Advances in Hospitality and Leisure: Volume 18

This chapter focuses on the physical work environment, in particular, the possibilities and limitations of biophilic design in hotel office space. Biophilic design has already gained attention in directly influencing the guest experience, but little focus has been given to workspace. Traditionally, the hospitality industry places employees' office spaces in parts of the hotel not appropriate as guest space due to lack of daylight and windows. Many studies have shown that improving the workplace with nature-based features can play a role in increasing employee well-being. Data collected from employees with both extensive managerial and back-of-house hotel experience established that employees would welcome the opportunity to work in such an environment and currently find back-of-house design basic and lacking any aesthetically pleasing elements. An understanding of the obstacles in initiating such changes was shown as well as employee initiatives to improve work spaces. This initial exploratory study concludes that the needs of employees in terms of comfort, wellbeing, motivation and work satisfaction are often overlooked when considering back-of-house spaces. There is a general understanding and expectation that management needs to develop awareness and practical initiatives to address the deficits of the physical work environment. Biophilic design can be influential in promoting a calming and restorative environment at the workplace and thus positively impacting employee motivation and performance.

This research attempts to understand how individuals prevent themselves from exposure to COVID-19 when dining out at a restaurant and what situational factors shaping their COVID-19 preventive behavior (CPB) are. It collects 303 questionnaires responded by restaurant patrons in the United Arab Emirates. The resultant data reveals the ranks of the relative importance among the five CPBs proposed by this study that wearing a mask is considered the most critical CPB. In contrast, wearing gloves is the least desirable CPB. Concerning five health-risk factors under investigation, there is no difference in CPB between the vaccinated and non-vaccinated. People suffering from issues with their immune system show a significant inclination to stress social distancing compared to those without any immune issues. Those having an inflected family member are apt to wear gloves. Further, individuals bearing risk factors concerning chronic illness, an immune problem, and an infected family member are inclined to wash their hands and wear gloves. Lastly, this research finds six situational factors affecting an individual's CPB.

Hanfu has been the Han ethnic costume in Chinese history. This study explores the travel motivation and experience of Hanfu tourists by conducting qualitative research on Hanfu tourists through photo-elicitation interviews with 25 participants covering four study regions, including the mainland of China, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore. The results reveal seven motivations drive Hanfu tourists: (1) personal hobby, (2) seeking cultural identity, (3) social belonging, (4) Hanfu tourist photography, (5) career need, (6) influence on Hanfu movement, and (7) free space for wearing Hanfu created by tourism. Additionally, the seven types of Hanfu tourist experiences are (1) social experience, (2) cultural experience, (3) Hanfu performance experience, (4) nonvisual sensual experience, (5) learning experience, (6) challenge experience, and (7) pilgrimage experience. This study further furnishes theoretical and managerial implications as a reference for destination marketing targeting Hanfu tourists.

Tourism and hospitality scholars have examined tourists' food experiences in the tourism context. However, little research has been focused on the experience of tasting slow food/wine and the market that consumes slow food/wine. This study aims to (1) understand the factors contributing to tourists' slow food experiences and (2) identify the market segmentation of tourists who experiences slow food and wine at a winery. Four hundred fifty-three online survey questionnaires were collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform. The critical research variable is slow food experience, which contains 16 items explained by four dimensions: (1) food, (2) place, (3) behavior, and (4) knowledge. Subsequently, a cluster analysis based on slow food experience measurement was adopted to discover the tourist market. The study identifies three markets: (1) hardcore slow food gastronomes, (2) common slow foodies, and (3) casual visitors. In the conclusion section, this study offers theoretical contributions to the slow food literature and managerial implications for tourism marketers to establish new marketing strategies.

The aim of this chapter is to delineate a product framework concerning managed visitor attractions (MVA), which highlights the supply-chain aspects of destinations. It first touches on the rationales for developing such a framework and then constructs a framework composed of a set of product components deriving from the extant literature. Consequently, an version of a product component framework, fastening on an accumulated sample of attraction cases, is presented through three illustrative cases. In the conclusion section, this study elaborates on the study limitation while connoting how the resultant data could shed light on the role of the components of the MVA product in the creation of visitor experiences.

This chapter strives to evaluate the impact of tourist arrival on energy consumption, air pollution, gross domestic product (GDP), and foreign direct investment to suggest strategies for further tourism development. Relevant data from Taiwan are analyzed, entailing tourist arrivals, GDP, carbon dioxide emissions, energy consumption, and capital investment. It tests four hypotheses using the Augmented Dickey-Fuller single root test, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag model, and time series econometrics of Granger causality. This study finds that tourist arrival is positively related to energy consumption and GDP, whereas it negatively relates to carbon dioxide emission and capital investment. In consideration of a negative relationship between tourist arrival and direct investment, this study suggests devising timely research agendas on carrying capacity and service quality in the mind of international tourists to see if additional investment in tourism infrastructures is needed.

This chapter investigates the effect of customer orientation and CRM organization on hotel financial performance. A model of enhancing hotel financial performance through customer satisfaction practices was tested. Customer satisfaction was hypothesized to be a mediator in the relationships between customer orientation and CRM organization and the result being financial performance. The sample consisted of 54 hotels that was made up of three 5-star, fifteen 4-star, and thirty-six 3-star hotels in Ghana. A quantitative deductive approach was employed to gather data using cross-sectional survey, which was analyzed using PLS-SEM to check the validity, reliability and factor loading of the data. The findings revealed that, CRM organization enhances customer satisfaction and financial performance of hotels. Also, customer orientation showed significant positively related to customer satisfaction in the hotels. Surprisingly, the effects of CRM organization and customer orientation on financial performance through customer satisfaction were insignificant. Thus, customer satisfaction failed to mediate the effect of CRM organization and customer orientation on the financial performance of hotels. This suggests that though an effective CRM organization enhances customer satisfaction, it directly affects the financial performance of hotels. The outcomes have useful implications for CRM implementation on hotel financial performance in Ghana.

The rejuvenation of waterways, including rivers and canals as well as riverbanks, has led to an almost explosive increase in the touristic colonization of these fluvial landscapes. In Europe, navigable rivers once used to transport freight have undergone a tourism inspired renaissance as river cruise routes. A similar renaissance has occurred in many of Europe's canal systems. This paper identifies four key elements that form the core of waterway tourism: the structural elements of waterways; the on-land experience; the on-water experience, and; the onboard experience. Structural elements include waterway capacity and use profile, the on-land experience refers to the use of riverbanks for recreation and tourism, the on-water experience refers to activities including swimming, fishing and recreational boating and, the onboard experience refers to the lived experiences of passengers on overnight waterway cruising. The discussion in this paper addresses two research issues related to the core elements of waterway tourism, testing of the canal lifecycle model and exploration of the lived experiences of river cruising in Europe.

The COVID-19 crisis has jolted the hotel landscape profoundly and sector's usual resistance to innovative efforts is gone. Ecologically innovative (green) hotels are now expected to set the benchmark in protecting the environment and mitigating human health hazards. The need for this study stems from the fact that eco-innovative (green) hotels need not only be established and promoted, but also accepted or adopted by guests. Existing studies have mostly relied on customer's pro-environmental attitude, knowledge, and a selective list of green hotel attributes in order to predict green hotel visit intentions. The objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive list of environmental and human health attributes that are likely to influence guest's decision to visit a green hotel. One of the first studies to utilize the diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory in sustainable hospitality research, this qualitative study identifies 27 key green hotel's perceived attributes. Examining the guest's expected green hotel attributes would help managers make their green efforts more effective and attract potential guests who have not yet stayed at green hotels.