Jaehee Gim

Outbound travelers from the so‐called Big Four European countries—France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom—are essential target markets in the global travel industry, consistently ranking within the top 10 for tourist volume. Despite their geographical proximity, these nations have cultivated distinct cultures, values, and customs, resulting in unique consumer characteristics for each country. However, comparative studies of these travelers within the hotel context remain limited. To bridge this gap, this study employs TripAdvisor review data and multilevel modeling to examine the varying impact that various hotel attributes (e.g., service, cleanliness, sleep quality, value‐for‐money, location) have on overall hotel evaluation across the Big Four, segmented by three‐, four‐, and five‐star hotels. The findings emphasize nationality as a critical factor in consumer behavior, offering theoretical support for Consumer Culture Theory and practical insights for hotel management and online travel agencies to design more targeted and effective strategies.

This study examined how workplace telepressure and cyber incivility, as work-related stressors, affect individual and work-related outcomes in hospitality employees, using a mixed-methods approach. After developing a draft, following a thorough literature review and interviews with hotel staff, the drafted questions were refined through a pre-test and a pilot test. Finally, the main survey was conducted with 792 hotel staff in China. Structural equation modeling was performed using Mplus (Version 8.3) to test both direct and serial mediating effects. It was found that workplace telepressure and cyber incivility, through the serial mediating effect of technostress and poor mental health, had a significant impact on work–life wellbeing and work pleasure as individual-related outcomes, and on service recovery failure and service delay response as work-related outcomes. The findings may help in managing employees’ individual-related and work-related stressors triggered by modern digital technologies.

The hospitality industry is vulnerable to various forms of customer incivility, leading frontline employees to perform emotional labor. This study, grounded in the Job Demands–Resources (JD‐R) model and the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, aims to elucidate the mechanisms through which emotional labor leads to emotional exhaustion and ultimately increases turnover intention among casino dealers. Health promotion behaviors are examined as a coping strategy within this pathway. A quantitative survey was conducted with 325 casino dealers in South Korea, and the data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The findings show that customer incivility exerts a partially significant impact on emotional labor, with physical incivility exerting a stronger influence. Surface acting significantly affects emotional exhaustion, whereas deep acting does not demonstrate a significant effect. Emotional exhaustion was identified as a strong predictor of turnover intention. Furthermore, health promotion behaviors did not show a significant direct effect on turnover intention.

This study proposed an integrated model grounded in social capital theory and stakeholder theory, explaining the impact of government trust on the decision‐making process of tourism development. A survey was conducted among residents who participated in rural development education programs to validate this model. The findings indicated that government trust influenced attitude and satisfaction but did not directly impact support for tourism development. However, attitude and satisfaction fully mediated the relationship between trust in local government and support for tourism development. Additionally, residents with higher levels of community participation showed a stronger influence of government trust on attitude and satisfaction than those with lower participation levels. These findings suggested that local government bodies could effectively foster support for tourism development by actively encouraging community participation throughout the tourism development process.

The unpredictable nature of crises poses a significant challenge to the operation of businesses. Hotels often resort to reactive measures, specifically cost reduction strategies, as their primary means of surviving a crisis. Despite the challenges that firms often face in determining which expenses to prioritize to improve their chance of survival, no prior studies have delved into this pressing matter. Thus, this study applied machine learning classification models to prove which expense should be targeted for cuts first to increase the odds of surviving a crisis. We proposed that food and beverage salaries were the most important operating expense as a determinant of a good-performing hotel during the COVID-19 crisis, and marketing expenses were the second most important operating expense. We also found that the relative importance of hotel operating expenses had changed before and during COVID-19.

Unlike institutional investors, who have expertise in collecting and analyzing firm information to predict firms’ future performance, individual investors have a limited ability to conduct this task. Therefore, individual investors are known to commonly rely on financial analysts’ earnings forecasts, which are freely available to them. However, as demonstrated by numerous studies, financial analysts’ forecasts are not always accurate and free from bias. Drawing on screening theory and the innate financial and structural differences between highly franchised restaurants and their less franchised peers, the current study showed that analysts provide more accurate and less optimistically biased forecasts for the former than the latter. However, the positive impact of an additional number of analysts on the accuracy of forecasts was weaker for the former than the latter. The current study can help individual investors in the restaurant industry improve their understanding of financial analysts’ earnings forecasts and make better-informed investment decisions.

In an attempt to manage earnings upward, firm managers commonly deviate from normal business activities (i.e., real earnings management) and misrepresent accruals on financial reports (i.e., accrual earnings management). The current study aimed to demonstrate that due to the financial and regulatory uniqueness of lodging real estate investment trusts (REITs), lodging REITs diverge from lodging C-corporations (C-corps) in their earnings management behavior. Specifically, drawing on signaling theory and precautionary motive theory, the current study showed that compared to lodging C-corps, lodging REITs are less likely to engage in accrual earnings management but more actively conduct real earnings management. Furthermore, the deterrent impact of cash holdings on real earnings management using unusually low discretionary expenditures was found to be weaker for lodging REITs than for lodging C-corps. The findings of the current study will enhance stakeholders’ understanding of lodging firms’ earnings management behavior by shedding light on the different business types in the lodging industry.

It has become a common practice for restaurant firms to spend amounts exceeding their earnings on share buybacks by depleting their cash reserves or even by borrowing money. Given restaurant firms’ limited ability to generate internal cash and the high cost of debt financing, using these means to finance share buybacks could jeopardize restaurant firms’ long-term success. However, little is known about the factors influencing restaurant firms’ tendency toward this seemingly aggressive buyback behavior. This study revealed that the more restaurant firms’ earnings reduce, the greater their tendency is to conduct such aggressive share buybacks. This result could provide some evidence that managerial self-serving behavior plays a role in aggressive share buybacks in the restaurant industry. The study also demonstrated that the positive impact of reduced earnings on aggressive buybacks becomes stronger as a firm’s degree of franchising increases.