Xiang (Robert) Li

• PhD
• Professor at Temple University

Despite extensive research on loyalty formation, findings regarding interrelationships between loyalty and its key drivers, such as perceived service quality, perceived value, and customer satisfaction, are inconclusive and often contradictory. To provide more definitive statements about these relationships, we synthesized and analyzed findings fro...

This research introduces a gamification-induced reward-desensitization effect observed in hotel loyalty promotions. Guided by scope-insensitivity theory and the dual-process model of value evaluation, it specifically examines whether integrating gamification into loyalty programs can mitigate customers' sensitivity to reward size and unfair prefere...

Ethnic tourism has recently been promoted as an economic development and cultural preservation strategy in many destinations. This tactic can have significant impacts on residents’ quality of life (QOL) in ethnic communities whose development potential is limited. This study reviews research at the intersection of ethnic tourism and QOL to examine...

This study investigates the efficacy of emotion regulation (ER) strategies used by tourists to manage negative emotions elicited by their on-site destination experiences. Specifically, suppression and reappraisal ER strategies were examined for their moderating impacts on the relationship between negative emotions (anger and fear) and tourists’ beh...

Travel bragging refers to showing off or boasting about travel experiences. Despite its ubiquity on social media, travel bragging has been relatively under-researched. This study examines travel bragging from a dual perspective of both braggers and audiences. Based on 30 semi-structured interviews with participants who frequently posted or bragged...

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed the notion of “travel shaming” under the spotlight—tourists are concerned about being criticized for traveling during the pandemic. Yet the broader idea of travel-induced shaming, conceptualized as ethics-based evaluations in this paper, has not drawn much attention as consequence-based assessments in travel-related...

Purpose Photos are powerful tools to attract individuals’ attention and convey service experiences. Yet exactly how visual cues in a photo contribute to the perceptions of the staged servicescape, and how these perceptions inspire online booking/reservation behaviors, remains underexplored. Addressing the gap, this study aims to uncover (1) how per...

The growth of quantitative studies on authenticity in the past two decades has reflected researchers’ ongoing attempts to establish a valid conceptual basis, research paradigms, and methodological approaches to measure authenticity in different tourism contexts. In the spirit of dialog, this study defends the conceptual and methodological underpinn...

Building on the self-determination theory and technology acceptance model, this study considers tourists’ adoption decisions around ridesharing and taxi services and examines whether actual rideshare use on-site affects visitors’ trip-level (i.e., trip satisfaction and trip value) and destination-level (i.e., locals’ perceived friendliness) evaluat...

This study investigates the impact of tourists’ travel experience sharing via mobile social media (MSM) on perceptions of smartphone usage-based travel experience improvement and tourists’ post-trip evaluations of their travel experiences. We also examined how two self-enhancement tendencies, self-promotion and self-protection, moderate the relatio...

This study unpacks how a person’s multiple identities affect their decision making when selecting a tourism destination. We propose that different aspects of identity yield distinct yet competing emotions. For instance, perceived social audience admiration combined with animosity might produce ambivalence, leading to greater decision-making uncerta...

Customers’ value co-creation behavior plays an essential role on brand pages, which many hospitality firms adopt to create value with customers. However, current understanding of the elements, drivers, and dynamics of such behavior is limited. Based on the value co-creation literature, motivation–opportunity–ability theory, and the dual identificat...

With a longitudinal dataset merging hotel performance and guest survey insights, this study examines the impact of hotel occupancy rates on the guest experience. Findings revealed a non-constant effect of hotel occupancy on the guest experience. Specifically, at low occupancy levels, the hotel occupancy rate was positively related to the overall gu...

This study integrates Lefebvre's theory of space production with the local border perspective as a theoretical basis to analyze the dynamic impacts of tourism development on changes to space, identity, and social relations in a destination and its surrounding community. Taking China's Hongcun Village, a bordered UNESCO cultural World Heritage Site,...

The idea of human territoriality is highly relevant to home-sharing services, which involve the sharing of private space under the sphere of business. To assist examinations of human territoriality in home-sharing contexts, this paper attempted to develop and validate a scale of host territoriality from the perspective of P2P accommodation guests....

This study examines the negative consequences of perceived isolation and its influence on intentions to travel and visit hospitality businesses. Drawing on compensatory control theory, we explore the multi-faceted effects of perceived isolation (e.g., functional, emotional, and social loss) on subsequent within-domain (e.g., functional loss–functio...

In light of current industry imperatives and growing scholarly attention, this study was conducted to provide a thoroughly updated bibliometric overview of how service innovation research has evolved. A total of 133 papers across 42 hospitality and tourism journals over 18 years (2003–2020) were extracted and analyzed. We first examined the publica...

Theme parks have attracted extensive scholarly attention within and outside the tourism literature. These parks have been studied from various stances, yet a uniform definition and integrated framework remain lacking for theme park research and practice. Based on a comprehensive review and research synthesis, this article defines a theme park as a...

Although scholars have sought to theorize tourism from important philosophical turns (e.g., epistemological/antirational/postmodern/practice), one influential turn (viz. linguistic) has not received much attention. This study attempts to fill this gap by retheorizing tourism from the linguistic turn. We introduced major theories of meaning (a core...

在网络信息时代,社交媒体上海量的在线评论数据,正日渐成为旅游者决策和旅游景区管理的重要参考依据。如何甄别非真实、内容不相关的无效评论,减少数据噪音,是当前学界和行业共同关注的话题。现有研究尚未充分揭示旅游行业中无效评论的特征。探索性地通过人工判读的方式,选取黄山、阳朔、洛阳、喀纳斯四个著名旅游目的地,同时阅读景区和酒店的游客评论,检索出其中的无效评论并利用对比分析和高频词语义网络分析来探究其特征。研究发现景区的无效评论可以分为不真实型、矛盾型、不相关型评论和非评论四大类;不同于酒店的无效评论,旅游景区无效评论更多的是不相关型评论以及非评论型评论,而非故意造假或者广告评论,同时评论长度无法作为判断评论无效的唯一依据。研究认为这些评论的出现未必是出于特殊目的,更多的是评论者为了节省时间的随意行为...

This study proposes two new concepts/indices—tourism demand energy and tourism attractiveness energy—to measure origin-side tourism demand and destination attractiveness. Tourism demand energy and tourism attractiveness energy are estimated based on tourist visitation, travel distance, and visitor flow network relationships. A reverse gravity model...

Guided by resource-based view, this study investigates performance stabilization of new hotels in emerging markets. Profitability measures (e.g., gross operating profit percentage [GOP%]) and standard operating metrics (i.e., average daily rate [ADR], occupancy, and revenue per available room [RevPAR]) for 105 hotels in China, Indonesia, and Thaila...

Online photos can reflect tourists’ received destination image and be used to project destination image by destination marketing organizations (DMOs). Studies have identified a gap between projected and received images, highlighting the difficulty DMOs face when selecting content to project the “right” image. Taking an audience-driven perspective,...

We developed a COVID19tourism index to monitor the pandemic’s tourism effects. It consists of aviation, hotel, pandemic, interest, and mobility sub-indexes. It offers insight into the tourism industry’s recovery process and future outlook. Some countries witnessed an L-shaped recovery while others show a U-shaped recovery.

Annual usage of paid leave in America has been declining although employees are granted more time off than before. This study proposes that taking paid leave for a vacation is perceived as a violation of workplace norms, which could partly explain this phenomenon. This violation is presumed to pose a threat to an employee’s social self at work. The...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation concerns economic transactions that involve people’s private territory. To provide a fresh perspective on P2P accommodation, this article emphasizes the territorial complexity in such accommodation and proposes to understand guest experience through the lens of human territoriality. Following an interpretative pheno...

Travel bragging rights have become an important factor influencing travel decision making in the social media era, yet research on this topic remains scant in the tourism literature. The present study attempted to answer the question “What constitutes travel bragging rights?” from tourists’ perspectives using in-depth interviews and means–end analy...

Given the limitations in existing resident attitude research, a new concept of resident sentiment is proposed to describe local residents’ overall perceptions of and emotional dispositions toward a dominant tourist market, in which attitude is a constituent part and behavioral response is implied. To operationalize this higher-order latent concept,...

Using mobile devices to complete web-based surveys is an inescapable trend. Given the growth of this medium, some researchers are concerned about whether mobile devices are a viable channel for administering self-report online surveys. Taking two online surveys respectively using the US and China samples, this study compared the responses quality b...

Although there is some variation in the ratios between domestic and international tourism reported by organizations such as the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) and the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), it is generally agreed that domestic tourism represents around 80% of world tourist arrivals. In terms of tourist spending,...

Over the past decade, customer engagement has attracted significant interest from academics and practitioners. This article reviews and synthesizes customer engagement research published in seven leading hospitality and tourism journals between 2009 and 2019. It systematically analyzes publication outlets and trajectories, study sectors, methodolog...

The impacts of tourism boycotts on a destination's tourist economy can be vast, yet few studies have examined such events. This paper explores the effects of tourism boycotts by analysing seven events involving Chinese tourism boycotts during the past decade. The findings show that boycotts can significantly decrease visitor numbers. Also, non-poli...

The progress in sentiment analytics and communication research provides a powerful scaffold by which to reexamine the long-debated research on residents’ attitudes toward tourism. To mitigate the limitations of the classical survey-based research method, this study takes a news media sentiment analytics perspective to unveil how the residents’ atti...

Building on Li and Petrick’s earlier work, this study applies the investment model to a destination context. Specifically, this study proposes that tourist satisfaction, perceived investment in a destination, and perceived quality of alternatives can be used to explain tourist loyalty to a destination. An alternative approach that indirectly measur...

This article extends on the literature regarding brand anthropomorphism and contributes to hospitality and tourism literature by demonstrating that positioning of different anthropomorphic brand roles (partner vs. servant) attracts diverse consumers. Drawing from the results of three experiments in various contexts, we theorize that brand role and...

This paper investigates the symptoms of failure in public corporations with multiple hospitality businesses and examines whether a new case-based deep-layer predictive analysis methodology is more appropriate than conventional approaches to failure analysis. The symptoms correlated with multi-business hospitality failures were determined using a no...

Guided by the resource base theory, this study investigates the performance stabilization of new hotels in emerging markets. Potential competitive advantages, i.e., real estate type (mixed-use vs. standalone), location type (distance from downtown and airport) and scale (room count and meeting space), were assessed for their impacts on pace and lev...

Annual usage of paid leave in the U.S. has declined over the years even though employees are given more time off than before. This study proposes that taking paid days off could be perceived as a violation of workplace norms, which could partly explain this phenomenon. Such violation is hypothesized to pose a threat or potential damage to the emplo...

Sentiment analytics, as a computational method to extract emotion and detect polarity, has gained increasing attention in tourism research. However, issues regarding how to properly apply sentiment analytics are seldom addressed in the tourism literature. This study addresses such methodological challenges by employing the metalearning perspective...

This paper examines the joint effect of host’s cultural identity (i.e., ingroup vs. outgroup), presence of a travel companion, and consumer’s country of origin on international travelers’ evaluations of home-sharing services. A quasi-experimental design was implemented to collect data from U.S. and Chine consumers. Results indicate a significant th...

The tendency to postpone an action, otherwise known as procrastination, is related to the discounting of future costs. In a tourism context, despite having the best intentions to travel, people may procrastinate their trips. Considering crowding as a type of travel cost, this study examined the effects of crowdedness on travelers’ intentions to vis...

Residents can simultaneously possess positive and negative evaluations of mega-events hosted in their communities. The coexistence of positive and negative evaluations is attitudinal ambivalence. The extent to which ambivalence influences resident support for tourism development or mega-events has not been examined empirically. This article investi...

Memorable experiences in restaurant settings are not well understood, and little is known about what they represent and how they should be measured. This study filled this knowledge gap by developing a formative index to assess and measure memorable dining experiences (MDE). Drawing upon strategic experiential modules, MDE was conceptualized as a s...

Resident attitude toward the development of individual commercial tourism projects (e.g., theme parks and resorts) has not been well analyzed in tourism literature. In this study, the authors explored the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in understanding residents’ attitudes toward a high-profile tourism project in its initial building...

This study aims to understand the demand for home-sharing lodging and whether this accommodation choice influences guest experiences, in terms of overall trip satisfaction and perceived value. Using a dataset from a large-scale nationwide household tourism survey, we adopted a two-step empirical analysis to investigate the antecedents and consequen...

Whereas much previous culture-related business research has focused on cross-cultural differences among various groups, this special issue departs from this trajectory through a focus on transculturalism. It examines various aspects of transcultural issues in business research, that is, business-related concepts that transcend the boundaries of nat...

It is nearly always implicitly assumed that authenticity is a positive trait, as opposed to the fake or the plastic. As opposed to allegedly positive authenticity, negative authenticity is something that is authentic but which tourists and residents consider not valuable enough to be preserved. However, researchers rarely pay attention to it, and t...

This study examines the impacts of distance factors on Mainland Chinese tourists' international destination choices in 2007 and 2015 and how these factors' effects change over time. A random-coefficients conditional logit model was utilized to investigate three types of destination choice: past destination choice, dream destination choice, and inte...

The use of mobile devices to complete online surveys is trending upward and is likely to continue unabated for some time. With this growth, there is a growing interest in how to make mobile devices a viable way to administer self-report online surveys among researchers. Utilizing a large-scale online panel survey, the current study compares the qua...

This study looks at how destination image elements are connected in people’s minds and how tourists retrieve these elements from memory. Based on the spreading activation theory of memory, the study examines destination image as a network, applies social network analysis to test the core–periphery structure of destination image, and identifies imag...

This interdisciplinary research deals with attractiveness of China as a tourist destination for American pleasure travelers, barriers that American tourists perceive as preventing their travel to the destination, and their sentiments toward travel to China. The data were obtained through an online panel survey aiming at understanding American leisu...

This study aims to explain tourist happiness by examining a specific destination in which happiness is generated for tourists via their travel behavior at the destination. Building upon the spillover theory of happiness, we developed a destination-based model of tourist happiness, which is shaped by destination image and service quality and mediate...

Cultural distance is a key factor in international tourism. This study aims to use the perceptual measure of cultural distance to investigate 1) the impact of destination familiarity and geographic distance on perceived cultural distance (PCD); and 2) the moderating effect of cultural motivation on PCD and Chinese potential outbound tourists’ inter...

Photos are important carriers in destination image communication. Currently, efficiently selecting appropriate photos for destination promotion remains a major challenge for DMOs, a problem closely related to the discrepancy between projected and received destination images. During the photo selection process, contents that can best evoke viewers'...

TTRA-Destination advertising in a smarter way A machine learning model

The sharing of travel experiences has become ubiquitous in today’s era. This study focuses on a pervasive trend among Millennial consumers: the experience of benign envy toward others’ positive travel experience sharing on social networking sites. Drawing on social comparison theory, the current study reveals why and under what conditions others’ p...

Geographic distance has been studied extensively as an obstructer of tourism flows, whereas another distance measure, cultural distance (CD), receives less attention in tourism demand research. Using international tourist arrival data between 94 countries for the period 1995–2012, we estimate several Poisson gravity models incorporating a CD measur...

\As augmented reality (AR) technology has increasingly been adopted by many industries as a marketing tool, tourism practitioners have recognized its great potential in staging experiences. Despite some discussions around AR's managerial implications, academic inquiries on how to adopt AR technology in tourism contexts remain rare. Building on this...

In this study, we investigate how dyadic air and rail transport connectivity affects domestic tourist flows among 343 Chinese cities. Using geo-tagged Sina Weibo data to track tourists during China’s National Day Golden Week in 2014, we estimate several gravity models with a negative binomial distribution. The estimation results suggest that air tr...

The exponential increase in the number of Mainland Chinese tourists (MCTs) and their sudden influx to popular destinations worldwide have resulted in increasingly frequent media reports on their behaviours and encounters with hosts. However, the academic literature has inadequately analysed resident attitudes towards this surging and, in a few dest...

Interest in applying Big Data to tourism is increasing, and automated sentiment analysis has been used to extract public opinion from various sources. This article evaluates the suitability of different types of automated classifiers for applications typical in tourism, hospitality, and marketing studies by comparing their performance to that of hu...

There has been an inherent bias in studies of 'mobility regimes' toward the perspective of the authorities. This article suggests the concept of 'subversive mobilities' to offer a novel perspective on the construct of mobilities regimes, by stressing the ways such regimes are penetrated by adversaries through diverse routes and practices, despite t...

This study explores the impacts of Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions on international tourist flows. A panel data gravity model was used to analyse bilateral tourist flows between 81 origin countries and 32 destination countries from 1995 to 2008. This model highlights cultural factors using the push and pull framework and explains their influence...

In order to optimize theme parks’ tourism carrying capacity, one must understand how park spatial structure influences visitor distribution and, in turn, congestion. This study applied a mixed-methods approach of statistical and spatial analyses of survey data from a theme park in China, to determine how attraction and spatial layout attributes aff...

A detailed understanding of tourists’ preferences is of great importance both for decision-making theory and destination marketing practice. This study investigates the use of consideration-set formation together with conjoint analysis to estimate the destination preferences of Chinese long-haul outbound tourists. Through the integration of choice-...

Although cross-functional conflicts occur among departments, empirical research on the inherent mechanism remains scant. As conflict appears to be an element in innovation, by using a symbiotic approach combining traditional Confucian values and mainstream Western theories, this study of 135 Chinese high-tech companies investigates how various cros...

Although tourism destination image (TDI) has been extensively studied, the nature and scope of TDI remain vague. This study aims to address this conceptual problem from a modernist perspective. Forty-five representative TDI definitions are analyzed, and a new definition is proposed by adopting a “seven-step” procedure derived from definition theory...

This study argues that CSR has been overlooked in the resident attitude literature. Empirical research was hence conducted on the role of CSR in understanding resident attitude towards the building of Shanghai Disney Resort. Four competing models were proposed varying in assumptions about CSR's role in the perceived impact resident attitude framewo...

This study explores the impacts of cultural values on international tourism flows. A gravity model for bilateral tourism flows was tested with data involving 81 original countries and 32 destination countries. The external validity of the model was examined by testing several sub-models for each destination. The results show that international tour...

The purpose of this study is to examine changes to tourists’ image of a destination throughout a trip experience. Using Blackberry technology, a group of Canadian student travelers to Peru were asked to record images and experience about their trip during several key moments (pre-trip, upon arrival, half-way, departure, and post-trip). The results...

Facing increasing competition, many hotels have adopted “theming” as a marketing strategy. Although still in its fledgling stage, hotel theming has already gained popularity in the growing Chinese hotel market. This study conducted focus group discussions to understand the concepts behind hotel theming in China. Respondents were 41 practitioners fr...

Most studies on travel/leisure constraints to date were conducted in Western countries under a Western-centric research paradigm. It is not clear whether people from non-Western countries, such as Japan, face different outbound travel constraints. It is also not clear whether constraints research in a non-Western context will generate results that...

"Country-collectors" (CCs) are defined here as international leisure travelers who have visited 6 + countries within the five most recent calendar years primarily to pursue leisure activities. The study here contributes by offering an early workbench model of antecedents, paths, and outcomes of country-collectors' evaluations and behavior toward co...

In the context of increasing competition, many hotels are looking for innovative marketing practices in order to gain a competitive edge. One of these recently adopted techniques is hotel theming. While fairly popular in Western countries, the concept is still in its infancy in a Chinese context. This paper attempts to better understand how hotel t...

This study attempts to integrate social exchange theory (SET) and social representations theory (SRT) in understanding residents’ perception changes throughout a mega-event’s full life cycle. A three-wave survey approach was employed to track local residents’ evolving attitudes toward the 2010 Shanghai Expo. Results showed that Shanghai residents’...

Researchers generally assume that top-of-mind (TOM) brand associations represent a unique body of brand knowledge. However, this assumption has not been sufficiently tested and substantiated. This study investigates how unique TOM brand associations actually are and examines the differences between TOM and other spontaneous recalls by adopting quan...