| Author: | Hung, Oi Ki |
| Title: | Are your health and safety signals enough to attract the guests back to your hotel? A study on the impact of health and safety signals source and communication format on consumers’ risk perception and booking intention in the “new normal” |
| Advisors: | Lo, Ada (SHTM) |
| Degree: | M.Sc. |
| Year: | 2022 |
| Subject: | Hotels -- Health aspects Industrial hygiene Travel -- Health aspects Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | School of Hotel and Tourism Management |
| Pages: | iv, 55 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Hotel industry has been severely affected by the pandemic, experiencing the lowest occupancy in the history. During this low time, hoteliers have been working restlessly to enhance their health and safety standards in the hotels in order to regain consumers’ confidence for visiting hotels. Consumers’ behavior has been changed drastically during the pandemic, the priory for making purchase decision has been shuffled with health and safety topping the list. The stringent hygiene and safety standards are expected to be part of the “new normal”. It is important for hotels to effectively communicate their health and safety standards with the consumers. One of the challenges of communicating health and safety is its unobservable nature. Based on the signaling theory, hotels can send signals or cues to tangiblize the health and safety standards to consumers. The health and safety signals adopted in hotel industry can be categorized into four types: government certification, third-party endorsement, commercial collaboration and self-declared health and safety program. In this study, we try to understand the effectiveness of the different types of health and safety signals and the way they are being communicated influencing consumers’ perceived health risk, hotel image and their booking intention. A 4 (health and safety signals sources) x 2 communication format (text vs logo) between-subjects experiment were conducted. The results showed that government certification was the most impactful on consumers’ behavior, followed by third-party endorsement. It was surprising to note that commercial collaboration was perceived with the highest health risk hence lower purchase intention among the four health and safety signals. Health and safety signals presented in text format yielded more favorable results than logo in general expect hotel image. Furthermore, no significant interaction was found between health and safety signals sources and communication format but the effect of health and safety signal sources is much higher than communication format on consumers perception. This study addressed the research gap of the effectiveness of different health and safety signals source and their communication format from consumers’ perspective. Thermotical implications and future studies topics are also discussed. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6866.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 2.18 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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