Cornell Hospitality Quarterly

Brand affiliation is a critical choice in the hotel business. The decision to change brand (i.e., “rebranding”) may be determined by asset-level private information as well as publicly known information related to the property. In this article, we focus on nonprivate information, such as property features as well as market and industry performance indicators. Using the semiparametric and parametric hazard models, we show that variables such as hotels’ past record of affiliation changes, age, class, type, and location help predict the likelihood of rebranding. This analysis should increase the ability of industry practitioners to define rebranding risk and to use it as a competitive advantage.

The consumer online search journey is viewed as one of the key determinants toward consumer purchase decisions. Using a unique disaggregated query-level data set collected from a leading Chinese search engine, we employ a latent-class, two-stage logistic regression model and identify the existence of three distinct consumer segments in the hospitality industry. Each group represents a unique stage of the consumer experience along a typical search journey, leading to a set of click-through behaviors. The consumer search and click-through insights garnered from this study provide hotel marketers with deeper understandings and actionable guidelines to the development of their search advertising campaign and (re)targeting strategies. The segmentation model and the empirical insights also demonstrate the possibility that a segment-specific ad assortment approach could improve advertising efficiency, enrich consumer’s search experience, and eventually create a win-win situation that benefit all entities involved in the hospitality-related, search advertising domain.

There has been exponential growth in the power exercised by social media in hospitality and tourism. The power of social media platforms as stakeholders has been widely accepted by both academics and industry practitioners. However, to the best of the current authors’ knowledge, there has been no conceptualization of the power attributable to social media. On this basis, it is both timely and necessary to establish theoretical grounds that explain the concept of social media power and its application in hospitality and tourism. A hierarchical model that characterizes social media power is constructed in the present article by bringing together fundamental power discourses, media effect theories, and technology determinism. The authors identify definitions and sources of social media power at different levels of the power pyramid and present various technological mechanisms that trigger such sources. This conceptual study proposes theoretical foundations for future research and theory-building.

Service robots continue to permeate and automate the hospitality sector. In doing so, these technological innovations pose to radically change current service production and delivery practices and, consequently, service management and marketing strategies. This study explores the various impacts of robotization in the sector by offering one of the first empirical accounts on the current state-of-the-art of service robotics as deployed in hospitality service encounters. The results suggest that service robots either support or substitute employees in service encounters. They also offer hospitality businesses a novel point of differentiation, but only if properly integrated as part of wider marketing efforts. Finally, the automation of tasks, processes, and, ultimately, jobs has serious socioeconomic implications both at the microlevel and macrolevel. Consequently, hospitality executives need to consider where and how to apply robotization to strike a balance between operational efficiency and customer expectations. Displaying ethical leadership is key to reaping the benefits of the robot revolution.

This field study examined performance data from reel slot games located in two casinos. The paired design incorporated games that appeared identical to the players but featured substantially different, yet concealed, pars (i.e., prices). The results revealed significantly elevated revenues for the high-par games, despite egregious price hikes, while also failing to provide compelling evidence of rational play migration to the low-par games. The latter result suggested that frequently visiting players were not able to detect differences in the pars of games, even over lengthy sample periods. These outcomes were produced by the greatest par gaps of any paired-design study. These expanded gaps also generated the greatest revenue gains within this research stream. Increasing pars may represent a rare opportunity for operators to increase revenues, without concern for eventual brand damage or loss of market share. Limitations regarding the current uses of reel pars are also revealed.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of restaurant employees’ social perceptions of their supervisors on employees’ work engagement and extra-role customer service behavior. We also assessed restaurant employees’ social perceptions of their coworkers as a moderator. Utilizing an online survey design, data were collected from frontline restaurant employees via an online commercial subject pool (N = 477). Results showed that the more employees perceive their supervisors as warm, competent, and moral, the more employees were willing to engage in extra-role customer service behavior via the indirect effect of increased work engagement. The effect of work engagement on extra-role customer service was also found to be more pronounced when employees developed positive social perceptions of their coworkers. These results offer implications for work engagement, as they suggest a new antecedent in the form of social perceptions, as well as a boundary condition to the positive outcomes of engagement through the interactive effect of social perceptions of coworkers and extra-role customer service behavior. In doing so, these results also shed light on the relevance of social perceptions in hospitality operations.

This study examined the effect of CEO overconfidence on restaurant performance and how franchising, a key business format in the restaurant industry, affects the relationship. Based on the notion that overconfident individuals take more risks than non-overconfident people, this study hypothesized that CEO overconfidence positively (negatively) influences restaurant growth (profitability). Furthermore, since franchising reduces operational and financial risk, this study hypothesized that franchising moderates the relationship between CEO overconfidence and firm performance. The results of this study confirmed that CEO overconfidence positively influences firm growth but negatively affects firm profitability in the restaurant industry. This study also found that franchising negatively (positively) influences the effect of CEO overconfidence on restaurant firm growth (profitability). The results suggest that overconfident CEOs are more suitable for growth-seeking restaurant firms but less desirable for profit-seeking firms. The results also highlight that franchising mitigates the risk associated with CEO overconfidence. More detailed results and implications are discussed in this article.