Purpose: Based on equity theory, this paper investigates if guests write on different review websites because of different internal motivations. Furthermore, it examines the moderating effect of service’ exceeds, neutral, negative, and service recovery–on the relationship between motivations and type of website to write reviews.Design/methodology/approach: To exam if the star ratings of the same hotels were significantly different across hotel, online travel agency, and third-party review websites, this study collected 12,000 star ratings from 40 hotels across the US and conducted t-tests. A survey of 1,600 US travelers was administered to uncover the motivations for writing on different websites/website combinations. Four different scenarios were used to test the moderating effect of service: exceeds, neutral, negative, and service-recovery. These responses were analyzed using backwards stepwise regression.Findings: Star ratings for the same hotel do differ among the three websites; hotel is the highest and third-party is the lowest. There are seven distinct groups of guests. Guests are motivated to write reviews to balance inequitable relationships. They decide which website/website combination best improves the equity relationship. This research indicates that guests’ choice of website is based on different internal motivations. The moderating effect of the service experience was significant.Originality/value: This paper contributes to the literature by examining different motivations to write online reviews by website. Prior research typically examined one website or aggregated results from multiple websites, ignoring website specific differences. This can help hoteliers to understand why initiatives to promote reviews on certain websites may be unsuccessful.

The present study investigates the impact of natural environments on tourism destinations in a holistic approach. Specifically, the impact of accessibility to beaches and environmental quality aspects (temperature, visibility, air quality, and water quality) on tourism businesses can be accessed based on a natural-resource-based view. Dynamic panel estimation is employed to analyze the financial performance of U.S. coastal hotels between 2008 and 2017. By employing the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) analysis, this aims to estimate coefficients consistently and impartially, thereby addressing endogeneity issues. According to findings of the present study, as hotels are close to beaches, they earn higher revenues and higher revenue per-available-room. Also, all four environmental factors are significant on coastal hotels’ financial performance. These findings underscore the importance of beach and environmental factors as location-specific tourism resources that provide a competitive advantage and demonstrate the application of natural-resource-based view to tourism destinations.

In the fiercely competitive peer-to-peer accommodation business, it is critical that hosts advertise their homes effectively. This study aims to investigate, in a peer-to-peer accommodation context, the listing title’s impact on a property’s financial performance. Drawing on language expectancy theory, this work examines the linguistic styles of listing titles. Based on multiple analyses of 110,167 observations of seven Asian countries, this study found each country has significantly different linguistic styles that maximize financial performance. The findings of the study suggest that consumers’ expectation on listing titles varies by location; meeting such expectations is linked to higher financial performance.

During the economic downturns of 2008 and 2009, many US restaurant companies struggled to avoid heavy losses. However, some still managed to outperform the market and even made large profits in the midst of widespread economic difficulties. McDonald's was one such company and, in light of its example, many industry magazines and newspapers featured articles suggesting that a quick-service restaurant, with a lower income elasticity of demand, might be better able to survive during constrained economic conditions than upper-level restaurants. This paper empirically examines whether US restaurants' income elasticity of demand and actual financial performances during economic downturns are affected by the restaurant type. The findings suggest that restaurant type showed no significant effects on the income elasticity of demand for US restaurant companies, while fast-food restaurants showed significantly greater accounting performances than those of non-fast-food restaurants during recession. The insignificant differences in the income elasticity of demand and significant differences in accounting performances during the recession may suggest that fast-food restaurants implemented cost control more effectively than non-fast-food restaurants, and the authors' additional analysis confirms this.

There is a new wave of mixed development where luxury hotels come with condominium units, though this type of diversification has gained scant attention. Prior hospitality literature on diversification strategies has mostly taken the firm-level approach and documented its impact on performance from various angles such as brand diversification, segment diversification, and geographic diversification, therefore leaving a void. In this work, we use the multilevel mixed effect model to examine 15,340 property-level data points from 2010 to 2019 for U.S. luxury hotels with and without condominium units. Our objective is to compare, at a property level, the performances of luxury hotels with condominium units with the performances of those not having condominium units and to determine whether the difference varies by hotel location. Our findings suggest that the Average Daily Rate (ADR), Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR), and Total Revenue per Available Rooms (TRevPAR) of luxury hotels with condominium units were significantly higher than those of hotels without condominium units. Significant moderating effect of location was found for Occupancy, ADR, Food and Beverage Revenue per Available Rooms (F&B RevPAR), and TRevPAR while no such effect was found for RevPAR and GOPPAR.

Although the importance of superior stakeholder relationships in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives is well-established in the literature, research on the antecedents of such investments on salient stakeholders, like employees, and in particular industry contexts is lacking. In this paper, we explore an important antecedent of employee-centered CSR initiatives in the restaurant industry, that is, slack resources. We consider the restaurant industry an ideal context for this study due to the prevalence of limited slack resources, and the salience of employees for customer service, satisfaction, and eventual firm performance. Using a panel dataset of 430 observations of publicly traded firms in the USA, we find that slack resources contribute to socially responsible policies towards employees, yet slack resources do not alleviate any employee-related concerns in the restaurant sector. The findings on the differential effect of slack resources on employee-centered CSR initiatives and concerns provide practical implications and directions for future research.