Hotel crisis communication on social media: effects of message appeal

Abstract

The hotel industry is vulnerable to various external crises, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Social media is one of the primary platforms for hotel crisis communication. Accordingly, this study adopted the perspective of message appeal and tried to develop effective hotel crisis communication messages. An online experiment was conducted where 260 Chinese customers were included. The results showed that emotional-appeal messages are more effective in attracting customers for luxury hotels, while functional-appeal messages are more suitable for economic hotels. The results also showed that perceived safety mediated the relationship between the message appeal and booking intentions and that this mediating relationship is moderated by the hotel type. This study further discussed theoretical and practical implications.