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

Xi Zhang and Juan Tang
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Xi Zhang: Faculty of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau 999078, China
Juan Tang: Faculty of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau 999078, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 13, 1-17

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.

Keywords: emotional solidarity; perceived risk; customer loyalty; repurchase intention; word of mouth; post-pandemic era; homestay (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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