Student loyalty is an important concern for higher education institutions. When an educational institution enhances student loyalty, it is expected to improve its reputation and education quality, student retention, and financial support from alumni. This study develops a model based on the relationship marketing literature to examine student loyalty. It tests the model with two university-level tourism and hospitality management programs, one in the U. S. and the other in Hong Kong. Structural equation modeling is used to test the proposed relationships and to compare the two country samples. The findings provide practical implications for educators in tourism and hospitality programs.
Shopping is one of the oldest tourist activities and commonly accounts for the majority of travel budgets. However, tourists have expressed concerns regarding the risks they face in shopping destinations. Scholars have suggested that trust is a mechanism for reducing the complexity of human behavior in a situation that involves uncertainty. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate the trust of tourists toward shopping destinations. Specifically, the study attempts to develop and validate the measurement properties of a scale, which measures shopping destination trust. The target sample comprised shopping tourists. Via convenience sampling, 708 usable samples were collected in Hong Kong. Subsequently, purification of the measurement scale, assessment of the latent structure, and scale validation were conducted. Results reveal that shopping destination trust consists of nine dimensions. The present research is expected to shed light on potential research topics in the field of shopping tourism.
Integrating theorizing in sensemaking and conceptual or contextualized metaphor theory, this study investigates how middle managers in knowledge work settings support or contest the implementation of changes in management control systems (MCS) by examining how they make sense of the new control roles allocated to them. It draws on case study evidence from an organizational unit of a US multinational technology company. Results from qualitative analysis show that managers employed contextualized metaphors as collective symbols to make sense of and deal with differing views of changes in MCS and the impact on their roles, responsibilities and identity at work. Specifically, the results indicate that individuals’ acceptance of innovative control practices varied and that by remaining unaware of managers’ dilemmas, the organization ran the risk of failing to properly implement the changes, even though the system had been deemed appropriate for knowledge work. Because of their fundamental role in the success of implementing MCS-related changes in knowledge work settings, realizing how middle manager develop an understanding and react to changes in MCS is a critical endeavor for both researchers and practitioners alike.
The current study contributes to the extant literature by illustrating that airlines can enhance passenger (customer) satisfaction and loyalty by focusing on the enhancement of those aspects of the pre-flight and in-flight service experience over which they have direct control. The results indicate that airline passenger perceived pre-flight service quality and perceived in-flight service quality are distinct aspects of airline service quality that have independent and positive direct effects on airline passenger satisfaction. Moreover, perceived pre-flight service quality had a substantive, positive impact on airline passenger loyalty. Our findings illustrate the importance of airline pre-flight service quality and highlight the focal role that customer perceptions of pre-experience service quality (e.g., pre-experience communication, procedures, and interactions) play in the enhancement of customer satisfaction and fostering customer loyalty.
The relevance and recall of information sources, particularly those used in the prepurchase hotel search process, have not been fully explored. As they are critical to inform the final hotel booking, it is essential to examine the relevance and recall of information sources used by customers. Thus, the main aim of this article is to investigate both relevance, in this case measured by the pages viewed, and recall, gauged by both aided and unaided recall of keywords used and websites visited during an online session. An exploratory, observation method that is “goal-directed” is the main research instrument with both qualitative and quantitative data collected. This method is supplemented with questionnaires to measure both implicit and explicit recall. Results show that online travel agencies are more relevant than both search engines and travel-related social media, based on the number of pages viewed. The recall of both keywords and websites was low, both for aided recall and unaided recall.
De nos jours, la collaboration entre managers et chercheurs en gestion est délicate. Pourquoi et comment le praticien, souvent limité à un objet d’étude, peut-il créer de la connaissance ? Dans cette communication, nous présentons et explorons les cas de trois recherches menées par des managers. Nous avons actionné des techniques qualitatives de recherche telles que l’analyse de manuscrits de trois thèses de Doctorate in Business Administration, les observations participantes, ou encore des entretiens semi-directifs. Un traitement de nos matériaux par codage nous a permis de faire émerger les notions de création et transmission de connaissance ainsi que de besoin de reconnaissance des managers-chercheurs. Nous soulignons le positionnement épistémologique opté par opportunisme méthodologique et l’accès aux données comme avantage concurrentiel du manager-chercheur. Enfin, nous formulons une proposition à destination des institutions académiques afin « d’associer plus étroitement
