Dealing With the Risks of Information Overload

While guests go on farm holidays in the hope of receiving authentic and memorable experiences, information overload is a factor that is increasingly detracting from such experiences. For instance, the steady stream of emails, text messages, and news received through social media channels tends to distract from the main experience. To cope with such overload, script theory suggests that guests are increasingly ‘satisficing' their information intake and subconsciously tuning-out much incoming stimuli from their surroundings. This subconscious satisficing makes it more difficult for farm holiday providers to win the guest's full attention in order to create memorable and authentic experiences. Therefore, this chapter synthesizes theories and empirical research from several disciplines with a view to gaining a better understanding of how this modern information overload serves as a formidable threat to farm holiday providers, who typically operate from small family farms. This synthesis is then employed as the basis for a number of practical and research recommendations.

The COVID-19 Pandemic and Organizational Resilience in Hospitality Family Firms

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced a pandemic of COVID-19. The family-owned hospitality industry in the Tirol has been affected by governmental measures and travel bans in particular. The current study focuses on hospitality family business owners as the backbone of the regional tourism industry. Their dealing with the crisis and their perception of their own organizational resilience is explored. It uses a qualitative exploratory approach with semi-structured interviews to answer the research question. The most surprising result of the interviews was the optimistic state of mind visible among entrepreneurs. In this study, a better understanding of the tourism industry's dealing with a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic is created.

Heurigen 2.0

Traditional Heurigen and Buschenschenken have been an important part of Austrian culture for centuries and are mostly run as small family firms. In those businesses, succession is inevitable. Several factors are key for the success of transition processes within a family. Traditional concepts are confronted with digitalization, new technologies, new demand, and social changes. For the chapter at hand, incumbents and heirs of four wine making and Heurigen businesses in the Northern Burgenland were interviewed. Its aim is to investigate the perception of the succession process itself as well as the risk of implementing innovations into traditional concepts. This study shows that innovations are directed by natural circumstances rather than customer demands. The owners rely on traditional concepts with incremental changes to keep customers attracted. Thanks to trust, open communication, and succession processes that spread over long periods of time, neither generation thinks of the handover as problematic.

Family Business Tourism Risk in the Context of Coronavirus Pandemic

The coronavirus is crippling the global economy. However, the economic impacts of the pandemic vary significantly across sectors of the economy. This outbreak and related lockdowns are putting the tourism industry under unprecedented pressure. Within months, world tourism went from over-tourism to non-tourism. Therefore, the overall objective of this chapter is to introduce the latest trends in tourism, with emphasis on family businesses. More precisely, the chapter encompasses (1) the theoretical background, which defines family business, highlights their characteristics, and summarizes the importance of leadership succession; (2) the role of family business resilience and their behaviour in times of crisis; (3) a review of relevant European Commission policy publications regarding EU tourism and statistical analyses of selected key tourism indicators; and (4) an analysis of family businesses environment in time of crisis. Hence, this chapter has documented the crucial role that family businesses tourism has within the European Union and on the front line of the current crises.

Physically Apart, Emotionally Close

This chapter aims to explore the use of social media channels in the crisis communication of Austrian family-led hotels during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on current research on family businesses and crisis communication on social media, the authors investigated seven Instagram profiles of family-owned hotels in Tyrol and its borders. The data were collected in spring and summer 2020 and then analyzed using a mixed-method approach. First, the researchers did a quantitative analysis of the hashtags and then conducted a qualitative content analysis of the pictures and respective captions. The results show that information relating to the crisis is rarely communicated and the focus of communication rather lies on positive attitudes, emotions, and classic alpine marketing topics. During the crisis, the hotels present themselves as resilient and anchored in their family values. This chapter adds new insights to current research on family firms' crisis communication and provides valuable findings for the development of a successful communication strategy for family businesses.

Crisis Favors the Prepared Firm

This chapter examines the interplay of the fundamental constructs of perceived organizational resilience and organizational ambidexterity by providing insights from a case study of an integrated service company in the tourism and leisure industry located in the Swiss Alps. The authors theorize that organizational ambidexterity (i.e., the balance between adaptability and alignment) leads to higher levels of resilience by boosting the capability of the firm to mitigate and adapt to major disruptions in its environment. Data from a survey with non-family employees show that establishing structures of alignment and adaptability and imprinting an “and/or”-mindset into the company culture has enabled all employees to constantly navigate new challenges while staying aligned on priorities throughout the hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the positive effects of alignment and adaptability can only unfold if they are combined with clear communication and transparency by the company's leadership.

How Small Hotel Owners Practice Resilience

Through three dramatic periods—the period of communism, the period of the war and transition during the 1990s, and the period of EU admission—this longitudinal study investigates how small hotel owners in Croatia understand and practice resilience. Findings demonstrate that entrepreneurs have proactive understanding of resilience and practice different actions before the shock of a disruptive event/s occur/s. Interestingly, entrepreneurs perceive this disruption as opportunities to exploit for their business development. One of the most prevalent practices is diversification, where entrepreneurs start another firm in different, often unrelated, sectors.

Travellers' Resilience to Major Travel Risks of Today

It is argued that the current times can be labelled as the era of fear, as there is always something to be afraid of. Fear causes great damage to the tourism industry, as the prerequisite of global travels is (the sense of) safety. Resilience is a promising approach to address the harmful effect of fear in tourism. Travellers' resilience, while an essential component of overall tourism resilience, is scarcely studied. This chapter investigates what makes global travellers resilient in the face of current global adversities, terrorism risk, and COVID-19, the recent game-changers in tourism. By building on psychological resilience theory and synthesizing the latest risk-specific findings, general categories of travellers' resilience are outlined. The chapter concludes by profiling each travellers' category along with communication guidelines on how to encourage each segment in troubled times.

The Risk Perception of Family Business Owner-Manager in the Tourism Industry

Successfully dealing with risk has become a major challenge for firms to stay competitive in the long run. The tourism industry is vulnerable to any crisis and therefore has to deal with a high degree of uncertainty including many risks. The Alpine tourism industry is shaped by small and medium-structured family businesses. Such firms have more informal decision-making processes and more generations involved, while risk taking depends on the decisions of an owner-manager. Understanding the risk perception owner-managers is thus a complex task. This study conducts n=12 qualitative interviews with senior and junior owner-managers of family SME in tourism. Understanding the risk perception for tourism family SME might therefore contribute to build resilience and long-term competitiveness.

Resilience as an Opportunity Approach

Against the background of its conceptual vagueness, practicing resilience is a complex task and a particular challenge for management. Resilience initiatives on the local and regional levels pursue participation by using different methods of stakeholder integration. In this contribution, the private sector is presented as a particularly difficult stakeholder group to attract for cooperative resilience building. Due to limited resources, corporate development and responsibility often remain in the spheres of an operational context. Thus, involvement in regional resilience building is often seen as desirable, but not an integral part of strategic corporate management. This contribution gives recommendations on how coordinated resilience initiatives should act in order to achieve the systematic participation of the private sector. If resilience practice defines measurable outcomes for entrepreneurship and positive experiences are made in the regional network, a sustainable participation of firms in the resilience development should be manifested.