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Purpose Tour guides often use humor to entertain tourists, but the process of tour guide humor (TGH) affecting tourists’ positive word of mouth (PWOM) remains unclear. To fill the gap, this study aims to investigate how TGH enhances tourists’ PWOM through perceived relationship investment, perceived wellness value and trust in tour guides. Design/methodology/approach A comprehensive mediation model was proposed based on social exchange theory (SET). Data were obtained from 335 tour group tourists and analyzed using structural equation modeling. Findings Results present that TGH positively predicts tourists’ PWOM. Perceived relationship investment, perceived wellness value and trust in tour guides not only play mediating roles between TGH and tourists’ PWOM, respectively, but also jointly provide two sequential mediation paths (TGH → perceived relationship investment → trust in tour guides → tourists’ PWOM and TGH → perceived wellness value → trust in tour guides → tourists’ PWOM). Research limitations/implications The findings have practical value for tour guides and travel agencies to use TGH to improve tourists’ PWOM. Originality/value The major contribution is that a reciprocity-based framework rooted in SET was proposed to parse the complex process of TGH promoting tourists’ PWOM. Furthermore, this study enriches current knowledge by confirming that perceived wellness value is not only available in wellness tourism but can be experienced from TGH in mass tourism.

As a new emerging sales promotion tool, various types of online services are increasingly adopted by firms to improve consumers’ satisfaction and then increase profit. This paper simulates a two-echelon supply chain where a supplier sells the product through an offline or online retailer. Online channel is characterised by direct selling and reselling. We consider three online service strategies: no online service and preemptive and reactive online service. Several results are obtained. We find that investing in online services can benefit all players in most scenarios more than no-service scenario. In the direct selling case, the offline retailer benefits the most from the reactive service strategy due to the webrooming effect, whereas the supplier performance is best in the preemptive service strategy. However, in the reselling case, we find that the supplier and the online and offline retailers benefit the most from reactive service strategy. Furthermore, we compare the prices and service levels of the three strategies and find that the webrooming effect coefficient can affect the optimal wholesale price, retail prices, and online service level. Finally, the findings indicate that the supplier’s choice of the two cases depends on the fixed cost of the online channel.

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