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Purpose This study aims to theorise and empirically test a model based on the hierarchy of effects behavioural learning approach (“do-think-feel”) to explain how travel during a crisis assists consumer well-being. The paper also examines whether the effect travel has on well-being is serially mediated by perceived risk and resilience and moderated by the personality trait of sensation-seeking. Design/methodology/approach This research uses a quasi-experimental design involving Australian consumers based on a sample of n = 307 who had travelled and n = 277 who had not during the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 584). A replication study (N = 290) is also undertaken to assess the robustness of the hierarchy of effects uncovered in the main study. Data were analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM) and Hayes PROCESS macro. Findings The results reveal travellers have significantly higher levels of both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being than non-travellers, suggesting the transformative potential of travel experiences during a crisis. The transformative potential of travel is driven by perceived risk and psychological resilience, which mediate the relationship between travel frequency and well-being. Further, spotlight moderation analysis demonstrates that the effect of travel on well-being is most profound for those with lower levels of sensation-seeking. These relationships are also confirmed in the replication study. Originality/value This research is among the first in transformative service research (TSR) to test the mediators of perceived risk and resilience together in a singular study, showing how experiences such as travel are potentially transformative. It also evaluates personality traits such as sensation-seeking as a moderating factor, which is uncommon in TSR. Further, this study empirically validates a do–think–feel behavioural learning approach, as opposed to other hierarchy of effects sequences that are dominant in TSR and the wider services marketing literature.

Refereed/Peer-reviewed Design of advertising stimuli is critical for marketing, especially to destinations which have limited exposure to visitors. Existing studies postulate the design of advertising affects the amount and valence of thoughts (Cognition), thought confidence (Metacognition) and attitudes towards a destination. Despite this, limited research has considered the influence of emotional arousal and perceived credibility of advertising on cognition, metacognition and attitude. This research implemented a two-by-two experimental design to examine how cognition, metacognition and attitude differ across different levels of emotional arousal and perceived credibility of an advertisement of Iran. Results demonstrate participants showed higher cognitive engagement with the advertisement and more thought confidence and developed more favourable thinking and attitude to Iran in response to a highly credible and emotionally arousing tourism stimulus. A key contribution of this research is that high emotional arousal evokes more favourable cognition, metacognition and attitude towards a destination.

Experiential marketing has emerged as an effective strategy to promote hedonic tourism and hospitality experiences through stimulating tourist imagination and positive emotions. This study aims to broaden the existing literature by exploring potential imagination facilitator and/or inhibitor in the context of a local tourism event, “The White Party” on the Gold Coast, with a sample of 655 participants. Structural equation model (SEM) using SmartPLS software and cluster analysis using SPSS were conducted to test research hypothesis and identify three audience groups (event dreamers, indecisive audience, and uninterested audience). Research outcomes demonstrate that video is more effective than poster in evoking tourist imagination and positive emotions, leading to stronger intentions to attend the promoted event. More importantly, prior knowledge is found as an imagination facilitator while psychological distance plays the role of an imagination inhibitor. This study provide valuable insights into how the effectiveness of experiential marketing varies depending on the audience characteristics. Therefore, event managers can optimize the effectiveness of experiential marketing by (1) targeting more receptive audience groups (i.e., event dreamers and indecisive audience); (2) adding more “psychologically close” details of the promoted event (e.g., similar age or cultural groups) and (3) enhancing message repetition.

Purpose This study aims to explore residents’ emotional responses to tourism development and how the anticipated loss or gain of resources from it affects their attitudes and actions. The study extends the conservation of resources (COR) theory by using the cognitive appraisal (CA) theory to explain why the residents of Al-Juhfa village in Saudi Arabia become stressed and experience negative emotions due to tourism development and how they respond and cope with it. Design/methodology/approach This study uses qualitative methods by applying purposive interviews to engage informants. Data were gathered from 38 residents of Al-Juhfa village, Saudi Arabia. A content analysis of the data collected was used. Findings Findings indicate that residents who perceived they might lose resources (land, houses, heritage, sociocultural and Islamic values and job and investment opportunities) due to tourism development had negative emotions and attitudes towards tourism development. This led a group of residents to resist development and not allow tourists to enter the village. Without tourism knowledge and skills, the residents are worried they may lose control of their resources. Religiosity was a factor that helped to cope with the negative emotions, and other coping actions included accepting displacement with compensation, allowing foreign workers to enter the village with conditions and accepting development with their involvement. Research limitations/implications The limitations of the current study are that the data were gathered for the duration of the COVID-19 outbreak when residents were highly anxious and still feeling fear; these feelings could have influenced the responses. Secondly, the data were collected through hardcopy surveys using close- and open-ended questions. Therefore, these data might be limited, as the topic and questions were politicaly sensitive, and the informants might not have completely expressed their feelings, giving diplomatic answers instead. Therefore, the research should be repeated in different contexts with qualitative data using face-to-face techniques. Practical implications Firstly, the residents are concerned about losing their resources, such as land, houses and heritage. The development cannot be fully successful without the involvement and support of the local community. Therefore, the government should help them remain in their village by offering them official permission (sukuk) to retain their land and houses. Secondly, the government can open new residential areas and build homes for the residents within the current village, especially as the village has only a few people. Residential areas, such as a compound with complete services, can be designed as part of the tourist attractions in Al-Juhfa. Social implications The two theories of COR and CA were developed in the western context and used in tourism studies separately in other contexts, especially CA. However, as far as the authors’ concern, this is the first study to use the two theories in one study to explore residents’ emotions towards tourism development. Both theories explained the process of residents’ emotions towards tourism impact and the negative emotional reactions to perceived threats and resultant stress and how residents cope with these emotions. Nevertheless, in the context of Al-Juhfa as a conservative community, these two theories are not the only factors that explain the residents’ emotional response and attitude, instated that the residents’ religiosity and their belief in Allah is also an important determinant that explains their emotions and attitude towards tourism’s impact on their village and community.

Purpose This study aims to extend the use of psychology in the field of tourism crisis and disaster management using coping theory. It examines how resident emotions change in the extended prodromal stage of the COVID-19 pandemic and how residents used humour to cope with stress from not being able to travel. Design/methodology/approach Early COVID-19 (March–April 2020) was characterised by negative media reports, lockdowns and travel restrictions but for Indonesia, no direct effects in terms of loss of life. This unusual context has led to phenomena not previously studied – humour as a coping strategy. This research consists of two studies: Study 1 used thematic analysis of interviews before and during the early lockdown period with a panel of 245 quarantined residents who had travelled in the prior two years. Study 2 followed up using a #hasthtag analysis of travel-related videos content posted on Instagram and TikTok. Findings The COVID-19 global pandemic is an unusual crisis which has resulted in high levels of stress and uncertainty. This study identified the unusual characteristics of the COVID-19 crises and changes of quarantined resident’s emotions during the pre-event and prodromal stages. In addition, this study found the use of humour as a coping mechanism during the lockdown period and the use of social media as the vehicle for humour. Research limitations/implications These findings may be generalisable only to a crises and disasters with an extended prodromal stage. Interestingly, climate change has some similar characteristics where warning signs are available, but the personal implications have not yet become apparent. Practical implications The emotions associated with crisis are dynamic and crisis managers may tailor communication to help deal with stress. Social implications This research provides an insight into how humorous content can be used to reduce negative emotions in the early stage of a stressful event associated with travel restrictions. This study may be suitable for use in integrated marketing communication in post-recovery messaging for the tourism industry and destination management organisation in the digital platform. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate “dark humour” during the early stages of COVID-19 and also the use of coping strategies to explain how humour can reduce stress.

Purpose Al-Juhfa is a small village located near Rabigh City, between Makkah and Madinah, Saudi Arabia, with significant archaeological and religious resources. The purpose of this paper is to examine residents’ attitudes toward tourism development at Al-Juhfa. Design/methodology/approach The qualitative study uses purposive interviewing to recruit informants. Data was collected using semi-structured interview and open-ended questions. Eight semi-structured interviews were made and a list of open-ended questions was distributed to 134 informants. All data were analysed and no new codes were found after the answer of the first 49 informants analysed. Findings The results show that residents’ attitudes toward tourism development in general were positive with residents expecting to receive economic, social and environmental benefits. Residents were aware of potential positive and negative impacts of tourism development and appeared to balance these in developing their attitudes. Tourism was seen to empower residents and the religiosity of the community influenced their perception of tourism development. Originality/value This study contributes to the literature by supporting the use of social exchange theory in this context and by recommending the inclusion of religiosity in further studies.

Purpose To clarify inconsistencies in the emotion elicitation process and to suggest avenues for advancing emotion research, this study aims to conduct a systematic review of emotion research in the subject area of hospitality and tourism management. Design/methodology/approach This study analyzes 178 emotion-related articles published in 37 journals from 2004–2019 in the context of hospitality and tourism, providing a systematic synthesis of publication outlets and trajectories, research settings, the conceptualization of emotion, emotion measurement, classifications of antecedents and consequences. Findings Regarding the elicitation of emotions, many studies ignore the developments in emotion research in the mainstream discipline and still consider external stimuli as the direct causes of emotion. Numerous studies conceptualize customer emotion as positive or negative, which overlooks the nuances between discrete emotions with the same valence. Additionally, emotion scales are largely borrowed from psychology without considering the specific characteristics of the hospitality and tourism context. Methodologically, most studies take a single-measure lens with either a self-report, physiological or expression behavior measure. Research limitations/implications The analysis of the literature highlights three main areas for future emotion studies in the hospitality and tourism context. Originality/value Previous reviews are narrative and only address specific areas of interest, rendering them incapable of explaining how a systematic literature identification process was conducted. The present systematic review is among the first to provide an overview of emotion studies in hospitality and tourism over a 15-year period. By drawing insights from appraisal theories of emotions, this review addresses common misunderstandings concerning the emotion elicitation process in the current hospitality and tourism literature.

Airline service delays have received increasing media attention and can result in negative public comments. This study examines the relationship among perceived wait time, negative emotions (anger and worry) and loyalty intention, and the moderating effects of two types of emotion regulation strategies (reappraisal and suppression). A total of 958 valid responses were collected from passengers who had experienced a flight delay. The results reveal that perceived wait time is positively related to feelings of anger and worry, which in turn, negatively influence future loyalty intentions. Importantly, results indicate emotional reappraisal alleviates the effect of perceived wait time on elicitation of anger and worry. Emotional suppression, on the other hand, reduces the influence of negative emotions on loyalty intentions. This study is one of the first to examine how emotion regulation strategies can moderate the negative effect of flight delay on loyalty intention. It contributes to the knowledge by providing a validated empirical model of how customers react to a service delay experience. Implications and recommendations for future research are provided.

The “10 New Balis” aims to duplicate the economic effects of tourism in Bali to 10 new tourism destinations in Indonesia. Group interviews were conducted with Indonesian tourism stakeholders (N = 2...

Prior self-validation hypothesis studies suggest that an individual’s attitude toward advertising is affected by the cognitive processing of the message and the valence of emotion. Yet, the effect of emotional arousal and stimulus credibility on attitudes toward a destination has not been discerned. This study employs the self-validation hypothesis to investigate the effect of the three dimensions of thinking on attitudes toward Iran. Participants (N = 416) were randomly assigned to a two (high vs. low arousal) × two (high vs. low source credibility) experiment. The partial least squares multigroup analysis results indicated that the emotionally arousing stimulus led to a greater influence of the amount and confidence of thought on attitudes. The effect of the amount of thought on attitude was greater in response to a credible stimulus. This research advances knowledge by revealing that emotional arousal has a significant positive impact on three dimensions of thinking and positive attitudes. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This research note distinguishes between the concepts of novelty, unexpectedness and surprise applied in research on tourism experiences. In the existing tourism discourse, these concepts are used ...

Food is a necessary part of a trip, but it can also create a memorable experience. This study explores the relations between food experiences, place attachment, and destination image, as well as the moderating effects of food neophobia and food involvement. The study was conducted in Macau using a survey of 450 inbound tourists. Findings indicated that food experience has a significant correlation with place attachment and destination image. This study also found food neophobia has an important moderating effect on the relationship between food experience and place attachment. Food involvement moderated the relationship between food experience and destination image. These results indicate that positive food experiences can increase place attachment and destination image, but its impact is moderated by food-related personality traits.

Tourism is part of the experience economy, and more and more governments are interested in improving their tourism experiences. This improvement can add value for visitors as well as increasing income for local people. There are several techniques that are used in developing experiential tourism products, and this chapter focuses on development through the use of storytelling, particularly applying interpretation approach, principles, and techniques to create a story-based experiences well-known as interpretive experience. This chapter provides a case study of the development of interpretive experiences by the Bajo sea-farer, the largest sea nomad descendant in the world, who live in Mola, Wakatobi National Park, Indonesia, a UNESCO Man and Biosphere site and listed in their World Heritage Tentative List. Through series of workshops, community investigation, simulation, and tryouts, they developed four interpretive experiences strongly related to Bajo culture, namely Dolphin Watching Tour, Cultural Walking Tour, Village Canoeing Tour, and Star-Telling.

While other disciplinary approaches such as sociology and anthropology are important, this chapter introduces a cognitivist psychology approach to experience research. Such theoretical discussion may seem of little practical use, but the chapter argues that it is fundamental to understanding how and why experiences are created. The chapter applies theory and concepts from cognitive science (cognitive psychology and neuroscience) in the study of tourism experiences. This provides a different psychological paradigm to the behavioural approach currently in use in much research. The chapter describes the scope of cognitive psychology and neuroscience, its main concepts of cognitive psychology (perception, attention, emotion, memory, consciousness, learning), and their neuronal basis (neuroscience). These concepts are then applied in three topic areas related to tourism experiences: decision making, emotion, and attention. Several applications to tourism experience research are noted. Finally, the chapter discusses the way cognitive psychology concepts can be used in tourism research.

This study applies a relationship perspective to study tourism crisis management and resilience. Despite the growing academic interest in crisis management, few studies have examined how tourism businesses utilise their networks as a crisis management strategy. This research uses a multi-case study design and longitudinal data collection to study the effects of a natural disaster on tourism businesses in Lombok, Indonesia. Results indicate that the characteristics and capabilities of individual tourism business actors and their networking behaviour affected the speed of their recovery. Networks can be used as a strategic tool and business recovery is improved by strengthening network resilience.

This article examines how real-time emotions elicited by advertisements affect post-viewing judgments, with the goal of determining whether the key moments of real-time emotions lead to enhanced global retrospective judgments. Facial electromyography (EMG) was used to measure objective and unbiased moment-to-moment emotions. One hundred and one participants watched three destination advertisements while their real-time facial EMG data and self-report ratings were collected. The results demonstrate that tourism consumers’ average, peak, and end emotional experiences are correlated with their post-viewing attitude toward the advertisement. However, this study does not provide additional support for superiority of the peak and end moments in driving global retrospective evaluations in tourism advertising. The study advances our understanding of how consumers evaluate tourism advertisements based on more objective physiological data and extends the literature on key moments and retrospective evaluations. Implications and recommendations for future research are discussed.