This study reports the results of a meta-analysis of empirical studies on Internet addiction published in academic journals for the period 1996–2006. The analysis showed that previous studies have utilized inconsistent criteria to define Internet addicts, applied recruiting methods that may cause serious sampling bias, and examined data using primarily exploratory rather than confirmatory data analysis techniques to investigate the degree of association rather than causal relationships among variables. Recommendations are provided on how researchers can strengthen this growing field of research.

Purpose: This study aims to measures the effects of managerial response on consumer electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) and hotel performance.Design/methodology/approach: A sample of 56,284 consumer reviews and 10,793 managerial responses for 1,045 hotels was retrieved from TripAdvisor, along with 30,232 performance records matched to these hotels on a quarterly basis.Findings: This study finds that managerial response leads to an average increase of 0.235 stars in the TripAdvisor ratings of the sampled hotels, as well as a 17.3 per cent increase in the volume of subsequent consumer eWOM. Moreover, managerial response moderates the influence of ratings and volume of consumer eWOM on hotel performance.Practical implications: This study offers a practical model that enables hotel managers to orchestrate social media marketing approaches and efforts toward an optimal social media strategy.Originality/value: This study differs from extant literature that has extensively focused on consumer reviews by providing a new perspective of management intervention in the social media context. By examining the interplay of managerial response and consumer eWOM at the individual hotel level, this study provides empirical evidence of managerial response affecting hotel performance through the increased ratings and volume of consumer eWOM. This study also offers insights into the practical importance of crafting intervention opportunities to cultivate the continued engagement of consumers on social media and increased hotel performance.

The growing interest in ruralism among Chinese people has been observed as China’s population in urban areas has exceeded its rural population. Rural tourism has become one of the leading tourism sectors in China, in large part because many of China’s popular tourist attractions are surrounded by rural communities. This study identified 12 dimensions of tourist-perceived quality. In addition, perceived value and satisfaction were used as mediators to explain the relationships between perceived quality and three dimensions of behavioral intentions (i.e., revisitation intention, positive word-of-mouth, and willingness to pay for special rural products). Furthermore, the moderating impact of urban versus rural residence was tested. A total sample of 495 was used for data analysis. Four tourist-perceived quality dimensions (i.e., tourism infrastructure and transportation, hospitality and learning, handicrafts and culture, and rural environment) were found. The results of this study demonstrated the empirical evidence of the relationship between perceived quality, perceived value, satisfaction, and behavioral intentions. Finally, the results showed a moderating effect. The findings of this study can contribute to increasing various behavioral intentions and sustainable rural tourism in China.

There is a lot of attention given to the determinants of guest satisfaction and consumer behavior in the tourism literature. While much extant literature uses a deductive approach for identifying guest satisfaction dimensions, we apply an inductive approach by utilizing large unstructured text data of 104,161 online reviews of Korean accommodation customers to frame which topics of interest guests find important. Using latent Dirichlet allocation, a generative, Bayesian, hierarchical statistical model, we extract and validate topics of interest in the dataset. The results corroborate extant literature in that dimensions, such as location and service quality, are important. However, we extend existing dimensions of importance by more precisely distinguishing aspects of location and service quality. Furthermore, by comparing the characteristics of the accommodations in terms of metropolitan versus rural and the type of accommodation, we reveal differences in topics of importance between different characteristics of the accommodations. Specifically, we find a higher importance for points of competition and points of uniqueness among the accommodation characteristics. This has implications for how managers can improve customer satisfaction and how researchers can more precisely measure customer satisfaction in the hospitality industry.

Location-based premiums for hotels have been observed in various segments, such as downtown and resort hotels. However, the location effect of airport hotels has not yet been studied, despite the longstanding history and significance of this market, which is arguably the most location-sensitive segment. It has also been found that former models for hotel location based on firms’ bid-rent functions were not directly applicable to airport hotels, even when the monocentricity assumption holds. Thus, the current study applied the household bid-rent function to provide a theoretical justification for premiums on airport proximity and estimated their effects on room rates using the hedonic pricing method. Results indicated that location premiums for airport hotels are simultaneously affected by their proximity to the central business district as well as the airport. Implications for the hotel industry and suggestions for future research are discussed.