A Study of Emotional Solidarity in the Homestay Industry between Hosts and Tourists in the Post-Pandemic Era

Abstract

Tourists’ perceptions of various risks at their travel destinations have crucial implications for destination management organizations and other tourism industry practitioners, which is growing into an unprecedented concern in the post-pandemic era. The Internet has boosted the global homestay industry. The perceived risk of homestay tourists requires further attention from researchers to promote the sustainable development of the homestay industry, especially in the post-pandemic era. To supplement and enrich the literature, this study aims to explore the relationships between tourists’ perceived risk, three dimensions of tourists’ emotional solidarity with hosts (feeling welcome, sympathetic understanding, and emotional closeness), and their customer loyalty towards the homestay industry in the post-pandemic era by taking the homestay industry of Guangzhou, China as the context, and employing SmartPLS for the empirical analysis. The results indicate that perceived risk has a significantly negative impact on emotional solidarity and customer loyalty, while emotional solidarity has a significantly positive impact on customer loyalty and plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between perceived risk and customer loyalty. The theoretical contributions of the article and the practical implications of the findings for the sustainable development of the homestay industry are discussed.

A Study on the Mediating Role of Emotional Solidarity between Authenticity Perception Mechanism and Tourism Support Behavior Intentions within Rural Homestay Inn Tourism

“…On the basis of their enhanced emotional identification, these tourists’ desire to revisit, recommend, provide support, and enjoy a similar satisfying experience may influence their future tourism decisions. This study also reaffirms the previous finding that the ES between tourists and homestay inn hosts increases the latter’s intensity of revisiting, recommending, or providing support at the destination [ 46 ].…”

A Comparative Study of Customer Perceptions of Urban and Rural Bed and Breakfasts in Beijing: An Analysis of Online Reviews

“…In contrast, customers paid less attention to the value, especially the price, indicating that customers were not sensitive to the prices of either type of B&B. To some extent, this echoes another study [17], which indicated that B&Bs in China are high-end accommodation products and a symbol of luxury, which makes customers more focused on social value than on functional value [17]. Therefore, the price is not an important consideration.…”

“…Hence, they need to built connections with their hosts. Furthermore, there is literature that shows that the emotional closeness between customers and hosts is the factor most important in business success [17], so hosts should also strengthen their relationships with their customers to improve customer satisfaction. Furthermore, we also found that the convenience of urban B&Bs is more prominent than that of rural B&Bs from the customer perspective, which also verifies the customers' view of the location superiority of urban B&Bs.…”

“…Previous studies on B&Bs mainly focused on the marketing [11][12][13], management, and sustainable development of B&Bs [5,14,15], as well as the consumer behavior [16], host-guest interaction [17], customer experience perceptions of B&Bs [4,18,19], and spatial distribution of B&Bs [20][21][22]. The differences between urban and rural B&Bs have not been well emphasized in existing studies.…”

Factors influencing tourists’ shared bicycle loyalty in Hangzhou, China

“…Perceived risk refers to the spirit cost associated with customers’ purchasing behavior, which significantly impacts tourist behavior ( Nguyen et al, 2021 ). Tourists’ perceived risk is highly correlated with their experience and loyalty ( Zhang and Tang, 2021 ). When their perceived risk is low, they are more at ease with bicycle-sharing and more inclined to become loyal, whereas, when they have a higher risk perception, they tend to be less loyal and refuse to reuse ( Jin et al, 2016 ).…”