From the Editor—August 2022

Abstract

The bar is rising. I have been extremely encouraged by the submissions we have received over the past several months. As I continue fighting through a substantial backlog—and I truly appreciate everyone’s patience with my efforts—I have seen authors place much more considered attention to three essential requirements for all papers that are published in the CHQ. The first requirement is demonstrating the practical importance, not mere relevance, of the topic for the hospitality industry. In the current issue, the lead article by Dogru, Mody, Line, Hanks, Suess, and Bonn takes a granular look the adverse influences of Airbnb on hotel performance. This is a hot topic among industry leaders, and the findings have direct implications for hotel pricing and revenue management strategies. Similarly, the corporate social responsibility paper by Num, Koh, and Jang, the gender wage gap study by Casado-Díaz, Driha, and Simón, and the article on best practices for creating bespoke customer experiences by LaTour and Brant provide clear evidence of the strategic and operational priority of the topics under investigation. The second requirement that is gaining more salience is ensuring a clear and contextualized conceptual basis for the focal study. Authors are moving away from the descriptive literature reviews and testing the applicability of models that have been established in non-hospitality settings. Instead, they are offering more explicit explanations that are informed by industry priorities, and as such, extend the more broadly based frameworks to account for the unique features associated with hospitality settings. The paper on customer-driven employee citizenship behavior by Ma, Wang, and Qu, and the article by Guzzo, Wang, and Abbott that examines the links between corporate social responsibility and employee work-related outcomes are exemplary examples of how the hospitality industry can inform and advance theoretical development. The last feature of many recently submitted papers is an increasing level of methodological rigor. More authors are utilizing multi-sample and longitudinal approaches, as well as experimental designs, that offer robust results that can be interpreted with confidence. The article on decision making behavior by Lucas, Cho, and Singh, and the study on assetlight real estate strategies by Bianchi and Marklin are particularly noteworthy in this regard and offer excellent references for the level specificity and thoroughness that is needed to produce useful, impactful research. Indeed, the bar is rising across the board, and we can look forward to a proliferation of high-quality work that accelerates our understanding of the increasingly complex challenges faced by the hospitality industry. John Bruce Tracey Cornell University 1105558 CQXXXX10.1177/19389655221105558Cornell Hospitality Quarterly editorial2022