Cornell Hospitality Quarterly

This study investigates the influence of hotel attributes and characteristics on debt servicing and default in the U.S. hotel sector. Employing a unique dataset that we derived comprising more than 2,000 hotels from five recent years, this study provides empirical evidence of significant effect of hotel characteristics on debt servicing performance and default. Debt service and debt yield performance is significantly and negatively associated with the likelihood of default. Hotel default probability also varies significantly across various hotel characteristics, including service type, location, class, size, and age. In particular, the results show interstate hotels by location, economy and midscale hotels by class, smaller hotels by size, newer hotels by age, and hotels that are components of portfolios with significantly lower probability of default. Analysis by hotel service type provides empirical support for the main findings. Theoretical and practical implications provide owners and investors with relevant information for hotel investment decisions.

Service failure is common and inevitable due to the unique characteristics of services. It is essential for service organizations to carefully handle service failure and employ effective recovery strategies to maintain and improve customer satisfaction, especially when consumers experience mixed emotions towards the organization. However, most service failure and recovery literature focuses on how ambivalent identification works at the organizational level. Thus, this study extends the application of the social identity theory beyond organizational perception and focuses specifically on the consumer context, shedding light on its role in recovery justice and satisfaction. It explores the impact of failure severity and degree of correction on recovery justice, with ambivalent identification serving as the moderator in the hotel industry context. Findings from an intercept survey method indicate that the negative relationship between severity of failure and recovery justice weakens as ambivalent identification increases, while ambivalent identification strengthens the positive relationship between degree of correction and recovery justice. Moreover, ambivalent identification diminishes the positive impact of recovery justice on post-recovery satisfaction. This study provides the theoretical and practical implications related to service recovery for hotel management.

The main purpose of this study was to summarize extant empirical findings on how front-line service employees experience and manage emotions at work. When consolidated, the research on front-line employee emotions revealed mixed and contradictory results and knowledge gaps on workplace challenges of service-oriented employees. The PRISMA were followed for study selection, and the appraisal theory of emotions was used to classify the direct antecedents and outcomes of emotion management. To calculate meta-analytic effect sizes, comprehensive meta-analysis methodology wasapplied to analyze 79 studies (N=28,332). The summary effects of known antecedents, affective events (conflict, customer interactions), stimuli (personality characteristics), and workplace environment (support and display rules) on front-line employees’ emotion management were more modest than previously indicated. Organization, supervisor, and coworker support were found to be a moderator between conflict and employees’ emotion management. The most-researched outcomes of emotion management (burnout and job performance) also showed only modest effect sizes. Job satisfaction was a moderator between emotion management and job performance. The relationship between emotion management and customer-related antecedents and outcomes showed modest to small effect sizes. These results contribute to the ATE and highlight the knowledge gap on how customer emotions and behaviors affect front-line employees’ ability to manage their emotions and provide quality customer service and, in turn, how employee’s transference of emotions might influence customer satisfaction, loyalty, and trust. Managers should provide necessary support to mitigate the impact of affective events that may influence how front-line employees manage emotions at work to increase job satisfaction and performance.

Based on trial-and-error learning theory, this study proposes an OCB-C (Organizational Citizenship Behavior toward customers)-driven social learning mechanism for the formation of other two types of OCB (OCB-O toward organizations and OCB-I toward coworkers). In this process, we propose that each of the employee empowerment factors play vital trial-and-error opportunities for employees to perform OCB-C, offering employees chances to learn from errors and gain positive affect. A total of 422 respondents were collected from employees at upscale hotels. We found that two empowerment factors (i.e., work competency and employee impact) supported OCB-C. Engaging in OCB-C not only led to the increase of learning from errors and positive affect, but also the increase of OCB-O and OCB-I. In addition, while learning from errors assisted employees to exercise OCB-O and OCB-I, positive affect helped employees to contribute OCB-O.

This study investigates how managers’ and targeted Asian employees’ responses to customer-perpetrated racial discrimination affect the observing customers’ perceptions and behavioral intention. Using two experimental designs, Study 1 examines the effect of managers’ responses (i.e., avoidance, employee support, and customer support), and Study 2 tests targeted employees’ responses (avoidance, confrontation, and venting) to racial discrimination on observing customer’s revisit intention. In addition, this study examines the moderating role of the severity of racial discrimination. Across two studies, this research provides evidence that observing customers tend to rate managers as fair when they support the targeted employees. Also, observing customers rate the targeted employees as competent when they professionally confront the customers which led to a higher level of revisit intention. This study expands the hospitality literature by focusing on racial discrimination against Asian American and offers practical guidance on how managers and employees should respond to racial discrimination.

Understanding the roles of tourism development in poverty reduction and livelihood capital through a microlens is essential to rural ethnic areas’ sustainable development. However, few assessment methods are available to unravel the complex relationships between these three facets, and gaps remain in measuring residents’ livelihood. Based on the sustainable livelihood approach, this paper first selected core components of the sustainable livelihood framework to construct an evaluation index system and then provided specific indicators and evaluative criteria. Taking villages in China’s Longji Rice Terraces as a sample case, this study employed objective approaches (e.g., the entropy weight method and gray relational analysis) to assess residents’ livelihood capital. The aim was to showcase the sustainability of this area’s livelihood through a microlens. Findings offer several important contributions. First, this study presents a reliable measurement development method and a set of evaluation criteria for sustainable livelihood in tourism contexts, including five forms of capital and 21 indicators. Second, local inhabitants were found to benefit from tourism development; their livelihood options were diversified, especially in terms of growing financial capital. Yet these benefits were not evenly distributed, with notable differences observed across communities. Third, farmers’ livelihood capability did not improve uniformly over time. These findings offer valuable insights for tourism and hospitality stakeholders and can help steer rural regions toward a path of prosperity and growth. Strategies for inspiring entrepreneurship should especially be considered. In closing, theoretical implications are discussed, and suggestions for future work are provided.

Given the growing interest in healthy and sustainable consumption, organic food has gained much attention from restaurants and markets aiming to achieve a competitive advantage. As a new form of word of mouth, influencers’ endorsements help organic food marketers reach and attract potential consumers. However, little is known about the persuasiveness of influencer marketing in organic food settings. Drawing on source credibility theory, this study proposes influencer credibility as the key to influencer marketing and examines its impact on consumer responses. Using data from an online survey, structural equation modeling revealed a significant and positive relationship between all credibility dimensions (expertise, trustworthiness, attractiveness, and interactivity) and perceived information quality leading to behavioral intention. Moreover, a significant moderation of herd behavior on the credibility information quality relationship was found. These findings will provide useful insights for organic food marketers in developing effective influencer marketing strategies.

Despite extensive research on loyalty formation, findings regarding interrelationships between loyalty and its key drivers, such as perceived service quality, perceived value, and customer satisfaction, are inconclusive and often contradictory. To provide more definitive statements about these relationships, we synthesized and analyzed findings from 153 articles published in eight top-tier tourism and hospitality journals between 2006 and 2020 using meta-analytic structural equation modeling. We also confirmed that five- and seven-point Likert-type scales did not generate significant differences in the effect size of correlational measures. A further comparison of four theoretically postulated competing models strongly supports the full mediation model. Our results suggest that customer satisfaction fully mediates the effects of perceived service quality and perceived value on customer loyalty, whereas perceived service quality directly influences perceived value. This study contributes to the literature by reconciling and synthesizing inconclusive findings from prior research.