Hosting ethnically and culturally rich religious festivals provides visitors a glimpse into how a sense of togetherness and faith are not only established but strengthened through shared beliefs and ritualistic behavior. This research examines visitors’ destination loyalty through their emotional bonding with place, the emotional solidarity they experience with residents, and their perceived level of safety. Based on data collected from 813 visitors during the Attur Church Feast in Karkala, India, the results indicated that place attachment directly influences loyalty and two dimensions of emotional solidarity and, in turn, emotional solidarity has a positive effect on loyalty. Additionally, it was found that emotional solidarity partially mediates the effect of place attachment on destination loyalty. Finally, employing a moderated mediation analysis, visitor level of perceived safety at the festival partially moderated the indirect effect of place attachment on destination loyalty through emotional solidarity.

Places hosting religious sacred events provide opportunities for visitors to find spiritual growth and also afford glimpses into the local culture, community, and hosting religious group. This study looks at tourists’ intended behavioral loyalty to a religious sacred event place as determined through motivations, shared beliefs, and emotional solidarity with other visitors, and memorable religious experiences. Data were collected from 985 visitors (556 domestic and 429 international) during the 2019 Kumbh Mela, held in Prayagraj, India. Contrary to previous studies, results indicated that emotional solidarity did not significantly influence attendees’ intended behavioral loyalty (among domestic visitors). Furthermore, in employing an invariance structural test for paths mentioned in the model, results revealed that the effects of shared beliefs, motivations, emotional solidarity, and memorable religious experiences differed among domestic and international visitors. Study implications and limitations are provided at the close of the paper, giving way to future research opportunities.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of two personality traits (i.e. food neophobia (FN) and domain-specific innovativeness (DSI)) on revisit intentions of consumers in the food festival context.Design/methodology/approach: The study adopted a FN scale, DSI scale and food festival revisit intention scale to capture the study constructs. Furthermore, data were collected from 265 food festival attendees in the town of Udupi (State of Karnataka, India). Furthermore, the study adopted structural equating modeling to investigate the relationship between the three study constructs.Findings: The findings of this study reveals that DSI seems to exercise significant positive influence on consumers revisit intentions for the food festival. On the contrary, FN seems to exercise a negative influence on consumers revisit intentions. This relation, however, is found to be non-significant.Practical implications: The findings of this study are expected to help food festival event managers, organizers and practitioners outline and delineate marketing strategies so as to increase the revisit intentions of consumers for the food festivals.Originality/value: FN and DSI have been extensively studied in the context of consumers’ food consumption and related behaviors. On the contrary, majority of the studies that relate to festival revisit intentions situate consumers’ experiential values and satisfaction with attributes of the festival itself (e.g. location, affordability, quality of food, infrastructure, venue ambiance, service quality, entertainment avenues, timing and duration and size of the festival) as key precursors to their revisit propensity. This research endeavor, however, attempts to investigate whether, notwithstanding other food festival attributes, personality traits of individuals (i.e. FN and DSI) exercise any influence on food festival revisit intentions.

Purpose: This study aims to identify and validate the different clusters of wine festival visitors based on their hedonic motivation. Further, this study also sought how identified clusters were different in terms of perceived value, satisfaction and loyalty to the wine festival. Design/methodology/approach: A survey was conducted during the International Beach Wine Festival held in Karnataka, India, to collect primary data from 400 visitors. Data were subjected to a two-step cluster analysis. Further, cluster segmentation based on visitors’ demographics, perceived value, satisfaction and loyalty was conducted. Decision tree analysis based on recursive partitioning algorithm was used to validate the clusters. Findings: A two-step cluster analysis identified two distinct segments and named those as elite and informal visitors based on hedonic motivation. The cluster scores show that the elite group had the best ratings on social status, socialization and family harmony. On the other hand, the informal group had top scores for wine tasting, enjoyment, change from routine and the festival atmosphere. Decision tree analysis results indicate that social status enjoyment and taste motives differentiate an informal group from the elite group. Research limitations/implications: This study was conducted in a wine festival held in a single location. To assess the strength of the results, case studies in other regions will be of importance. Originality/value: This study extended the knowledge of the wine festival by adapting hedonic motivation as a basis for wine festival segmentation. Besides, this study’s empirical findings would greatly benefit wine festival organizers to formulate an appropriate marketing strategy to target each wine festival visitors’ cluster based on the differentiating factors obtained from the decision tree modelling.

The purpose of this research is to examine the perceived importance and perceived experiences of library service quality for hospitality management students. Also, an effort was made to identify the strengths and weaknesses of library service quality based on their perception of library services. The researchers have used LibQUAL+®, a popular tool that libraries use to assess the perception of library service quality over the years. Undergraduates and postgraduate’s students studying in one of the premier private hotel management institutes in India participated in this study. The findings of the study suggest that library service providers need to understand the needs of students and should have the inclination to help students in making the library a gateway for study, learning and research. The future research may include faculty members’ perception of importance and performance of library service quality. This type of survey can be repeated at regular intervals to distinguish the varying needs of library users.