Advances in Hospitality and Leisure: Volume 12

Coffee shops are becoming more aware that brand loyalty can be an effective strategy for securing a competitive edge in business. To supplement current understanding of the importance of coffee shop branding, this study investigates the role of personality traits and congruity in the formation of brand loyalty. This study finds that personality traits have direct effects on congruity and customer satisfaction, the two defining factors of brand loyalty. Overall, our results suggest that the interaction of personality traits, congruity, and satisfaction is essential to the process of influencing coffee shop customers’ brand loyalty.

An investigation of multinational corporations (MNCs) integration of the concept of community participation into the factors of needs and expectations revealed a significant difference amongst MNCs’ strategic choice in their tourism market development in those African host countries. The findings identified only 16% of the participating MNCs integrated the concept of community participation. The integrators increased in growth more than the non-integrators of concept of community participation. It is concluded that MNCs need to realize that strategy involves forecasting and understanding the business environmental factors, planning on which applicable strategy to choose and implementing a strategy that is rewarding to both the corporation and the host community with minimum risks.

This paper explores why and how Japanese tourists travel in their home country. This work uses in-depth interviews and focus group interviews as its study design. Nature is an important aspect of Japanese life, and the meaning and use of nature include spiritual and bodily purification. Furthermore, Japanese domestic nature-based travels are strongly linked to self-identity and self-presentation, in that the Japanese travel not only for the sake of enjoyment, but also to a large extent as an instrument for learning, sharing and communing. The results are discussed in terms of theoretical contributions and practical applications.

This study seeks to investigate issues transpiring in green hotels from a human resource perspective which is unlike most green-hotel studies centering on consumer behavioral subjects. It hypothesizes that the employees’ green ability consisting of environmental awareness, environmental knowledge, and environmental skill creates a positive impact on hotels’ green ability and ultimately on the overall performance of hotels. Using alumni from a tourism and hospitality program, this study collects 233 responses from a structured questionnaire survey. The findings indicate that hotel employees approximately contribute toward a fifth of the hotels’ ability to implement greener practices.

This paper investigated the effectiveness of using a Restaurant Week promotion to market a group of restaurants during a traditionally slow period in the calendar year for the city of New Orleans. A questionnaire was developed by the communications committee of the local restaurant association. The questionnaire included questions to ascertain why restaurants chose to participate in Restaurant Week. The results of the study showed that the Restaurant Week campaign was successful for the participating restaurants in several ways. Success was demonstrated in increase in sales, a better understanding of menu item sales, an awareness of the strongest days of promotion, and methods of making reservations. The majority of restaurants experienced an increase of sales up to 20%. For both lunch and dinner promotions, Friday ranked as the strongest day of the promotion. The use of Open Table increased as a means of making reservations during Restaurant Week.

Corporations in all industries recognize the demand for responsible business behavior and have developed corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs accordingly. This paper examines to which extent sustainability practices – unrelated to the actual ingredients of a consumable product – affect brand equity, taste perceptions, and perceived emotional value. In an experimental setting, effects were determined of the presence or lack of a sustainability-marketing message within a beer brand’s promotional material. The constructs were measured in a survey, and a PLS-SEM was used to analyze the results. In the factor model, all constructs proved to be sufficiently reliable and valid. The experiment’s results indicate that taste perception is positively influenced by the presence of a sustainability message.

In Sabah, Malaysia, illegal hunting has increased in recent years putting considerable pressure on large mammal populations. The causes for this phenomenon lie in increasing rural poverty, ineffective policies to regulate hunting, as well as a ready market for many wildlife products in the Chinese medicine markets. This paper examines how Community-Based Ecotourism has some potential to be used as a tool to reducing poaching using the Tidong community in Sabah as a case study. The key finding is that successful conservation outcomes for Community-Based Ecotourism projects are only sustainable over the long run if projects are structured to ensure that the local community is able to continue effective management once sponsoring organizations hand over control and that revenue from tourism does not decline. If tourist revenue declines communities may be forced to revert to previous practices reversing any initial conservation gains.

Spatial integration and industrial clustering have become an important feature of the culture tourism business. When the core elements in both the culture industry and tourism industry are integrated, a model based on system science is constructed that combines the resources and capacity of the two entities to envisage the ways of creating integrated products and services from the two sectors. Guided by the system science, this study proposes a culture tourism system revealing the clustering and hierarchical structure of the industrial elements. The system contains two subsystems: internal system and external system. The agglomeration model of the system includes 26 indices and the PEF methods, which involved the Parallelogram Law, Entropy-weight Method, and Fuzzy Membership Function. Finally, this study deploys an empirical study involving all provincial territories (N=31) in mainland China. It analyzes the variability and degree of balanced development of the system. In addition, through the resultant data this research adds a typology of culture tourism system along with policy recommendations.

This research examines the effect of people interaction on value creation of tourist experiences by reconstructing a scale of value perception. It gathers a set of on-site survey data collected from tourists visiting Norwegian Arctic destinations that contain 579 useful questionnaires. A 19-item value measurement is first validated by confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) that results in a 13-item, five-factor parsimonious model. The CFA results also suggest a high-order factor solution; it finds two convergent factors explicated by five value domains. The derived high-order factors are labeled as tangible value and intangible value. Further analyses show significant relationships between experience values and people interaction. That is the intangible domain of value could create significant mediating effect on people interaction. Specifically, novelty and social values tend to moderate tourist experience. The conclusion furnishes implications in theory advancement and service innovation along with suggestions for research study.

Tourism and hospitality have experienced strong diversification during the past few years. One of the latest trends in the field of nature-based tourism is the phenomenon of tree house hotels. The unique character of these hotels appeals not only to childhood memories but fulfills desires of adventure and novelty, romanticism, and uniqueness. The restorative power of nature is examined in this setting and the evidence suggests there are physiological and psychological benefits from forest recreation and sleeping in treetops. Surveys of potential clients, actual guests, and tree house hoteliers gave new insights into the perception of tree house accommodation and an understanding in the choice and provision of tree house hotels. The findings suggest that tree house hotels respond to a human need in urbanized societies to reconnect with nature and gain relaxation, restored health, and well-being. Environmentally friendly and noninvasive, this new form of hospitality may well stimulate sustainable tourism policymaking based on increasing human interaction with the forest ecosystem services that nature provides.