Purpose
The purpose of this study is to assess the comparative influence of two empathy dimensions (cognitive and emotional attributes) on emotional service experience and behavioral intention among business and leisure hotel guests. Studies relevant to empathy dimensions are relatively scarce in tourism and hospitality.
Design/methodology/approach
The current study reviewed the concepts of empathy, and empirically compared perceptions of empathy attributes between the two groups. The survey was intended to examine how well the hotel employees emotionally handle hotel guests’ incidents or inquiries related to any discomforts through personalized attention. The data were collected from 330 hotel guests who had actually complained about service failures while staying at the hotel during the record-breaking summer of 2013 in terms of number of visitors to Jeju. An active empathetic listening (AEL) tool has been taken to measure the hotel guest’s cognitive views and behavioral intentions, as well as emotional empathy measures under the empathic concern and emotional contagion.
Findings
The results revealed that empathetic dimensions strongly influenced the service experiences of hotel guests. While the emotional service experience of business guests was almost completely determined by the cognitive empathy, the emotional service experience of the leisure guests was mainly governed by the emotional empathy.
Practical implications
These outcomes suggest that the empathetic services through a “purpose of visit”-oriented manner might enhance the guest’s overall emotion positively.
Originality/value
According to the prior literatures and empirical findings in hospitality and tourism, empathy can be seen as subscale in SERVQUAL instrument. This paper focus on insights of empathy dimensions, and it was revealed that the interaction of both the cognitive and emotional dimensions of empathy conjointly determines the overall emotional service experience and intention of hotel guests.
Purpose
The purpose of this research is to analyze the shifting perceptions of international tourists to Jeju Island and provide practical lessons to the tourism industry. Specifically, in regard to three United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) natural World Heritage sites in Jeju, this research measures the most salient topics mentioned by tourists to inform a more accurate perception of the island’s most valuable natural assets as reported by tourism experiences.
Design/methodology/approach
This study used a Web crawler to gather over 1,500 English language reviews from international tourists from a famous travel information website. The collected data were then preprocessed for stemming and lemmatization. After this, the processed text data were analyzed through a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)-based topic modeling approach to identify the most prominent clusters of ideas mentioned and represent them visually through graphs, tables and charts.
Findings
The findings from this research suggest that there are ten identifiable topics. Topics focusing on “adventure,” “summits” and “winter” showed noticeable increases, whereas topics focusing on “sunrise peak” and “UNESCO” have decreased over time. There is a trend for international tourists to be ever more conscious of the adventurous and rugged aspects of Jeju, and the novelty of mentioning UNESCO status seems to have worn off. Furthermore, there is the proclivity for tourists to mention “worth” and “enjoy” more as time goes on.
Originality/value
This study applies LDA-based topic modeling and LDAvis using user-generated online reviews with time-series analyses. Consequently, it provides unique insights into the changing perceptions of ecotourism on Jeju today, as well as contribution to smart tourism fields.
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