Wei Wei

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at University of Central Florida

The dynamic of modern events reflects an increased focus on staging unique and compelling experiences for event attendees. Considering the centrality of customer-customer interactions (CCIs) in conferences, conference experience is greatly driven by attendees' engagement in CCIs. Anchored in social psychology, organizational behavior, and marketing...

Purpose – The present research draws upon the theory of consumption values and the experiential value scale to develop a conceptual model concerning hospitality customer’s use of self-service technologies (SSTs) and their impact on consumers’ service experience. Methodology / Design – Questionnaires were administered to 220 hotel and restaurant c...

Advances in virtual reality (VR) technology exert increasingly influential impacts on tourism. Drawn upon a presence perspective and a process theory, this research aims to explore how VR technology may help enhance theme park visitors' experience and behaviors. Data was collected from 396 theme park visitors who had experienced VR roller coaster o...

Using social network theory as a theoretical root, this study introduces the concept of peer engagement behaviors and discusses its characteristics in relation to customer, employee, and actor engagement behaviors. This study identifies several sets of foundational research questions related to peer engagement behaviors that focus on unique attribu...

The case study method is instrumental in researching complex and new phenomena for both building and testing theories; yet, it is often misunderstood, misused, or mislabeled. For example, Vuignier's (2016) literature review of case studies in destination/place branding research revealed that some studies do not comply with expert definitions since...

Influencer marketing, as a booming phenomenon, has huge potential for marketing research and practices. This paper tackles the topic of pet influencers on social media, more specifically, dog influencers on Instagram, to examine their effectiveness in guiding hotel guests’ booking intention. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the joint e...

Purpose This paper proposes a holistic framework that identifies factors at micro-, meso- and macro-levels and their impacts on the development and evolution of cultural sustainability in hospitality and tourism. Design/methodology/approach A thorough literature review is conducted to construct a conceptual framework for cultural sustainability in...

The restaurant industry rapidly adopted mobile ordering technology during the pandemic, with certain customers preferring it post-pandemic. Understanding its impact on employees is crucial, particularly regarding role ambiguity in handling both face-to-face and mobile orders. Using the Job Demands-Resources Model and the Coping Model of User Adapta...

Purpose The occurrence of severe illness, the risk for which increases as people age, often results in depression. The current study aimed to explore how and when severe illness leads to depression among older adults. Method Data collected from a sample of 756 older adults were analyzed using moderated mediation analysis to examine the underlying...

Even though the role of aesthetics in human life is presumed, its critical role in tourism experience formation is not well-understood. Aesthetic experiences are in the genes of culture and heritage sites; however, aesthetic experience formation in heritage tourism sites is void in tourism theory. To fill this void in the current tourism theory, th...

Hospitality and tourism experiences have impeccable capacities of transformation. Drawing on the experience advantage literature, the current research highlights the needs-based mechanisms through self-esteem, autonomy, meaningfulness, and relatedness in understanding the transformative power of hospitality and tourism experiences. Through a synthe...

By applying the two-step flow theory, this research examines if the level of brand equity impacts consumers’ attitudes toward social media influencers and consumers’ visit intention, and if influencers’ recommendation type plays a moderating role in the process. This research employs a scenario-based experimental design. Study 1 examines the main e...

Integrating neutralization theory, affective events theory, and resilience theory, this study examined the internal process that explains front-line hospitality employee workplace deviance, revealing the intriguing mechanisms behind quiet quitting. 563 surveys were analyzed using partial least square structural equation modeling. Results indicated...

Purpose This study aimed to identify both visitors’ and residents’ general wine consumer typology as well as their typology specific to a wine destination, Florida, and investigated the influences of these typologies on consumer motivation to visit a winery in Florida and their motivations’ influences on their satisfaction with the winery visit and...

Purpose The current study aims to examine the joint impact of consumers' need for status (NFS), celebrity's star power and consumer-celebrity image match on consumers' attitudes toward the celebrity endorsement. Design/methodology/approach A factorial design was employed to test the research model. Consumer-celebrity image match was manipulated, a...

Service robots as an example of service innovation has been of great interest to researchers as it could produce greater value‐in‐use for consumers during service encounters. However, the question of how and why service robots may affect consumers remains inadequately understood. Leveraging service‐dominant logic and the heuristic‐systematic model,...

Purpose Considering Gen Z’s unique formative experience with social media, this study aims to apply the cue utilization theory to investigate the effects of social media policy as an organizational cue in attracting this cohort to hospitality and tourism (H&T) companies. Design/methodology/approach A 2 (policy frame: promotion/prevention) × 2 (pol...

Given the rising popularity of post-retirement work and its potential benefits for older adults’ mental health, this study examined older adults’ adaptation ability as a conditional factor for the impact of post-retirement work on depression. Quantitative data from 1433 working older adults and 1433 non-working older adults were analyzed using the...

Purpose This paper aims to examine factors affecting users’ intention to continue using mobile event applications (MEA). The impacts of perceived usefulness, social exchange and perceived enjoyableness on users’ intention to continue using MEA were tested. Further, the moderating role of social image in the proposed relationships was analyzed. Des...

Purpose Growing recognition of the metaverse has implied its far-reaching impacts on the tourism and hospitality industry. This paper sets out to detail the status of metaverse-related research in tourism and hospitality, propose intriguing directions for future studies and highlight multiple areas that call for immediate attention from practitione...

The power of pet influencers has been increasingly recognized by hospitality and tourism practitioners as more people choose to travel with their pets these days. Pet influencers are social media influencers whose primary focus is on pets. An effective social media post by pet influencers can largely affect pet owners’ purchasing decisions on hotel...

Hotel businesses endeavor to achieve successful green practices for long-lasting business success. The key issue is to promote consumers’ willingness to participate in such practices. Despite increased environmental awareness among today’s consumers, a relatively large percentage of consumers hesitate to actively engage with green practices because...

Systemic shifts in consumer preferences and expectations are not new, and can often be accelerated by major environmental events. Early evidence suggests that the events of 2020 to 2021 may have created that acceleration to fundamentally alter future consumer preferences. In this study, we argue that consumer expectations are on the path to being e...

The prevalence of eCCI (electronic customer-to-customer interaction) is rapidly growing as customers increasingly employ online tools to reach fellow customers and voice their opinions, especially after service failures. Adopting a quasi-experimental design, this research examines the impact of eCCI on restaurant customers, considering their need f...

Residents’ environmental citizenship behavior is essential to the environmental protection and sustainable development of rural destinations. However, previous research with regards to environmental citizenship behavior has focused on an employee perspective, rather than a resident one. Through the theoretical lens of the Stimulus-Organism-Response...

Tourists’ pro-environmental behaviors are critical to the conservation of cultural landscape heritage and for the sustainability of heritage tourism. Applying the theories of planned behavior (TPB) and self-congruity, this research explained the formation of tourists’ pro-environmental behavioral intentions (TPEBI). A total of 342 effective respons...

Although terror management theory has been widely studied, little research has empirically examined whether travel functions as a terror management mechanism. Thus, the present research investigated the influence of mortality anxiety on heritage tourism preference and heritage protection intention through two studies. Study 1 shows that as individu...

Improper waste disposal of tourists has detrimental impacts on the environment, economy, and people in rural destinations. Separating at the source is an effective means to mitigate these adverse impacts on rural destinations. Hence, identifying factors influencing tourists’ waste sorting intentions in rural destinations is critical to the sustaina...

As theme parks seek more opportunities in using intellectual properties to redesign their services, this study explores the potential impacts of such modifications on consumers’ attitudes towards the theme parks. More specifically, it investigates the joint effects of service redesign, nostalgia, and consumer expertise on consumers’ brand love for...

This research was to examine the effects of meeting size on attendee experience at association meetings. From perspectives of social anxiety, this research investigates how meeting size influences attendees’ social anxiety levels; how attendees’ perceived self-esteem and group identity at meetings moderate the effects of meeting size on social anxi...

This research adopts the view that tourists can feel destinations belong to them emotionally (destination psychological ownership). An ownership route for promoting tourist environmentally responsible behavioral intentions (TERBI) is examined based on the theory of planned behavior, with perceived environmental responsibility and place attachment a...

How to alleviate tourist incivility (i.e. social and environmental deviant behaviors) is not only a practical concern but an emerging tourism research topic. Advocating civilized tourist behavior could be an effective tool in enhancing sustainable tourism. In this paper, we test how tourists’ anticipated emotions and perceived severity (of tourism...

A lack of credibility in the tourism sector is becoming a social and environmental concern. This article argues that destination source credibility as a destination-level stimulus can have significant influences on tourist environmentally responsible behavior (TERB). Based on the stimulus-organism-response theory, this article developed an integrat...

Purpose This study aimed to bibliometrically and visually analyze and review hospitality and tourism marketing studies published from 2000–2020. Design/methodology/approach A total of 3,942 articles collected from the databases of Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-E) in the Web of Science (WoS) along wit...

Classical gardens offer ample cultural and natural landscapes for visitors to appreciate. Taking the tourist gaze as a theoretical lens, this study assumes a netnographic approach and conducts narrative analysis on travel blogs to explore visitors’ experiences at Chinese classical gardens. Findings revealed key domains of the gaze object (i.e., mac...

Although cultivating tourist pro-environmental behavioral intentions (TPEBI) has been emphasized, the effect of destination unique fascination on TPEBI is unknown. Applying the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the cognition-affect-behavior (CAB) model, this research develops an integrated theoretical framework to predict TPEBI. The results sugg...

The importance of pro-environmental behavior in tourism has been established, but explaining its sub-dimensions, especially in the private and public dimensions, is under-researched. Existing literature on tourism research mainly uses SEM to analyze tourist pro-environmental behavior, while fsQCA is scarcely implemented. In this study, SEM is appli...

The growth of peer-to-peer businesses has seen the concomitant emergence of regulatory issues. Despite intensified regulatory efforts at multiple levels to address these issues, peer-to-peer markets continue to challenge regulators. Using cybernetic control theory as a theoretical framework, this conceptual paper systematically explores the regulat...

Although the significance of destination image is acknowledged, its effect on tourist reactions, especially energy-saving behavior, remains unknown. This research aimed to explore tourist energy-saving behavior (TESB) and loyalty (TL) in a rural land context by using the cognition-affect-behavior (CAB) model. The findings indicated: (1) destination...

To better understand travel and hospitality consumers’ purchasing behavior amidst a worldwide emergency commonly referenced as COVID-19, the present research set out to assess the impacts of sensation-seeking, consumer affect, and risk-taking attitude on consumers’ willingness to purchase travel-related activities. A sample of 775 adult U.S. consum...

In sharing accommodation business such as Airbnb, while the provision of personalized amenities and services may seem like good business, hosts should be aware of the potential unintended consequences when they are not able to deliver what they promise. The present research examines how expectation gaps created by guest reviews interact with differ...

In this article, we discuss each of the three types of influencers and their effectiveness in endorsing hospitality brands (see Table 1 for selective examples). We propose that the underlying psychological mechanisms behind these influencers are unique in their own right. We further suggest that it is essential for companies to understand the diffe...

The hospitality industry has been suffering from a pervasive climate of suspicion among guests who are concerned about potential hygiene or safety issues. From the perspective of protection motivation theory, this study presents a conceptual model elucidating the underlying mechanism through which generalized distrust shapes hotel guests' defensive...

Destination marketing organizations (DMOs) have widely adopted virtual reality (VR) commercials to highlight attractions for potential tourists and encourage visitation. This study extends the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) model by incorporating telepresence and social presence as stimuli and elucidating these factors’ possible interplay in join...

The present study sought to analyze how hospitality service consumption changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Following a national survey of U.S. consumers, the effects of customer affect were tested using regression analysis with squared values to ascertain their impact on consumer behavior. Results revealed the impact of negative customer affecti...

Purpose This study reviews existing research and current applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in the hospitality and tourism industry. It further proposes a new evaluation framework to inform the susceptibility of AI adoptions. Design/methodology/approach This is a synthesis and evaluation study that qualitatively summarizes and presents f...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) businesses in the hospitality and tourism industry pose a regulatory challenge that has disrupted traditional regulatory schemes. This article proposes peer regulation as a form of regulation that complements and supplements command-and-control regulation and platform self-regulation in a P2P business model. Using the polycentric...

The present research examines the joint effects of density and power on consumers’ attitudes and revisit intentions in a restaurant context. A 2 (Density: high vs. low) x 2 (Power: high vs. low) quasi-experimental design was employed. The restaurant’s built density was manipulated by keeping (high density condition) or removing (low density conditi...

Online reviews have become a significant information source for customers in decision-making. Such reviews are particularly important to firms like Airbnb as consumers have limited direct information regarding the quality of the property and the services. Researchers and practitioners, in general, favor positive reviews as they increase customers’...

Purpose Theme park experiences ubiquitously unfold in the presence of others. In acknowledgement of this important part of theme park consumption, this research set out to examine if other visitors help create an immersive environment and, in turn, memorable experiences for theme park visitors. Design/methodology/approach An online survey was dist...

The issue of data breaches has received increasing attention in the hospitality industry. Companies’ efforts to fix such errors affect consumers’ evaluations and behavioral intentions toward those companies. This study investigates the impact of perceived error stability on hotel guests’ intentions to spread positive word-of-mouth (WOM) about a hot...

Objectives: This study examined the mediating effect of life satisfaction and the moderating effect of the availability of community recreational facilities (CRF) in the association between loneliness and depression in rural older adults and urban older adults, respectively. Methods: Quantitative data collected from 7547 Chinese older adults wer...

Amid population aging, the senior living industry has become an important sector of the service industry, especially in China. Population control throughout the past four decades has led to the quintessential “sandwich” family, wherein a young couple faces pressure to care for four elderly parents as well as their own child(ren). A lack of proper h...

Purpose Based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2), the purpose of this study was to examine users’ continued usage intention of mobile event application (MEA) technology. Design/methodology/approach A self-administered online survey was used to collect the study data from 407 MEA users, and structural equation modeli...

Purpose This paper aims to explore how hospitable telemedicine services empowered patients during the COVID-19. Expanding from the technology aspect, this research integrated the philosophy of hospitality organizational culture by including factors related to human-human interaction as significant predictors for patients’ sense of empowerment (perc...

The main purpose of this research is to examine the joint effects of error management, error locality, and individuals’ comparative optimism on consumers’ attitudes and intentions to spread negative word-of-mouth. To explore consumers’ reactions, a 2 (Error management: Yes vs. No) x 2 (Error locality: Focal vs. Competitor) x 2 (Comparative optimism...

This research examines how the social servicescape-directed gaze (i.e., perceptions of similarity, appearance, and behavior of other customers) influences theme park visitors’ affective states and experiences. A quantitative, survey-based research design was adopted with a total of 561 theme park patrons participating in the study. Results of struc...

This Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research examines the effectiveness of a personal learning environment (PLE) approach in using mobile technology for experiential learning during a study abroad to China. Thematic qualitative analysis of 21 undergraduate students' written post-trip reflections on their experiences revealed valuable b...

Crowding has become popular in academic research. Empirical studies have not, however, addressed the role of crowding on increasingly popular theme-park settings. This study explores the relative influences of perceived crowding and perceived popularity on theme-park product perceptions, which then influence satisfaction and behavioral intentions....

Purpose This study aims to understand customers’ watching experience with travel vlogs and its impacts on one of the most prominent manifestations of customer engagement behaviors (CEBs) – word-of-mouth (WOM) – and their travel intention. Drawing upon the theory of resonance, this study incorporated both cognitive and emotional aspects of travel vl...

Delivering memorable experiences is the essence of the tourism industry and has been regarded as a core aspect of competitiveness for destinations under the experiential marketing paradigm. However, knowledge remains scarce regarding how memorability can be generated and how it shapes tourist behavior. Taking rural tourism as the research context,...

Purpose This study aims to examine the nascent stream of literature connecting grit and protean career orientation to job attitudes, turnover intentions and job embeddedness and how job insecurity moderates the aforementioned associations. Design/methodology/approach Based on the threat-rigidity hypothesis and self-determination theory, a series o...

In response to this special issue, concerned with methods and measurements, a comprehensive review of the last 5 years of qualitative research was conducted in the top five journals that primarily publish articles pertaining to the hospitality industry. A total of 197 articles were read and analyzed for this review with a focus on the state of trus...

This study aims to test the moderating effects of home health care, home-help service, and older adults’ attitudes toward aging on the relationship between social support and life satisfaction among Chinese older adults. The study used a sample of 5,578 Chinese home-dwelling older adults. Multiple linear regression analyses were performed to test t...

Customer engagement has gained noteworthy attention among academics and practitioners over the last decade. Two studies employ latent profile analysis (LPA), a person-centered approach, to uncover discrete customer subgroups with similar profiles based on multiple customer engagement dimensions and relate these LPA groups to brand loyalty. Study 1...

Given the growing momentum of the sharing economy and the importance of trust in its peer-to-peer sector, this study theoretically develops and empirically investigates trust constructs, their antecedents, and perceived risk related to repurchase intention in the home-sharing economy. Our results reveal that antecedents of trust-in-hosts encompass...

This research note reports on the moderating effect of life satisfaction on the association between emotional labor and sleep of hotel workers. Drawing on Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory, the research note reports on how general life satisfaction acts as a buffer between emotional labor and hours of sleep after work. The results indicate tha...

Purpose Error management has begun to receive growing attention from both academic scholars and industry practitioners in marketing. However, the impacts of error management on consumers remain understudied. Taking data breach as an increasingly recognized error in the modern service industry, this paper aims to explore the impact of hotels’ error...

This study aimed to examine the complaint and resolution process in a peer-to-peer (P2P) business model, in the case of Airbnb, and to uncover the underlying attributions of responsibility in the process. A total of 52 complaint episodes posted by hosts and guests of Airbnb were retrieved from a third-party website and analyzed using content analys...

Objectives: This study aims to test the mediating effect of attitude toward aging and the moderating effect of social support in the association between perceived health status and depression in older adults. Methods: The study hypotheses were tested by using quantitative data collected from 6485 Chinese older adults. SPSS macro PROCESS was employ...

As health declines with age, it is critical to explore moderators that could buffer the impact of declining health on life satisfaction of elderly people. This study aims to test the moderating effects of social support, attitudes toward aging, and senior privilege on the relationship between perceived health and life satisfaction among elderly peo...

This study aimed to examine the complaint and resolution process in a peer-to-peer (P2P) business model, in the case of Airbnb, and to uncover the underlying attributions of responsibility in the process. A total of 52 complaint episodes posted by hosts and guests of Airbnb were retrieved from a third-party website and analyzed using content analys...

Purpose This paper aims to examine the main developments of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) research in hospitality and tourism. It also aims to pinpoint fruitful directions for tourism and hospitality research on VR and AR applications. Design/methodology/approach A selective literature review of full-length papers published in th...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to start a conversation on achieving a shared understanding among hospitality service co-creation participants. Adopting a stakeholder and service eco-systems approach, attention is drawn to the necessity for all service experience participants to have a shared understanding of the service experience and their...

Purpose This paper aims to offer empirical insights on how investing in e-commerce capabilities affects the relationship between loyalty programs and hotel operating performance so as to aid in identifying proper resource allocation strategies. Design/methodology/approach This study extended the model in Hua et al. (2015) by testing the interactio...

Given the growing number of credit card transactions, data breaches have become an increasingly serious concern for hotel businesses. Even when a rival hotel experiences a data breach, customers of the focal hotel may feel vulnerable as well. Nevertheless, firms have little insight into the potential impacts of a data breach on customers and the co...

This conference communication discusses insights from the 2nd USA-China Tourism Research Summit and Industry Dialogue, which took place in 2017. Results from focus group sessions among about 100 academic scholars and industry practitioners were textually analyzed. A framework was then developed to reveal the roles of technology, people, and organiz...

“Like mother, like daughter.” We say this often in our daily life. But is this true when it comes to the destination brand image of a state versus that of a city within that state? We conducted a study to investigate this. This is a short summary of the findings that have not been published in peer-reviewed outlets yet.

This research explores souvenir values under the influence of contemporary Chinese culture. Taking Shanghai Disney as the study context, a total of 32 onsite interviews with Chinese visitors to Shanghai Disney were conducted. Based on the analysis of 246 pages of interview transcripts, this research identifies three overarching souvenir values germ...

This study examined the moderating effects of anticipated emotional labor on the relations between currently felt emotional labor and hotel employees’ intention to remain with their companies or in the hotel industry. Drawing on image theory and expectancy theory, we argue that service employees’ perceptions of industry-wide expectations moderate t...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine why and how emotional labor influences hotel employee behavior outside the workplace. Design/methodology/approach Both qualitative and quantitative approaches were used. First, 21 entry-level hotel managers were interviewed, and grounded theory was used for the analysis of the interview data (Study...

Over the past decade, experiential consumption has received a growing attention from tourism and hospitality scholars. Even though fun is one of the most used concepts in daily rhetoric, it was mostly mentioned as a related concept in studying other variables in tourism, hospitality, and leisure contexts. The current study investigated fun as a con...

In response to the rapid growth of tourism in the world's emerging regions led by Asia, this study represents a seminal attempt to dissect Chinese outbound tourists' service expectations in the United States from the perspective of hospitality and tourism experts. Rapid focus group discussions were conducted with 64 academic scholars and industry p...

For years, the importance of customer emotions has been recognized in the service literature. Despite existing research, the discrete emotions generated by each service encounter within the theme park setting deserves more attention. The present research uses a quantitative research method to ascertain the various customer emotions experienced thro...

Purpose This study aims to use a sample of 2,120 individual hotel properties between 2011 and 2013 to evaluate the impact of loyalty programs on hotel operational and financial performance. Design/methodology/approach This study provides empirical support for the impact of loyalty program based on both cross-sectional and panel data analyses and...

Food packages have emerged as an important Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) communication tool. This study examined the effect of on-package CSR claims on consumers' health benefits perceptions, taste perception, attitude and behavioral intentions toward the food company. A 4 (CSR claims: none, food manufacturing, employee welfare, and eco-fri...

Memorable experiences influence consumers' behavioral intentions and determine a business's ability to generate revenue. Provided that conference experience is by and large driven by attendees' engagement in customer-customer interactions (CCIs), this study is to identify what defines memorable CCI experiences at conferences. The authors conducted...

Purpose – Drawing upon an error management perspective, this study examines that in the wake of an information security breach, how a hotel’s error management culture influences customer engagement behaviors and trust. The potential moderating effects of the perceived error controllability are also assessed. Design/methodology/approach – This study...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to uncover how emotions change (or remain constant) throughout the course of the vacation experience. Although the importance of affective experiences has been recognized in the literature, the momentary effects of each stage of the vacation on the overall appraisal of the experience deserve more attention. De...