Rosanna Leung

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY APPLICATIONS IN HOSPITALITY AND TOURISM: A REVIEW OF PUBLICATIONS FROM 2005 TO 2007

The tourism and hospitality industries have widely adopted information technology (IT) to reduce costs, enhance operational efficiency, and most importantly to improve service quality and customer experience. This article offers a comprehensive review of articles that were published in 57 tourism and hospitality research journals from 2005 to 2007. Grouping the findings into the categories of consumers, technologies, and suppliers, the article sheds light on the evolution of IT applications in the tourism and hospitality industries. The article demonstrates that IT is increasingly becoming critical for the competitive operations of the tourism and hospitality organizations as well as for managing the distribution and marketing of organizations on a global scale.

Distribution channel in hospitality and tourism: Revisiting disintermediation from the perspectives of hotels and travel agencies

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reexamine several issues about disintermediation from the perspectives of tourism product/service suppliers (hotels) and traditional intermediaries (travel agencies), considering the move of the current distribution landscape toward disintermediation. Internet and mobile technologies offer various tools for consumers to search and purchase products/services from suppliers directly. Consequently, the necessity and role of traditional intermediaries in the industry become questionable. Design/methodology/approach – In all, six focus group interviews were conducted to collect primary data from ten managers of three traditional travel agencies and 11 managers from three business hotels in Hong Kong, which is a major travel destination in Asia with many world-class hotels and tourism facilities. Findings – Despite their different business backgrounds, the interviewees agreed on the increasing importance of Internet technology in the distribution of tourism products. Th...

AN ANALYSIS OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN TOURISM JOURNALS FROM 2000 TO 2007: A GOOGLE SCHOLAR APPROACH

This research note reports a study that analyzed the 100 most influential articles, which is operationalized as the most cited publications published in tourism journals from 2000 to 2007. A Google Scholar‐based software system was developed in Java to retrieve the citation information. The empirical findings show that 10.16% of the citations were from Institute for Scientific Information‐listed (ISI) journals, and that 71.64% of them were from neither ISI nor tourism journals. The most popular topics covered by these articles were psychology and tourist behavior, followed by destination image and marketing. This article contributes to the literature by providing an alternative means of assessing the impact of research into tourism.

AN ANALYSIS OF ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP IN HOSPITALITY AND TOURISM JOURNALS

Despite the wide recognition of the importance of research in the academic community, the existing hospitality and tourism literature contains no published articles on the academic leadership of editors, associate editors, and editorial board members. This article presents the findings of a study that analyzed regional and institutional contributions to major research journals in the hospitality and tourism field. The empirical findings show that North America, and in particular the United States, has the largest regional and national share of editors, associate editors, and editorial board members, demonstrating the country’s clear academic leadership. When individual institutes are considered, it is evident that very few universities in the world can demonstrate leadership and that those that do are naturally universities that have a major specialization in tourism and hospitality.

The Recent Asian Wave in Tourism Research: The Case of the Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing

This paper presents the findings of a review of research papers that were published in the Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing from January 2011 to December 2013. Content analysis was used to analyze 159 research papers. The results revealed that, out of the eight research areas identified, consumer behavior, brand management, and e-marketing are the three most popular research topics among studies that collected data from Asian and non-Asian countries/regions. One notable exception is that research related to demand models and pricing seems to be dominated by research in Asian countries/regions. The study concludes with a general discussion of the implications, trends in tourism marketing research, and study limitations.

Evaluation of Hotel Information Technologies and EDI Adoption The Perspective of Hotel IT Managers in Hong Kong

This study examines information technology (IT) applications, the adoption of electronic data interchange (EDI) among hotel systems, and management support for IT departments in a sample of Hong Kong hotels. The empirical results indicate that most hotels have not installed decision support or strategic management tools. In addition, the ratio of EDI implementation between hotel systems and web applications is relatively low. The rate of adoption of automated credit card authorization, which can enhance the security of customer data, is only 6 percent for the property management system (PMS) and 17 percent for point of sale (POS) applications. In keeping with the increased importance of hotel IT systems, the background of hotel IT managers has changed dramatically in the past decade. Many more have IT-related qualifications, with almost 70 percent holding a bachelor’s degree or higher. Because of the low adoption of EDI, the authors propose a revised EDI adoption model. The original model includes perceived benefits, external pressure, and organizational readiness. Within organizational readiness are financial resources and IT competence, and to those two factors the new model adds IT managers’ attitude toward and awareness of EDI.

Analyzing Research Collaborations of Information Technology Publications in Leading Hospitality and Tourism Journals: 1986–2005

In spite of the existence of many of published Information Technology [IT] related articles in tourism and hospitality research journals, the degree to which the collaboration and social interaction of researchers in IT and tourism remains largely unknown. This paper reports on a study that selected six leading research journals in hospitality and tourism, including Annals of Tourism Research [ATR], Journal of Travel Research [JTR], Tourism Management [TM], International Journal of Hospitality Management [IJHM], Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly [CQ], and Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research [JHTR], as the source to analyze research collaboration in the context of IT and tourism research. A total of 4,140 full-length research papers have been published in the period of 1986 to 2005. On the basis of research findings, both national and international research has a significant increase of 154% and 175% between the first and second decades for IT related publications in these six journals. Interestingly, co-authored papers frequently have senior academics’ involvement, and that over 90% of the papers had three to four authors have at least one author who is a senior academician.

Attracting User Social Media Engagement: A Study of Three Budget Airlines Facebook Pages

The role of social media has changed from information delivery to distribution channels. Budget airlines have used their Facebook pages to delivery promotional materials connect new customers, invite user engagement, and information distribution. One of the main purposes of wall posts is to invite user involvement. The results in this study indicated users interested on commenting wall posts which were “fresh”, that means posts published within two days. In order to increase user engagement, airlines should keep publishing new wall posts so as to encourage users to “like” or “share” these information with their network. The company responses were not significant, only five, 14 and 17 responses were found for Air Asia, Easy Jet and Jet Blue respectively. The outcome of the study questions the role and suitability of social media tools for marketing purpose in the airline business especially in relation to other segments within tourism industry.

Asian wave in travel and tourism research.

ABSTRACT Although numerous tourism-related articles have been published by authors affiliated with Asian universities, operationalized here as the “Asian Wave,” little research effort has focused on examining such authorship. Adopting a publication counting method, this study analyzes articles published in four top tourism journals from 1999–2008 that are either Asia-focused or co-authored by researchers from Asian universities. The results reveal that both Asian research productivity and Asia-related contributions have increased over time, although there have been few inter-Asia and international research collaborations in the past decade. A discussion of the Asian Wave and suggestions for its further growth are provided.

Personality Differences and Hotel Web Design Study Using Targeted Positive and Negative Association Rule Mining

As people have unique tastes, the way to satisfy a small group of targeted customers or to be generic to meet most peoples preference has been a traditional question to many fashion designers and website developers. This study examined the relationship between individuals’ personality differences and their web design preferences. Each individuals personality is represented by a combination of five traits, and 15 website design-related features are considered to test the users’ preference. We introduced a data mining technique called targeted positive and negative association rule mining to analyze a dataset containing the survey results collected from undergraduate students. The results of this study not only suggest the importance of providing specific designs to attract individual customers, but also provide valuable input on the Big Five personality traits in their entirety.