Journal of Global Marketing

Reimagining Global Hospitality and Tourism Marketing

Hospitality and tourism are analytically distinct but commercially inseparable. Tourism creates trip purpose, mobility, and destination demand, whereas hospitality provides the service infrastructure, accommodation, food service, and welcome that transform domestic and international journeys into lived experiences. OECD tourism accounting formalizes this relationship by classifying accommodation services and food-and-beverage services as tourism-characteristic activities, which signals that hospitality sits inside tourism’s core value architecture rather than at its periphery (OECD, 2022). Recent market data point in the same direction. Domestic visitor spending reached US$5.3 trillion in 2024 and international visitor spending reached US$1.9 trillion in 2024 (WTTC, 2025b). International tourist arrivals rose to 1.52 billion in 2025 (UN Tourism, 2026). Collectively, these figures suggest that both domestic and international tourism depend on a tightly linked system of destination promotion, booking, transport, accommodation, food, and on-site experience design.

Such interdependence explains why marketing for one cannot proceed as if the other were separate. Legacy models assumed stable mobility corridors, relatively linear digital search, manageable regulatory divergence, abundant labor, and service encounters centered mainly on human employees. Recent shifts have weakened each assumption. For this reason, this special issue seeks conceptual and empirical work that reimagines global hospitality and tourism marketing as a field concerned not only with promotion and demand generation, but also with legitimacy, resilience, governance, cross-border value co-creation, and the standardization-local authenticity tension that now sits near the center of global marketing scholarship.

Why this special issue and why now?

First, sustainability and community legitimacy have shifted from reputational concerns to core market conditions. Booking.com’s 2025 study of 32,000 travelers in 34 countries reports that 84% regard more sustainable travel choices as important, 93% want to make more sustainable choices, 73% want the money they spend to return to local communities, and 69% want to leave places better than when they arrived (Booking.com, 2025). Sector-level pressure has not eased. Travel and tourism accounted for 7.3% of global greenhouse-gas emissions in 2024, even though emissions intensity fell relative to 2019 (WTTC, 2025a). Recent hotel research likewise shows that environmental, social, and governance activities shape booking intentions through corporate image and consumer trust (Zhang & Jung, 2026). Global hospitality and tourism marketing now needs sharper theory on legitimacy, regenerative value creation, and the conditions under which sustainability claims strengthen rather than weaken demand.

Second, generative artificial intelligence is changing how consumers discover, compare, and select destinations, hotels, restaurants, and experiences. Deloitte (2026) reports that use of generative artificial intelligence for trip planning tripled from 2023 to 2025. McKinsey & Company (2026) further report that fewer than one-third of travelers have used such tools for travel-related tasks, yet 84% of those users believe the tools improved the planning experience. Consumer discovery, under such conditions, is shifting away from traditional search and platform funnels toward conversational and agentic interfaces. Recent scholarship points in the same direction. Giri et al. (2026) show positive brand-performance consequences in tourism, whereas Zhang et al. (2026) argue that important questions about ethics, psychology, and security remain underdeveloped. Global marketing scholarship now needs stronger explanation of machine-mediated persuasion, algorithmic trust, and brand visibility in artificial-intelligence-driven choice environments.

Third, augmented and virtual technologies are changing when and where the tourism experience begins. International Data Corporation (2025) forecasts that worldwide shipments of augmented reality and virtual reality headsets, combined with display-less smart glasses, will grow 39.2% in 2025 to 14.3 million units, while spending on related apps, services, and technologies is expected to reach nearly US$12 billion. Such growth suggests that pre-consumption experience is becoming more immersive, more interactive, and more commercially consequential. Aggag and Kortam (2025) show that web-based augmented reality can strengthen tourism marketing effectiveness through interactivity, vividness, immersion, and destination visit intention. Lim et al. (2024) likewise show, in the hotel context, that the perceived usefulness, ease of use, and innovativeness of augmented and virtual reality enhance tourist satisfaction and intention to stay, with intention to stay, in turn, strengthening intention to return, which suggests that digitally mediated previews can shape not only immediate choice but also later behavioral outcomes.  Sharma et al. (2025) extend this insight by showing that virtual reality can deliver authenticity and satisfaction comparable to physical visits and can even enhance the authenticity and satisfaction of subsequent on-site experiences, which implies that simulated exposure may function not (merely) as promotion but also as experiential priming.  For this reason, destination brands, hotel chains, attractions, and intermediaries need more rigorous theory on virtual presence, expectation formation, and the translation of digitally simulated experience into on-site evaluation and post-visit behavior.

Fourth, geopolitical conflict has returned as a direct force in travel demand, route viability, risk communication, and destination trust. Reuters reported in March 2026 that the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran had thrown global aviation into turmoil through cancellations, rerouting, price pressures, and disruption across Middle Eastern airspace (Reuters, 2026a, 2026b). EUROCONTROL (2026) reported that Europe-Middle East traffic flows were down 52% in the week of March 9-15, 2026, compared with the same week in 2025, while the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (2026) maintained an active conflict bulletin for the region. Recent scholarship shows similar concerns. Grigoriadis et al. (2025) explain how political instability and social conditions shape destination choice. Ketter and Farkash (2026) show how resilience capacity shapes recovery under crisis conditions. Crisis marketing, under such conditions, can no longer be treated as a rare exception. Global hospitality and tourism marketing now requires stronger insight into reassurance, trust repair, and cross-border resilience signaling.

Fifth, workations, digital nomadism, and hybrid mobility have blurred the boundary between leisure travel, business travel, and temporary residence. MBO Partners (2025) estimate that 18.5 million American workers were digital nomads in 2025, which represents a 153% increase from 2019. Such mobility changes who travels, why they travel, how long they stay, and what they expect from hospitality providers. Wilkesmann and Bassyiouny (2025) argue that workations are reshaping hospitality and destination marketing in the era of New Work, while Choe et al. (2025) identify diverse motivational configurations behind workation behavior. Traditional segmentation logic based on short stays and clear leisure-business distinctions now looks increasingly dated. Global hospitality and tourism marketing now needs sharper explanation of belonging, productivity-oriented service design, extended stays, and the new relationship between place, identity, and lifestyle infrastructure.

Sixth, personalization has become a governance problem as much as a value-creation opportunity. The European Commission’s Artificial Intelligence Act entered into force on August 1, 2024 and is scheduled to become fully applicable on August 2, 2026, subject to limited exceptions, while transparency obligations for artificial-intelligence-generated content are moving toward implementation through the emerging code of practice (European Commission, 2024, 2026). Regulatory divergence across markets makes personalization impossible to judge only by convenience or conversion. Park et al. (2025) show that reactive personalization can shape perceived ownership in hotels, whereas Yallop et al. (2026) show that trust is decisive for securing social license for data practices in tourism and hospitality. For this reason, cross-country scholarship is needed to explain how privacy expectations, disclosure, fairness, usefulness, and control jointly shape customer acceptance and market legitimacy.

Seventh, resident legitimacy has become a core marketing issue rather than a post hoc policy concern. OECD (2025) argues for tailored and integrated destination management plans that align tourism growth with host communities, redistribution of visitor flows, infrastructure, and community engagement. The World Economic Forum (2025) likewise frames hospitality and tourism as a sector at a turning point, facing tensions between visitors and residents alongside environmental pressures and labor shortages. Consumer sentiment shows why resident legitimacy has become strategically important. Booking.com (2025) found that only 16% of respondents favor capping visitor numbers in their home destination, yet many report concerns about traffic, littering, overcrowding, and rising living costs. Destination marketing that pursues demand while ignoring resident consent risks eroding the social conditions on which brand strength depends. Future research should explain how resident wellbeing, shared value, and destination legitimacy shape global brand equity.

Eighth, the sector’s labor model is under pressure, which places service delivery capacity at the center of marketing credibility. WTTC (2025c) projects a global hospitality and tourism worker gap of more than 43 million by 2035, including an expected hospitality shortfall of 8.6 million workers. Kilson’s (2025) systematic review likewise shows that employer branding has become strategically important for attraction and retention in hospitality and tourism. A promise of warmth, authenticity, cultural sensitivity, or premium service cannot remain credible when frontline staffing systems are weak. For this reason, global hospitality and tourism marketing needs closer integration of brand promise, employee value proposition, service automation, and human labor design, especially across markets where labor expectations and institutional conditions differ sharply.

Desired contributions and editorial expectations

We are especially interested in submissions that offer theoretically novel and theoretically interesting insights. Lim (2026) argues that strong theory development requires scholars to establish a genuine theoretical gap, articulate suitable theoretical foundations, specify the theoretical contribution, and clarify the implications in a disciplined sequence. For this reason, hospitality and tourism should serve not (merely) as empirical scenery, but as a setting through which new mechanisms, conceptual tensions, boundary conditions, or explanatory relationships become visible. Manuscripts that simply apply an established framework to a new context will be less competitive than manuscripts that use this context to advance theory in global marketing, consumer behavior, service research, or related fields.

Suitable theoretical anchoring is equally important. Hollebeek et al. (2025) propose the IMPACT criteria for theory selection, namely interestingness, matching, parsimony, applicability, conceptual rigor, and testability. Those criteria are especially valuable for hospitality and tourism research, where fashionable theories are often imported with only loose fit to the phenomenon under study. For this reason, we welcome submissions grounded in theories that clearly match the research question, whether those theories come from global marketing, service research, consumer culture, institutional analysis, legitimacy, risk, resilience, affordance, practice, or adjacent domains. Strong fit between phenomenon and theory will be treated as a substantive strength, not a procedural afterthought.

Methodological pluralism is fully welcome. Conceptual papers (Hollebeek et al., 2024; MacInnis, 2011; Jaakkola, 2020), theory-building essays (Hollebeek et al., 2025; Lim, 2026b; Venkatesh, 2025), systematic reviews (Lim, 2025a; van Bueren et al., 2026), individual and focus group interviews (Lim, 2025b, 2026a), ethnography and netnography (Kozinets & Gretzel, 2024), surveys (Ali, 2026; Lim, 2025c), experiments (Viglia et al., 2021), field experiments (Dolnicar et al., 2026), archival studies (Das et al., 2018), platform data analyses (Newman et al., 2021), mixed methods designs (Venkatesh et al., 2013, 2016), and multi-study papers are all appropriate (read recent guides to gain an up-to-date understanding on methodological expectations). Field-data partnerships with firms, platforms, destinations, airlines, hotels, restaurants, cruise operators, or public agencies are especially encouraged. In the event of a large submission volume, priority will be given to multi-country, multi-method, and multi-study submissions.

Submissions that advance debates on cross-cultural value co-creation in artificial intelligence-mediated services, legitimacy and trust across markets, governance and ethics across countries, destination resilience, and the standardization-local authenticity tension will be especially valuable. Research that reaches beyond technology adoption alone and instead explains why these shifts reshape global marketing theory and practice will be especially competitive. Submissions may examine hotels, resorts, restaurants, airlines, cruise operators, destinations, attractions, online intermediaries, or linked ecosystems that connect place, service, and mobility.

Journal of Global Marketing’s expectations

Editor perspective:

• Lim, W. M., Lascu, D., Gandhi, S., Kumar, B., Mady, T., Sun, Q., & Manrai, A. K. (2024). Crafting excellence: Publication tips from the editors of Journal of Global Marketing. Journal of Global Marketing, 37(5), 353–356. https://doi.org/10.1080/08911762.2024.2405771

Reviewer perspective:

• Dwivedi, A., Lim, W. M., Chan, K. W., Huang, L., Suttikun, C., & Manrai, A. K. (2026). Reviewer expectations across peer review rounds. Journal of Global Marketing, 39(1), 3–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/08911762.2026.2623400

Especially welcome

• Theory-building papers that advance global marketing debates rather than treating hospitality and tourism as context alone.
• Studies on governance, policy, privacy, and ethics across countries, not only technology adoption.
• Field-data partnerships with destinations, firms, platforms, and public agencies.
• Multi-country, multi-method, and multi-study submissions.

Illustrative research questions

Technology, mediation, and discovery

• How do artificial intelligence agents reshape destination discovery, hotel consideration sets, and booking conversion across countries?
• Under what conditions do artificial intelligence-mediated service encounters increase or reduce trust, warmth, authenticity, and willingness to book?
• How do augmented or virtual pre-experiences change expectations, satisfaction, and post-visit word of mouth?
• How do platform ecosystems and conversational interfaces reallocate power among destinations, hospitality firms, and travelers?
• What forms of human-machine service design sustain relational value at scale?

Sustainability, legitimacy, and governance

• When do sustainability or environmental, social, and governance signals strengthen booking intention, legitimacy, and loyalty, and when do they trigger skepticism or resistance?
• How can firms market regenerative or community-centered tourism without slipping into moral posturing or greenwashing?
• How do privacy norms and data governance expectations differ across countries in personalized tourism and hospitality settings?
• What governance arrangements help organizations balance visitor growth with host-community wellbeing?
• How do residents’ perceptions of tourism growth shape destination brand equity and long-run competitiveness?

Mobility, place, and identity

• How are workations and digital nomadism reshaping segmentation, service design, and brand community formation?
• How do domestic and international visitors differ in their expectations of authenticity, standardization, and local adaptation?
• How do longer stays, hybrid mobility, and lifestyle infrastructure reshape place attachment and willingness to return?
• What new forms of value co-creation emerge when hospitality and tourism are treated as one linked global marketing domain?

Risk, resilience, and organizing capacity

• How do geopolitical shocks, conflict, sanctions, or airspace disruption alter destination choice and risk perception?
• Which crisis-communication strategies best repair trust after cross-border disruption?
• How do labor shortages and employer-branding strategies shape guest experience and brand-promise fulfillment?
• Which theoretical lenses best explain resilience, legitimacy, and recovery in global hospitality and tourism ecosystems?

(contact Guest Editors for list of references)