Amid a new marketing era featuring increasingly dynamic and interactive business environments (Hollebeek et al., 2016;Pansari & Kumar, 2016), the concept of customer engagement (CE) has sparked growing interest among scholars in mainstream marketing as well as in the hospitality and tourism domain. Recent empirical research has shown that CE enhances customers' brand evaluations (So et al., 2016) and future purchase intentions (Hollebeek et al., 2014), and is hence described as the "expanded domain of relationship marketing" (Vivek et al., 2012, p. 129). Given such findings, service organizations-particularly those in the hospitality and tourism industry, such as hotels, airlines, and even destinations-have implemented CE strategies to connect with customers at various stages of consumption, including pre-consumption, during, and post-consumption.In line with the concept's theoretical significance and practical relevance, the hospitality and tourism literature has paid increasing attention to CE. Critical insights include the conceptualization and measurement of CE (So et al., 2014), its antecedents and consequences (Dijkmans et al., 2015;Ge & Gretzel, 2017;So et al., 2016), barriers to organizational adoption of CE (Chathoth et al., 2014), customers' perceptions of and management responses to CE behaviors (Wei et al., 2013), and analysis of CE through the lens of social media affordance (Cabiddu et al., 2014).Despite these recent advances, insight into the nature of CE and the wider nomological network within which the concept is situated remain sparse. This lacuna highlights the demand for additional research to enrich the CE literature by addressing pertinent challenges. This need motivated the present special issue on CE in hospitality and tourism services in conjunction with a track on the same theme at the 2018 Global Marketing Conference in Tokyo, Japan (July 26-29).The Global Marketing Conference is cohosted by some of the world's leading marketing associations: the American Marketing Association, European 900010J HTXXX10.