Visitor Books and Guest-generated Discourses of Hospitality: The Case of theHanok

Abstract

This study analyzes visitor book entries as cultural repositories of guest-generated hospitality discourses to understand how guests articulate/narrativize hospitality. Inquiry into visitor book entries offers insight into ways in which tourists render people and place intelligible. Utilizing textual analysis, this study examines discursive entries contained within visitor books displayed at a traditional South Korean hanok guesthouse/commercial home. The findings indicate that tourists' entries could be classified into three emergent categories: Structural Esthetics, Emotions/Affective State, and Inter-personal Engagement. Guests' entries indicated that there was an appreciation for the display of traditional architecture, which facilitated sentiments of relaxation, contentment, tranquility, and homeliness. The hanok is thus regarded as a therapeutic landscape in which positive emotions are nurtured. Guests' entries also showcased evidence of genuine and personalized exchanges with hosts. This study points to the need for further theorizations on the role of indigenous knowledge in informing the performance and reception of hospitality.

Topic Modeling of Online Accommodation Reviews via Latent Dirichlet Allocation

“…In commercial home enterprises (CHEs), customers have different expectations since the products and services offered differ from traditional hotels [30]. Owners of commercial homes "prioritize personal values, quality of life, and personal interactions above economic gains" and it is reflected in the dimensions valued by CHE guests [34] (p. 115).…”

“…In Korea, an endemic, traditional type of CHE accommodation exists called a "hanok", and it is popular for both domestic and international tourists. Hanok "literally means Korean house and it refers to an abode designed according to the traditional principles of Korean architectural culture" [34]. The traditional principles are known as pungsu-jiri (i.e., Feng Shui), and they direct how the traditional hanok accommodations are constructed [41].…”

The landscape of customer engagement in hospitality and tourism: a systematic review

“…Therefore, only economic entities were considered as focal agents of customer engagement. However, this study argues that interpersonal engagement also plays an important role in the customer engagement process, such as customer-customer engagement (Steele et al, 2017;Tussyadiah, Kausar, and Soesilo, 2018;Wei, Miao, and Huang, 2013;Zhang, Zhang, and Lu, 2019b), guest-host engagement (Choi, Buzinde, and Lee, 2015), customer-staff engagement (Huang and Choi, 2019) and tourist-community engagement (Sharma and Sarmah, 2019), etc.…”

“…Innovative research methods were shown in a few studies, such as Radic (2019) examined children's engagement with cruise travel through kids' drawing. Choi et al (2015) understood the engagement with guesthouse through visitors' books, and Muñoz, Liébana, and Hernández (2018) explored customers'engagement with hotels' advertisement through experiments based on eye-tracking technology. About model building, compared to SEM, PLS has the advantage of using nonnormal data, small sample sizes, and formative indicators (Hair, Sarstedt, Hopkins, and Kuppelwieser, 2014).…”

“…Existing studies on customer engagement mainly focused on the travel service and lodging section and thus calls for the empirical exploration of customer engagement in different settings and sectors to enhance research applicability and generalisability (Aleti et al, 2018;Cabiddu, De Carlo, and Piccoli, 2014;Hapsari, Clemes, and Dean, 2017;Huh, 2018;Hyun and Perdue, 2017;Islam et al, 2019;Kim, Chiang, and Tang, 2017;Rather, Tehseen, and Parrey, 2018;Taheri et al, 2014;Wei, Hua, Fu, and Guchait, 2017a). For example, research can be conducted in different firm star categories (high/low-star) or firm types (individual, the local chain, international chain) (Choi et al, 2015;Hahn, Sparks, Wilkins, and Jin, 2017;Kim et al, 2017). For Online Customer Engagement, customer engagement must be explored with various online platforms with different design, functions and social presences (Aydin, 2020;Fine et al, 2017;Hashim and Fadhil, 2017;Lei et al, 2017;Li, Kim, and Choi, 2019;Menon et al, 2019;Perez, Taheri, Farrington, and O'Gorman, 2018;Schroeder, Pennington, and Mandala, 2018;Yoo and Lee, 2015;Zhang, Gordon, Buhalis, and Ding, 2018).…”