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.


Introduction
The hotel industry is vulnerable to various health issues, including the recent outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic.The COVID-19 pandemic, which broke out at the end of 2019, has quickly swept across the globe and has become by far one of the most significant public health crises (Fauci et al., 2020).The pandemic has negatively impacted the hospitality industry, and the hotel industry is among the hardest hit.This is due to the implementation of non-pharmaceutical measures (i.e.social distancing and national lockdowns) in earlier days and the public fear and hesitation to travel and stay in hotel properties accumulated over time (Lai & Wong, 2020).Ever since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic in March 2020, hotels throughout the world have suffered steep drops in occupancy as well as revenue, and it is predicted that hotel business' recovery to pre-COVID19 levels could take until 2023 (Krishnan et al., 2020).
China was the first country affected by the pandemic, whose devastating impact has caused multiple challenges for the hotel industry (China Tourism Research Institute, 2020).These difficulties include Chinese citizens' reluctance and access to travel, more and more hotel cancellations, and hoteliers' increasing sense of job insecurity, all of which lead to further complications such as labour and cash shortage, postponed development projects, property closure, and hotels' declining market performance (Hao et al., 2020).Scholars (Hao et al., 2020;Lai & Wong, 2020;Le & Phi, 2021) have developed and refined crisis management frameworks to assist China's hotel industry in recovering from the adverse situation and returning to normal.Le and Phi (2021) further suggest the importance for hotels to develop strategic responses, which can adequately address the evolving circumstances associated with the pandemic and regain public confidence.
Crisis communication is an integral part of tourism crisis management and has become even more critical with the rise of social media.Effective crisis communication messages on social media can quickly satisfy customers' informational needs, instil their confidence in the firm, and encourage purchase decisions (Liu-Lastres et al., 2019).Recent studies (Kim et al., 2021;Wang et al., 2021) highlight the significance of message appeal and the message effects on eliciting purchasing intentions towards hospitality products during COVID-19.However, despite its importance, few studies thus far have devoted efforts to developing effective social media crisis commutation messages for hotels, a key segment in the hospitality industry.
Understanding consumers' information processing mechanism is of critical importance for developing effective social media crisis communication (Jiang & Wen, 2020;Liu-Lastres, 2022).The dual-process theory suggests that individuals often adopt different approaches to process functional and emotional appeals (Jang et al., 2014).Hence, they might react differently to various crisis communication messages on social media.Thus, drawing on the dual-process theory, this study conducted an experiment to test the influences of message appeal and hotel type on tourists' booking intentions.This study also explored the mediating roles of psychological closeness and perceived safety during the crisis communication process.In doing so, this study fills the existing knowledge gap, provides empirical insights into crafting effective crisis responses, and offers implications for future research and practitioners.

Literature review
People's decisions to travel and purchase hospitality products are easily influenced by ongoing events such as the COVID-19 pandemic.The dual-process theory posits that decision-making is usually reflected through two processes: a fast, affect-driven process that relies on emotions and a slow, deliberative process that is reason-based (Kvaran et al., 2013).Consistent with the propositions of dual-process theory, the appeal of crisis communication messages can be categorized into two typesan emotional appeal and a functional appeal (Kim & Cameron, 2011).An emotional appeal elicits viewers' emotions and features subjective expressions, while a rational appeal often provides audiences with objective and factual information and highlights rationality (Huang & Distaso, 2020).
Message design is the key to effective crisis communication strategies, especially considering that different message appeals often lead to various consumer responses (Kim et al., 2021).For instance, it is noted that emotional appeals are more likely to lead to audiences' positive behaviours, such as purchasing the product (Kim & Cameron, 2011).This is mainly because most crises act as "an emotional charging experience" for organizations and their stakeholders (Huang & Distaso, 2020, p.3) and that stakeholders are longing to experience the "human" side of an organization through their interactions, especially on social media (McCorkindale & DiStaso, 2014).Thus, the following hypothesis was proposed: H1.An emotional appeal message on social media leads to higher hotel booking intentions than a functional appeal message.

Psychological closeness and perceived safety as mediators
Besides, studies showed that affective responses are vital in the crisis communication process, given that emotions often mediate the relationships between crisis response and the audiences' attitudinal and behavioural reactions (Grappi & Romani, 2015).For instance, general crisis communication research found that consumers' adverse emotional reactions towards a crisis response often led to anti-brand behaviours (e.g.boycotts) (Romani et al., 2015).In a hospitality and tourism management context, perceived safety appears to be an affective response that has been well studied in crisis communication (Liu-Lastres, 2022).Perceived safety represents individuals' feelings of being safe and indicates the degree of confidence to handle uncertainties (Quintal et al., 2010).Studies (Liu-Lastres et al., 2019;Quintal et al., 2010) found that perceived safety mediates the relationship between crisis response and consumers' intention to purchase hospitality products following a major crisis.
Psychological closeness is another key affective response during the communication process.Psychological closeness, derived from psychological distances, refers to the feeling or perception of attachment to an object, person, event, or place (Gino & Galinsky, 2012).Advertising research, in particular, found that psychological closeness often results in positive emotional appeals, closing the gap between the audience and an organization/product/brand and increasing their purchase intentions (De Pelsmacker & Janssens, 2007;Hahn & Lee, 2014;Marmor-Lavie & Weimann, 2008).In the same vein, crisis communication research found that psychological distances not only shaped public perception and appraisal of organizations' crisis responses but also determined their support of the organization during pandemic times (Kim, 2022).Thus, the following hypothesis was proposed:

Hotel type as a moderator
The hotel market is heterogeneous, where hotel properties can be classified into luxury or economic hotels depending on the level of service.Hotel products are often associated with different price points, expectations, and marketing approaches.Luxury hotels are one of the fastest-growing segments, and their goods and services are hedonic in nature, which aims to create pleasurable experiences filled with positive emotions for customers (Archille, 2014).Kozub et al. (2014) also found that emotional antecedents are vital predictors of luxury hotel guests' future behavioural intentions following a service failure.In contrast, economic hotels are usually characterized by a low tariff structure, basic accommodations, and limited services (Hinkin & Tracey, 1998).It is further suggested that economic hotel guests may be more used to standardized services and seldom expect personal touches and emotional experiences (Chan & Tung, 2019).Thus, this study proposes that hotel type plays a moderating role during the process:

H4. Hotel type moderates the mediating relationships between message appeals, perceived safety(a), psychological closeness(b), and booking intentions.
Lastly, the protective motivation theory (PMT) is one of the most widely used conceptual models to understand tourists' decision-making under uncertainties (Wut et al., 2021).It suggests that both perceived risks and efficacy beliefs drive people's protective motivation in risky situations, which relates to their decisions to adopt self-protective measures as well as purchase or avoid certain tourism and hospitality products (Hao et al., 2020;Kim et al., 2021;Krishnan et al., 2020;Liu-Lastres et al., 2019).Travel experiences also played a critical role in this process, as experienced travellers are often equipped with more travel knowledge and confidence, reducing perceived risk and enhancing their efficacy beliefs (Sharifpour et al., 2014).Hence, this study included all these three variables, including travel health risks, efficacy beliefs, and COVID-19 travel experiences, as control variables.Figure 1 presents the conceptual model and all the hypotheses.

Methodology
A 2 (message appeal: functional appeal vs. emotional appeal) x 2 (hotel type: luxury vs. economic hotels) between-subject experimental design was adopted in this study.An experimental design allows the researchers to test the causal effects of the message appeal and investigate the relationships among the key variables (De Vaus, 2001).
The data were collected through a paid online panel of Chinese citizens over 18 years old.A pretest with 79 participants was conducted to ensure the clarity and quality of the questionnaire and test the effectiveness of the stimuli.The pre-test results showed that perceptions of the functionality of the social media post were higher in the functional appeal condition than in the emotional appeal condition (rational:  (Brislin, 1970).
To develop the stimuli, a hypothetical scenario was created.The participants were asked to imagine they were planning to travel shortly during the pandemic and came across a social media post of a hotel brand they followed on Weibo, a popular social media platform in China with similar functions as Twitter.Each participant who entered the survey was first asked to review the informed consent form and then randomly assigned to one of the four experiment conditions (See Appendix).After viewing the stimulus, participants were asked to complete manipulation checks and indicate the likelihood of booking the hotel.They were also asked questions related to perceived safety, psychological closeness, and demographic information.
Booking intention is the dependent variable in this study, and it was measured by four items using a 7-point Likert scale (Kim et al., 2012).Perceived safety is a mediator in this study, and it was measured by four items on a 7-point Likert scale (Hahn & Lee, 2014).Finally, psychological closeness is another mediator in this study, and it was measured by three items on a 7-point Likert scale (Baek et al., 2017).The measurements are all presented in Table 1.
The data analysis consists of three steps.First, a series of descriptive analyses were conducted to summarize the characteristics of the sample.Second, an ANCOVA test was conducted to test hypotheses 1 and 3, where booking intention was entered as the dependent variable, message appeal was treated as the independent variable, hotel type was used as the moderator, and travel health risks, efficacy beliefs, and COVID-19 travel experiences were included as control variables.Lastly, both the mediation hypothesis (H2) and the moderated mediation hypothesis (H4) were tested using the PROCESS macro (V2.0).Before the analyses, several assumptions were checked, including the distribution of the dependent variable (Skewness = −.50) and the mediators (Safety skewness = −.40,Closeness skewness = .39),independent observations, the absences of outliers, corelations between the covariates and the dependent variables (r efficacy-booking = .14,p < .05;r risk-booking = −.44,p < .01),linear relationships between the key variables(r safety-booking = .66,p < .01,r closeness-booking = .15,p < .05),and absences of multicollinearity (All VIF values <5).

Results
A total of 260 completed responses were included in the final sample.As shown in  20,000 and 29,999 (approximately USD 3,644).

Manipulation check results
The manipulation check results are reported in

Hypotheses testing results
Hypotheses 1 and 3 were tested using ANCOVA analysis.The results showed that message appeal is positively related to booking intention (F [1,253] = 75.54,p < .01),and participants in the functional-appeal group (M = 5.04, SD =.10) scored higher on booking intention than the emotionalappeal group (M = 3.71, SD = 1.51).The interaction term between hotel type and message appeal (F[1,253] = 186.47,p < .01) is also significant, indicating a significant moderating effect of hotel type on the relationship between message appeal and booking intention.The results of post-hoc analyses showed that participants who received a functional-appeal message from economic hotels displayed stronger booking intentions than those who received an emotional appeal message (t[126] = 25.34,p < .01,M function = 5.18, M emotion = 2.41).The findings here supported H3.
Hypothesis 2 was tested through SPSS PROCESS Macro (Model 4, Bootstrap = 5000), with message appeal as the independent variable, booking intention as the dependent variable, perceived safety and psychological closeness as mediators, and travel health risks, efficacy beliefs, and COVID-19 travel experiences as control variables.The results showed that the overall model is statistically significant (F = 37.11, p < .01).The indirect effects of message appeal on booking intentions via perceived safety is significant (B = −1.12,95% CI [−1.49, −.76]), but not through psychological closeness (B = .01,95%CI [−.09, .09]).Therefore, the results here supported H2a but not H2b.
Hypothesis 4 was tested through SPSS PROCESS Macro (Model 8, Bootstrap = 5000), with message appeal as the independent variable, booking intention as the dependent variable, perceived safety as a mediator, hotel type as a moderator, and travel health risks, efficacy beliefs, and COVID-19 travel experiences as control variables.Psychological closeness was not included since H2b was not supported.The overall model is statistically significant (F = 72.42,p < .01).The moderated mediation test result is significant (Index = −.22,95%CI [−.46, −.04]), indicating that participants who received a functionalappeal message from economic hotels are more likely to book the hotel due to an increased level of perceived safety.However, this relationship does not apply to luxury hotels.The findings here supported H4a.

Conclusion and implications
This study aims to provide empirical insights into developing effective social media crisis communication messages for hotels in the context of COVID-19.The findings showed that factual information, including health, sanitation, and safety measures, is vital in comforting and attracting hotel guests.This finding is consistent with the outline of strategic crisis responses both in regular times and COVID-19 (Le & Phi, 2021;Liu-Lastres et al., 2019;Liu-Lastres, 2022).Furthermore, the findings of this study underscore the importance of a situational approach, where the scope of strategic crisis responses should be addressed differently depending on the type of hotel property.This notion is unique to the current study context and generates new knowledge in crisis communication research in hospitality management.
Additionally, consistent with the literature (Le & Phi, 2021;Liu et al., 2015), this study finds that health and safety information should be prioritized during the crisis commutation process, especially in the recovery phase.The findings also correspond to another recent study (Kim et al., 2021), which reveals that a health-appeal message is more likely to result in stronger purchase intentions for hospitality customers with a health-focused mindset.In addition, the findings of this study show that the message effects occur because of perceived safety, which acts as an affective response and reflects one's overall evaluation of the situation.Thus, as important as it is to disseminate safety-related information, it is vital for hotel properties to devote efforts to creating a safe environment on site, especially considering that one's feeling of safety is built upon the interplay between individuals and the physical environment (Loewen et al., 1993).
Despite the importance of functional-appeal messages, this study finds that it does not work for all hotels.Le and Phi (2021) suggested that general marketing and branding strategies are needed in the hospitality industries' crisis response towards COVID-19.Our study furthers this line of inquiry and shows that emotional appeal messages, which are aimed at eliciting positive emotional responses from the viewers, are more effective for luxury hotels by increasing audiences' purchasing intentions.Emotional crisis communication is not a new term in crisis communication research, mainly because emotions can fulfill critical social functions as well as impact interpersonal relationships and behaviours (van der Meer et al., 2014).This study confirms the essence of emotions in crisis communication in the specific field of hospitality management and calls for more research in this area.
Last but not least, Leta and Chan (2021) point out that most studies in hospitality crisis management tend to be reactive and rely on case studies, where various crisis response strategies were identified but seldom tested.There is also a lack of theoretical foundation in most studies in crisis communication research in hostpiatliy and tourism (Liu-Lastres, 2022).To overcome these shortcomings and to fill the gaps, the current study is drawn upon the dual-process theory and attempted to develop and test theory-driven crisis communication messages on social media.
This study is among the first to apply the dual-process theory to crisis communication in the tourism and hospitality context.The findings of this study support the propositions of the dualprocess theory, which highlights the co-existence of two ways of thinking embedded in the decisionmaking process (Kim & Cameron, 2011).This study also demonstrates the distinctive effects of functional and emotional appeal messages, which correspond to the two mechanisms outlined in the dual-process theory.Most importantly, this study examines the moderating effect of hotel type and the mediating role played by perceived safety, which extended our understanding about dualprocess theory in hospitality crisis communication context, and advanced our theoretical understanding of the crisis communication process for hotels and other hospitality businesses alike.
The findings of this study can be transferred into practical implications.First, different hotel properties should prioritize different components in their crisis communication message.Economic hotels should concentrate on delivering information related to cleanliness, sanitation, and overall health and safety.Luxury hotels should balance the portion between functional and emotional components.Although emotional marketing has been seen as an effective way of connecting the brand and the customers (Bülbül & Menon, 2010), the findings of this study show that functional appeal messages are as important as emotional messages during the crisis communication process, especially considering that factual information is more likely to increase customers' sense of safety and strengthen their booking intentions.This is particularly important for the upscale market, given that luxury hotels have been struggling to catch up and bounce back to the pre-pandemic level.
Additionally, this study highlights the critical role of perceived safety during participants' decisionmaking process after exposure to different crisis communication messages.Besides regular maintenance, recent literature (Jiang & Wen, 2020) suggests that new technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics will be vital in increasing customers' evaluation of the hygiene and cleanness of hotel properties.Therefore, having this type of equipment on-site and efficiently communicating this information with the target market will increase their sense of safety and likelihood of booking the hotel.
This study is not without its limitations.First, this study features a hypothetical scenario, while in reality, some other factors such as brands, loyalty, and even memories may affect individuals' hotel choices.Therefore, future studies should replicate the experiment in different settings and compare the results.In addition, this study is confined to the China market.In order to test the generalizability of the study findings, future studies should consider replicating this study in other regions/ contexts and conduct cross-cultural comparisons.
Futhermore, this study only considers the effects of message appeal and hotel types.At the same time, some other theoretical frameworks, such as protection motivation theory and construct level theory, may offer different insights.Therefore, future studies can incorporate these theoretical perspectives, conduct similar studies, and compare the results.Lastly, the study results might be affected by the participants' past hotel stay experiences.This study only included the sample's overnight travel experience during the pandemic as a control variable, which might not be able to capture the full scope of their previous lodging experiences.Future studies on this topic should include participants' lifetime hotel stay experiences as a control variable.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
t[77] = 29.31,p < .001;informative: t[77] = 17.64, p < .001;factual: t[77] = 20.62,p < .001),and the perceptions of emotionality were higher in the emotional appeal condition than in the functional appeal condition (emotional: t[77] = −21.33,p < .001;sentimental: t[77] = −14.58,p < .001;feeling-based: t[77] = −17.28,p < .001),indicating success of the manipulation of message appeal.The formal study took place in the summer of 2021 when most hotels in the China market were transiting to re-opening and welcoming guests back.The online experiment was hosted in Wenjuanxing (https://www.wjx.cn), a popular Chinese online survey platform .A link to the survey was distributed to the onine panel.The questionnaire was delivered in Chinese.A back-translation approach was used to ensure the accuracy and equivalence of the translation

Table 2 ,
41.5% of the sample were between 35 and 44 years old.Approximately 49.6% had a bachelor's degree or

Table 1 .
Participants who were in the luxury hotel condition tended to find the property more expensive (t[258] = 43.825,p < .01),more high-end (t [258] = 43.589,p < .01),and more luxurious (t[258] = 41.504,p < .01)than those in the economic hotel condition.When asked to evaluate the message appeal, participants who were in the emo-