Abstract
After hotels in many countries were forced to close in government-imposed lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an inherent need to communicate how they deal with the coronavirus to motivate guests to visit. However, lack of knowledge about how to persuasively communicate about hotels’ cleaning programs for COVID-19 can challenge the industry’s survival. We investigated how hotels that position their brand as a particular personality (sincere vs. exciting) could benefit from different communication styles (inclusion of numerical vs. verbal quantifiers) when presenting their COVID-19 cleaning procedures. Study 1 explored tourists’ central attitudinal responses toward hotels’ cleaning programs. Study 2 demonstrated that sincere hotel brands would benefit from using numerical and verbal quantifiers to communicate their cleaning policies, whereas exciting hotel brands would benefit only from numerical quantifiers. Our results invite hotel managers to use their brand personality positioning to influence tourists’ attitudes and intentions in a pandemic context.
1. Introduction
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is one of the most impactful events of the 21 st century and its effect on the hospitality and tourism industry is tremendous (Zenker and Kock, 2020). On the supply side, the hospitality and tourism operations of many countries have mostly been shut down (Baum and Hai, 2020), with an estimated 75 million jobs at immediate risk (World Travel and Tourism Council, 2020). On the demand side, this pandemic will affect tourists’ behavior while traveling, booking accommodation (Zenker and Kock, 2020), and consuming physical spaces (Wang and Ackerman, 2018). As the world adjusts to COVID-19, policymakers worldwide are progressively restoring individuals’ mobility and re-opening hospitality and tourism facilities.
4.3. Limitations and future research
This work is not without limitations that should be addressed in future studies. First, it is necessary to evaluate the external validity of our experiment, including communication styles that combine both numerical and verbal quantifiers in the same condition with a bigger sample. Currently, hospitality and tourism organizations are also using labels to signal that a hospitality area was cleaned with secure procedures against COVID-19 (World Tourism Organization, 2020). It will be interesting to analyze hotels’ use of COVID-19-free labels combined with numerical and verbal quantifiers to advance in the post-pandemic hotel industry agenda (Hao et al., 2020).
