Carol Zhang

Abstract The hospitality industry is witnessing continuous growth in the number of female travellers and female hosts available to accommodate travellers in their properties using peer-to-peer (P2P) service platforms. Cues that convey information about the host’s gender are therefore acquiring notable relevance. Tourism research, however, has not yet devoted attention to this phenomenon. To fill this gap, the present paper investigates whether and how gender cues conveyed on P2P accommodation platforms affect users’ expectations and booking intentions. Across three experimental studies, the paper demonstrates that such cues affect users’ expectations in a P2P accommodation context, but not in a hotel accommodation context. In particular, regardless of the hosts’ race, female cues, compared to male cues, appear more able to create expectations of warmth and this effect is evident for users who have a strong gender stereotyping tendency. Importantly, enhanced expectations of warmth exert a positive influence on users’ reservation intentions.

This study explores how humour in tourism can communicate facets of national identity. In particular, the paper focuses on the presentation by guides of two English and two Scottish castles. Drawing on multiple sources, including an analysis of promotional materials, the text of the guide’s narratives, on-site observation, and TripAdvisor comments from tourists, it was revealed that the guides repeatedly jokes to create clear boundaries between being English and Scottish. The guides’ command of nuances in language was a pivotal skill underpinning the humour. Through employing interactive jokes, the guides engaged the tourists’ attention and drew attention to the contrasts between English and Scottish characteristics. The research not only captures how the role of tourism-linked humour can function to interpret the distinctiveness of a destination, but also suggests further possible implications of humour in heritage tourism contexts.

Adopting customer-to-customer value co-creation logic, this study explored the underlying dimensions of the co-creation experience and its effects on the behavioral intention to attend festivals. The analysis focused on the role of place attachment and festival satisfaction as mediators in the relationship between festival visitors' satisfaction with the co-creation experience and their behavioral intention to attend the festival. Drawing on 444 survey responses, our findings support the mediation roles of place dependence and festival satisfaction. The findings did not vary between tourists and residents. This suggests that facilitating shared consumption of festivals motivates festival attendees to re-patronize specific festivals. Based on these findings, both theoretical and practical implications of this analysis are discussed.

The number of cultural festivals organised globally has increased primarily due to their significance in celebrating and promoting community values, ideologies, identity and continuity. This mixed-method study aims to understand the role national identity and the associated emotions play in cultural festivals. It first investigates the rationale of organising festivals to celebrate postcolonial hybrid identities via a qualitative approach in Study 1, specifically regarding the ‘Macao International Parade’. It further tests a proposed framework via a quantitative approach in Study 2, which investigates the relationships between national identity, festivalscapes, festival satisfaction, hedonic value and re-patronising intention. This study implies that the cultural festival in Macao not only recognises a unique moment in history, but also contributes to strengthening the hybrid identity in postcolonial Macao. Based on these findings, both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Reforming opening comes more than 30 years, the hotel industry in China gets flying development. With the continuous increase of numbers of hotels in China, the relatively weak position within international division of labour has not been improved. The lack of the innovation capacity of China’s tourism industry (including the hospitality industry) leads to the extensive economic mode that high financial input often results in a relatively lower return. This has become a major constraint to the competitiveness of China’s hospitality industry. The innovation pattern of the hospitality industry highly depends on external factors. It is mainly because the hotel industry is generally lack of Research and Development department and is regarded as low skilled service industry. While the existing literature on hotel service innovation has demonstrated the external knowledge is the indispensable element to the hotel innovation, academic studies have overlooked the search, access and use process of the external knowledge to enhance the innovation capacity of the hotel industry. As a result, it is impossible to answer a question: with the low-technology and absence of research and development, how the hotel industry could enhance service innovation?

Therefore, this research adopts the theory of boundary - spanning search of knowledge as the dependable variable in the field of hotel innovation to explore the impact of transboundary search knowledge on hotel service innovation and to discuss the regulation effects of both the hotel Star level and the ownership type. The study adopts the quantitative survey methodology. The questionnaire was distributed to 100 hotels in Dalian, China. The theoretical model is also tested in this study by using those samples.  The results show that (1) the research finding is consistent with the high technology research in the developed countries, which the transboundary search of technological knowledge can accelerate hotel service innovation in the context of China. (2) The transboundary search of technological knowledge and the market knowledge can both stimulate hotel service innovation. This indicates the external transboundary search of knowledge is the key of enhancing the innovation capacity of the hotel service industry. (3) Both the hotel Star level and the ownership type regulate the above relationship. The Star level has different regulate effects in between various types of transboundary knowledge and the hotel innovation. Specifically, the higher the hotel Star level, the greater the transboundary search of technological knowledge impact on the hotel service innovation, while the lesser impact of the transboundary search of the market knowledge on the hotel service innovation. In comparison, the relationship between the transboundary search of market knowledge and the hotel service innovation is weaker for foreign-invested companies than for domestic companies. However, the study does not find any significant relationship between the transboundary search of the technological knowledge and the hotel service innovation. The possible explanation might be that the high staff turnover rate in the hospitality industry makes the transfer of the knowledge-intensive and social capital-intensive personnel in foreign-invested hotels to domestic hotels possible and thus contributes to the knowledge transfer to some extent. Additional, the “going out” strategy has been implemented within Chinese enterprises in recent years stimulates the increase of foreign investment within some large scale domestic hotel group in China. This thus is beneficial to domestic hotels in the transboundary search of the advanced technological skills in oversea hotels.  As a result, the technological skills is easily transferred through the relocation of personnel which contributes to the hotel service innovation. In conclusion, the current study not only provides new theoretical perspectives in the field of the hotel service innovation, but also tests the adaptability of transboundary knowledge research in the low-technology business in the developing country. It also provides important theoretical basis for companies to develop searching strategies.

This study develops a small but growing cadre of work seeking to reveal how humour is used in
tourism. It focuses on the presentation of three sites in southern England where guides use
humour to enhance the presentation of the country’s distinctive history. The study has two aims:
to understand how tourists react to the guides’ humour and, second, to identify how the
humour works to portray a sense of Englishness. Using multiple sources of information, including
an analysis of promotional materials, the text of the narratives, TripAdvisor comments from
tourists and direct on-site observation, it was established that the humour was both carefully
framed and successful. It was revealed that the guides employ their jokes and jibes to manage
the flow of the visitors and control the atmosphere of the tour. Guides also employ interactive
and direct joke routines where tourists are effectively co-actors and participants in the
experience. Since research opportunities for considering the role of tourism-linked humour lie in
portraying the distinctiveness of destinations, further work can capture new facets of the tourist
experience and offer a fresh route to appraise tourism marketing and interpretation.