (IMC) by empirically examining the concept in a new context, that is hotel companies, and comparing its implementation and impact in Italian and Croatian hotels.

The study uses survey methodology to assess IMC, approaching managers and guests in high-quality hotels.

From the manager’s point of view, both Italian and Croatian hotels show a high level of IMC implementation and significant differences regarding some items. From the guest’s point of view, significant differences are obtained between the two hotel groups. In addition, IMC is found to influence positively and significantly customer satisfaction.

This research is limited to the Italian and Croatian hotel context. Future studies should approach a greater number of hotels to obtain more representative results.

Managers need to adopt a holistic vision of marketing communications and regularly analyze consumers’ opinions to understand if their campaign works.

This paper makes several original contributions, thus filling the existing gap in the literature. First, IMC is analyzed in a new environment, that is high-quality hotels. Second, the study is conducted in Italy and Croatia, where research on IMC is rather neglected. Third, in addition to managers’ opinions, guests’ perceptions are assessed, thus highlighting that consumers need to be considered as true “co-managers” of business strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether bonding and bridging social capital of professional athletes affect their performance and whether the impacts vary according to their life cycle stages.

This study establishes an unbalanced panel of motorboat racers in Japan, and estimates a fixed-effects negative binomial regression model to analyze determining factors in the number of wins in a final, focusing on not only physical factors but also social capital.

Bridging social capital, measured by the number of racers in the same regional division, has no impact on performance. Bonding social capital, measured by the number of racers who graduated the training institute in the same period, has positive impacts on performance. This positive effect is more salient among racers who are less experienced, and thus need to extract benefits from social capital to augment limited internal resources.

This study adds statistical evidence to previous literature on the contingency theory that different types of social capital have different impacts on performance under different environments.

Hotels are dependent on information and communication technologies (ICTs) for both their internal management and their relationships with customers and the other stakeholders. Therefore, research on ICTs in the hotel sector has kept growing lately. The purpose of this paper is to offer a review of the literature dedicated to ICTs in hotel management by analyzing papers published in seven prestigious journals in the field of Hospitality Management.

The 147 papers analyzed – published over a 27-year period – have been studied according to a variety of criteria such as their research methods, perspective, statistics used, topics covered, technologies and authors and countries.

The conclusions suggest a promising future regarding both ICT applications for hotel management and research in this area.

Concerning limitations, the most important one stems from the selection of works subject to examination because our analysis dealt with papers published in only seven journals, other publication sources have not been considered. Nevertheless, the present paper can prove useful both for researchers and hotel managers because new trends are emerging in both contexts with regard to technologies themselves as well as to some of their uses.

One of the most important contributions made with this work is the preparation of a list with the topics covered by the papers under examination. Moreover, no studies have to date specifically tried to identify the technologies used in hotel management by means of a literature review.

This study aims to present a conceptual model of how blog readers' perceptions of satisfaction generate blog loyalty, which in turn enhances bloggers' power. This study also seeks to investigate the moderating influence of subjective norms on the relationship between satisfaction and loyalty.

The structural equation modelling approach was used to estimate a conceptual model based on survey data from blog readers in Taiwan. After discarding incomplete responses, the final sample consisted of 567 completed responses.

The majority of the results supported the hypotheses. Three types of exchange outcome satisfaction influence blog readers' perceptions of bloggers' power by increasing attitudinal loyalty. Information satisfaction has a direct and positive effect on expert power. Most importantly subjective norms exhibited a positive moderating relationship between exchange outcome satisfaction and attitudinal loyalty. The authors found no evidence to support the relationship between exchange outcome satisfaction and behavioural loyalty.

From the perspectives of exchange outcome satisfaction, loyalty, power, and susceptibility to normative influence, this study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the process through which blog readers become loyal to their bloggers and are influenced by bloggers' expert and referent power.

While the topical areas of service failure and complaints have been systematically investigated for the general traveling public, service failure issues for disabled tourists have been widely ignored. This exploratory study attempts to provide some insights into this phenomenon by analyzing disabled travelers' complaints reported through online customer complaint websites.

A total of 316 customer complaints were collected and analyzed utilizing a modified procedure of the Critical Incident Technique (CIT). Differences in service failure dimensions in industry sector and recovery type were investigated through the correspondence analysis.

Critical incidents of disabled travelers were classified into three dimensions of service failures including service delivery failure, unfulfilled special requests, and unsolicited employee conduct. Significant relationships in service failure dimensions were identified in the industry sectors and types of recovery.

The limitations of this study are unidentifiable demographic information and lack of necessary details, since this study is based on textual data collected from online complaint/review websites. For further research, more inclusive quantitative data could provide a more complete picture.

The findings of this study could represent a valuable step toward assessing the current status of service failure provided by hospitality and tourism industry, and thus provide useful insights for practitioners to more effectively serve this market segment.

This study serves as exploratory research and contributes to a better understanding of the tourism experience of individuals with disabilities.

The purpose of this paper to investigate the current information systems security (ISS) practices of the social software application (SSA) users via the internet.

The paper opted for a systematic literature review survey on ISS and its practices in SSAs between 2010 and 2015. The study includes a set of 39 papers from among 1,990 retrieved papers published in 35 high-impact journals. The selected papers were filtered using the Publish or Perish software by Harzing and Journal Citation Report (JCR) with an inclusion criterion of least one citation per article.

The practice of ISS is driven by the need to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the data from being tampered. It is coherent with the current practice as reported by many researchers in this study. Four important factors lead to the ISS practice in SSA: protection tools offered, ownership, user behaviour, and security policy.

The paper highlights the implication of successful ISS practices is having clear security purpose and security supported environment (user behaviour and security protection tools) and governance (security policy and ownership) protection tools offered, ownership, user behaviour, and security policy towards ISS practice by the users.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study how to enable ISS practice.