Hosting ethnically and culturally rich religious festivals provides visitors a glimpse into how a sense of togetherness and faith are not only established but strengthened through shared beliefs and ritualistic behavior. This research examines visitors’ destination loyalty through their emotional bonding with place, the emotional solidarity they experience with residents, and their perceived level of safety. Based on data collected from 813 visitors during the Attur Church Feast in Karkala, India, the results indicated that place attachment directly influences loyalty and two dimensions of emotional solidarity and, in turn, emotional solidarity has a positive effect on loyalty. Additionally, it was found that emotional solidarity partially mediates the effect of place attachment on destination loyalty. Finally, employing a moderated mediation analysis, visitor level of perceived safety at the festival partially moderated the indirect effect of place attachment on destination loyalty through emotional solidarity.

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Purpose During COVID 19 pandemic emergency remote teaching (ERT) in higher education emerged and faculty members had to go through a transformation in teaching-learning without preparedness. The purpose of the study is to understand the instructional delivery experiences of faculty members, explore the challenges and how they overcame these challenges during the transition from traditional classroom teaching to ERT. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative research approach using phenomenology is adapted for the study. The study is conducted in selected renowned government and private universities offering professional education in India, Malaysia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Data analysis is using NVivo, data management software, based on Ricouer’s theory of interpretation. Findings The findings identify unique challenges and opportunities in faculty experiences during the implementation of ERT and universities require more preparedness in implementing a revised pedagogy. Addressing these unique challenges is, therefore, essential in effective change management and ensuring the effectiveness of instructional delivery. Research limitations/implications The study comprises faculty experiences from only selected countries (the United Arab Emirates, Oman, India and Malaysia) and disciplines such as business studies, design and architecture, engineering, hospitality and tourism management, medicine and nursing. The research contributes towards change management and adaptability strategies during emergency transitions. Practical implications The study has implications in the field of education, administration, research and society at large. This is an era of change that has witnessed tremendous possibilities of digital technology in enhancing remote teaching and learning at all levels of education worldwide. The study enumerates the factors influencing the paradigm shift in the pedagogy for present and future higher education. The present study also highlights how challenging this transformation was to the lives of professional academics and emphasized how effectively the faculty need to be mentored for the future by the administration. Future research can envisage effective tools and techniques for strengthening professional education at universities. The social context and human experiences in ERT and their impact on the process of learning are also addressed in the study. Social implications The study aims to understand the social context and human experiences in the process of ERT and their impact on the process of learning. Originality/value The findings of the study would throw light into the factors influencing the paradigm shift in the pedagogy for present and future higher education.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of two personality traits (i.e. food neophobia (FN) and domain-specific innovativeness (DSI)) on revisit intentions of consumers in the food festival context. Design/methodology/approach The study adopted a FN scale, DSI scale and food festival revisit intention scale to capture the study constructs. Furthermore, data were collected from 265 food festival attendees in the town of Udupi (State of Karnataka, India). Furthermore, the study adopted structural equating modeling to investigate the relationship between the three study constructs. Findings The findings of this study reveals that DSI seems to exercise significant positive influence on consumers revisit intentions for the food festival. On the contrary, FN seems to exercise a negative influence on consumers revisit intentions. This relation, however, is found to be non-significant. Practical implications The findings of this study are expected to help food festival event managers, organizers and practitioners outline and delineate marketing strategies so as to increase the revisit intentions of consumers for the food festivals. Originality/value FN and DSI have been extensively studied in the context of consumers’ food consumption and related behaviors. On the contrary, majority of the studies that relate to festival revisit intentions situate consumers’ experiential values and satisfaction with attributes of the festival itself (e.g. location, affordability, quality of food, infrastructure, venue ambiance, service quality, entertainment avenues, timing and duration and size of the festival) as key precursors to their revisit propensity. This research endeavor, however, attempts to investigate whether, notwithstanding other food festival attributes, personality traits of individuals (i.e. FN and DSI) exercise any influence on food festival revisit intentions.

Our study adopts the Theory of Transactional Distance (TTD) as the theoretical framework to investigate the impact of the four interaction levels: content, instructors, peers, and technology on perceived learning among hospitality students with self-efficacy as the moderating factor. The data sample for the study includes responses from 461 hospitality students from various institutes in India. Our findings reveal that all the four-point of interactions, content, instructors, peers, and technology, have a significant positive impact on perceived learning. Further, learners' interaction with the content was emerged as the most significant predictor of perceived learning. The data was put to moderation analysis, with results suggesting that self-efficacy has a conditional effect only on the interaction between content and perceived learning.