Browsing by Author "Bernard, Shaniel"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
  • Thumbnail Image
    Breaking barriers for Bangladeshi female solo travelers
    Bernard, Shaniel; Rahman, Imran; McGehee, Nancy G. (Elsevier, 2022-01-01)
    Asian Muslim women's travel habits are sorely under-researched. In response to various calls for research in this area, this study utilizes Hofstede's five cultural dimensions to determine how Bangladeshi cultural values inhibit and/or enhance travel constraints for solo Muslim female travelers and the subsequent effects on solo travel behavior. We propose solo travel as a strategic tourism development tool to achieve mobility rights and gender equality particularly for destinations that are highly populated with more women than men. Introducing an interpretivist qualitative approach, the study extracted both survey and open-ended responses from 307 frequent Bangladeshi solo travelers that were recruited from a women-only English-speaking Facebook Bangladeshi travel group. The findings reveal that this group is constrained by a unique combination of intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural factors. Power-distance, masculinity, and uncertainty-avoidance also play key roles. Sustainable and practical applications are outlined for destination management organizations, travel planners, policy makers, non-governmental organizations, and for-profit tour companies that benefit both Bangladeshi solo female travelers and those with whom they interact.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Environmental certification and hotel market value
    Bernard, Shaniel; Nicolau, Juan Luis (Elsevier, 2022-02-01)
    To counteract the negative publicity derived from environmental impacts and avoid potential “greenwashing” accusations, hotels resort to third-party entities to certify their commitment to the environment. The objective of this study is to analyze the effect of environmental certifications on hotels’ market value. To fill this gap in the literature, this empirical study detects all announcements of environmental awards ever made by major publicly traded hotels in the United States. The findings show that environmental certification has a positive effect on hotels’ market value (reducing the effects of the alluded negative publicity); that this positive effect is higher for first-time awards; and that a U-shaped effect exists for subsequent awards. Managerial implications for hotels’ engagement in environmental awards are described.
  • Thumbnail Image
    From extra to Extraordinary: An academic and practical exploration of Extraordinary (E) Pro Environmental Behavior (PEB) in the hotel industry
    Zizka, Laura; Dias, Alvaro; Ho, Jo Ann; Bernard, Shaniel; Singal, Manisha (Elsevier, 2024-05)
    Over the past decades, organizations have become increasingly involved with environmental concerns to mitigate the negative consequences of their actions on the community. The hospitality industry, and especially hotels, aware of its effects, has taken steps to increase positive environmental behavior, attitudes, and initiatives, to lessen the harm to the greater community in which they are located. Encouraging employees in their pro-environmental behavior (PEB) within the organization is a long-standing initiative and well-cited in the literature. In this paper, we posit the need to extend the literature to an “extraordinary” (E) version of PEB i.e. extraordinary pro-environmental behavior via employee engagement. Our study examines traditional PEB through a systematic literature review deriving from eleven top-ranked journals for 79 articles, identifying key concepts through Leximancer. In addition, two workshops with international hospitality professionals were held to complement findings from the literature. Our contribution lies in developing a model that academics and hotel stakeholders can use to move beyond PEB to our proposition of E-PEB as well as address the practitioner-academia gap by comparing what the literature posits with the reality of the hotel industry.
  • Thumbnail Image
    The incidence of environmental status signaling on three hospitality and tourism green products: A scenario-based quasi-experimental analysis
    Rahman, Imran; Chen, Han; Bernard, Shaniel (Elsevier, 2023-03-01)
    This study examined whether environmental status signaling (ESS) applied to purchase situations involving three environmental products in hospitality and tourism: an environment-friendly car, an organically-produced wine, and a green hotel. Findings from three scenario-based quasi-experimental studies suggested that ESS differed across the type of green product and the consumption setting. When status motive was high, consumers would purchase the environment-friendly car over its more-luxurious conventional counterpart across all consumption settings. Higher purchase intention was also found for the more luxurious hotel over the environment-friendly hotel and for the organically-produced wine over the better-rated conventional wine in private settings. These effects disappeared in the public setting. Moreover, ESS was independent of whether green products were priced equal or more. Recommendations on how to promote the personal benefits of green products and improve performance, design, and packaging of the green products were provided to practitioners in the hospitality and tourism industry.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Investigating the emergence of third-party online food delivery in the U.S. restaurant industry: A grounded theory approach
    Traynor, Mark; Bernard, Shaniel; Moreo, Andrew; O’Neill, Sorcha (Elsevier, 2022-10)
    This qualitative study explores the emergence of Third-Party Online Food Delivery (TPOFD) in the US restaurant industry. The study used grounded theory to obtain insight into the perspective of restaurant operators regarding TPOFD adoption through interviews with seventeen restaurant managers and owners who use and do not use TPOFD in their businesses. The results identified several emergent themes relating to motivations, experienced outcomes, and future strategies for adopting TPOFD. These findings were used to propose a conceptual model that describes the adoption of TPOFD in the restaurant industry. The data shows that while the tremendous consumer demand for TPOFD is a motivation factor to adopt TPOFD, many restaurants are deterred by various adverse outcomes, most notably, the high commission and service fees paid to TPOFD aggregators. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed in detail.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Sustainability Communication in Hotels: The Role of Cognitive Linguistics
    Bernard, Shaniel; Rahman, Imran; Douglas, Alecia (Sage, 2023-03-06)
    Efficiently communicating sustainability initiatives is critical to generating positive attitudes and pro-environmental behavior in hotel consumers. However, research on the combined effect of various message factors to improve environmental message persuasiveness is scant. To fill this gap, two studies were conducted with a sample of onsite and online hotel guests to offer new insights into the combined effect of language design elements that identify connectives and prepositional phrases with message content as essential grounding components of persuasion. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of restriction-based language design on booking intention through nuanced mechanisms involving perceived environmental performance, perceived greenwashing, and environmental concern. This study contributes to the growing literature on sustainability marketing by examining the design and integration of linguistic tools that hospitality managers can use in their sustainability communication campaigns. Additional practical and theoretical implications are provided.