Purpose: The purpose of this study is to inspect factors influencing profitability in the Italian hospitality industry during the period 2008-2016. Design/methodology/approach: This paper examines the profitability and its determinants using a sample of 2,366 Italian hotels. The author applies a...

Purpose: Online consumer reviews have become increasingly important for consumer decision-making. One of the most prominent examples is the hotel industry where consumer reviews on websites, such as Bookings.com, TripAdvisor and Venere.com, play a critical role in consumers' choice of a hotel....

We investigate the empirical phenomenon of rating bubbles, that is, the presence of a disproportionate number of extremely positive ratings in user-generated content websites. We test whether customers are influenced by prior ratings when evaluating their stay at a hotel through a field experiment...

Purpose - This paper aims to display the role of hotel restaurants in gastronomic place branding. The authors view hotel restaurants as having a great potential in the promotion of local gastronomy. Design/methodology/approach - The research was done in several stages. First, the authors selected...

Over the last years, the lodging industry started to implement a wide spectrum of green practices to mitigate its pressure on the environment and to respond to the growing consumers' environmental concerns. Recently, scholar's attention to guest perception of hotels green practices has been grown....

This paper develops and tests an innovative DEA model in the hospitality sector, by originally embedding online customer ratings among the outputs of the model. Based on a sample of 268 independent hotels located in Rome (Italy), we test a eWOM-informed DEA model and find that the introduction of...

The evidence on the effect that sharing economy accommodation platforms have on the performance of hotels is not univocal, and a general picture about the circumstances under which hotels may suffer the least from this disruption is still missing. This paper contributes to bridge this gap by...

This special issue consists of seven papers focusing on the role of wine in the hospitality sector. Topics addressed include: small winery-restaurant relationship building; wine consumption behaviour in restaurants; the influence of wine service training on restaurant wine sales; consumer attitudes ...

Over time, more and more hotels have begun to include sustainability policies into their operations management. Hotels go green for a variety of reasons, including cost savings, public funding, staff commitment, public scrutiny, investor relations, and general societal good. However, one of the...

Purpose: This paper aims to examine the question of whether commercial, peer-to-peer accommodation platforms (Airbnb, in particular) and hotels are in fierce competition with each other with the possible presence of substitution threats, and compares the time series of the occupancy values across...