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Any fiercely competitive environment brings about changes in organizations and forces executives to seek the strategies that will best enable their organizations to gain or sustain a competitive advantage in the marketplace (Avci, Madanoglu, and Okumus 2010). This issue applies globally to the tourism industry since most of its market segments (e.g., hotels, restaurants, and travel agencies) have reached the saturation point in many countries.To continue growing, companies should adapt to environmental changes and manage their employees to act consistently in reacting to that change. Thus, corporate strategies should balance external environmental realities with internal capabilities to maximize corporate value.Several researchers writing in the 1980s demonstrated the strong relationship between culture and performance (e.g., Ouchi 1981;Deal and Kennedy 1982;Peters and Waterman 1982), and further studies have built on that foundation. Kim, Lee, and Yu (2004), for example, maintained that a "strong culture"-one that is shared among a majority of employees-could be a predictor variable to measure an organization's financial performance.A firm's strategic orientation embodies principles that are intended to provide coherence, focus, and direction to all of the activities undertaken by the employees. Therefore, strategic orientation helps to ensure consistency of purpose and action in the face of inevitable uncertainty.In the following sections, I review studies on corporate culture and strategic orientation, and then make research hypotheses. I then describe the research methodology, sample characteristics, and the statistical method employed to test those hypotheses. I name factors of strategic orientation based on exploratory factor analysis; I investigate how the corporate cultures of hospitality industries relate to key dimensions of strategic orientations and financial performance; and I determine a mediator effect of strategic orientation between corporate culture and strategic orientation. I AbstractThis study was conducted to suggest strategic orientations that can analyze which types of corporate culture and strategic orientation contribute to enhanced financial performance, based on the theory that, to acquire a competitive edge in the fierce competitive environment and maximize performance, the combination of corporate internal competitiveness and an appropriate action plan is crucial. The study shows that corporate culture does directly affect financial performance. However, for this group of Korean hotels, not all cultures performed equally. The transaction-oriented Market Culture did not promote financial performance, as compared to the family-oriented Clan culture or the innovative Adhocracy culture. The tradition-bound Hierarchical culture actually cost hotels in terms of financial performance. Certain strategic orientations moderated and improved financial results for some of the cultures, but not all. The opportunity-seeking approach of a leading orientation drove favorable financial results for th...

Customer reviews submitted at Internet travel portals are an important yet underexplored new resource for obtaining feedback on customer experience for the hospitality industry. These data are often voluminous and unstructured, presenting analytical challenges for traditional tools that were designed for well-structured, quantitative data. We adapt methods from natural language processing and machine learning to illustrate how the hotel industry can leverage this new data source by performing automated evaluation of the quality of writing, sentiment estimation, and topic extraction. By analyzing 5,830 reviews from 57 hotels in Moscow, Russia, we find that (i) negative reviews tend to focus on a small number of topics, whereas positive reviews tend to touch on a greater number of topics; (ii) negative sentiment inherent in a review has a larger downward impact than corresponding positive sentiment; and (iii) negative reviews contain a larger variation in sentiment on average than positive reviews. These insights can be instrumental in helping hotels achieve their strategic, financial, and operational objectives.

This study assessed internet users’ attention to hospitality companies’ COVID-19 messages on social media. We used 657 Facebook and 754 Twitter messages initiated by eight of the world’s largest hotel chains between January and mid-June 2020 for the exploratory analysis. Under the situational crisis communication theory, the analysis reveals that hotels shared five types of COVID-19 ( Prevention, Reminding, Ingratiation, Victimage, and Updates) versus Non-COVID-19 messages. Descriptive analysis and a series of t test, analysis of variance, and post hoc analyses reveal that hotels did not share any COVID-19 information until March 2020. Moreover, COVID-19 messages only accounted for about 20% of all messages, among which hotels shared Ingratiation and Updates messages most often. COVID-19 messages received more reactions, comments, and shares/retweets than Non-COVID-19 messages on both Facebook and Twitter, indicating the attention paid to the COVID-19 messages posted on a business’ social media page, which can help businesses spread the information in their networks. Specifically, Prevention, Reminding (although underused), Ingratiation, Updates, and messages with photos and videos received more attention. Such findings extend the crisis communication literature and help businesses develop effective communication strategies to engage their stakeholders on social media during the pandemic.

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