Linchi Kwok, Ph.D.

There is plenty of empirical evidence to support the positive relationship between online review ratings and a business's bottom line.  Not all online reviews carry the same effect, however. Those reviews that are exposed to more internet users will have a bigger impact on a business than the ones that are barely read by others.  Generally speaking, all of those websites allow consumers to vote on the helpfulness of an online review and tend to feature the reviews with more helpfulness votes on the front page. The reviews listed on the first page will have a better chance of being "discovered" and read by others. Meanwhile, managers are usually allowed to reply to an online review with one manager response. I recently conducted an empirical analysis with another key investigator,  Karen Xie at University of Denver . In this study, we drew our conclusions based on a linear regression model with 56,284 consumer reviewers and 10,797 manager responses from 1,405 hotels...

I raised several questions in the my recent discussion on  +MultiBriefs :  Is the restaurant industry in recession? If so, how can we deal with it ? The restaurants are now facing many challenges, including rising food costs and labor costs, as well as the travel threats created by the terrorists . One solution I proposed (among some others) was to work closely with the local community to boost sales.  Co-incidentally, I also found hotels are luring travelers with local flavors , with the examples of the "running concierge" by  +Westin Hotels & Resorts , rooms decorated by local artists in the  +Park Hotel Tokyo , and the community engagement programs in  +Hostelling International .  Would you consider "adding local flavors" to a hospitality or tourism product/service as a trend for the industry? Have you recently observed similar examples where businesses offer more local flavors to customers? Please share your story with us.  ...

As a college student, my financial situation does not allow me to stay at a midscale hotel for my personal vacations, needless to mention the luxury hotels.  Every time when I need to book a hotel room, I tend to go for the cheapest option of all with a convenient location.   When my family and I go on vacation, however, we have the opportunity to stay at a nice hotel that comes with great customer service and great amenities. Since my family does not take vacations very often, when we get the opportunity to plan a vacation, it is always a fun experience. I enjoy looking for hotels that will make our vacation fun and will guarantee that we have a great stay.   For our upcoming vacation, I gathered some ideas from looking through my Instagram page. Not only does Instagram promote certain hotels through the sponsored section, but also many bloggers that I am following or those with the popular pages give me great recommendations of hotels, together with their exper...

“ Every business interacts with a variety of publics: consumers, the general public, the financial community, the organizations’ employees, government, the media, suppliers, and many others. Public relations is the process by which the relationships with each to these publics is managed. ” --- Reid and Bojanic, in Hospitality Marketing Management (2010, p. 492) . Just recently at my workplace, there was an incident regarding one of my coworkers. It turns out that he used Facebook’s personal messaging system as a medium to exchange harsh words with another person. This person was not in any way connected to our company, but after finding out where my coworker worked through my coworker’s Facebook profile, this person decided to post on our company’s public Facebook profile what my coworker had said to them for anyone to see. It appeared that my coworker said things that were not nice; and even though he thought he was having a private conversation via personal messaging with thi...

In today's hospitality industry, companies are doing more and more to attract new customers. Money is poured into increased services, adaptations with changing technologies, corporate social responsibility programs, and intensive advertising strategies. So why is the concept of brand loyalty still so difficult to come by? According to Profitroom’s 2016 Report on Hotel Sales & Marketing Trends, consumers visit up to eighteen different websites before selecting a room. This includes company's social media pages, advising sites like Yelp, as well as the numerous OTAs (online travel agents) that are available. The heavy argument in favor of OTAs is their sometimes-substantially-lowered price points and the fact that their presence increases competition and drives overall market prices down. In my time working for an independent 180 room hotel, I grew to resent the existence of OTAs. The expectation of a hotel visit is to have a nearly flawless experience, but OTA benefits abr...

Studying overseas has become more common these days as opposed to years ago. Not only can international students learn how to communicate with the languages used in the destination country, but they also gain experience living independently without parents and family. The number of students from Indonesia, China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, and many other countries who study overseas continues to increase. As an international student from Indonesia, I can see that there is a huge increase in the number of Indonesians who decide to pursue their degrees in other countries. In 2013, there were only about 4,000 Indonesians who came to the United States to study. The number has been increasing and now there are more than 6,000 Indonesian students in the United States. An Advertisement by the Global Tree Overseas Education Consultants Based on the interviews with fellow international students, the reason Indonesians decided to pursue their degree in the United States is because the...