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This paper explores the challenges Malaysian tourism and hospitality organisations faced during the COVID-19 pandemic and assesses how they coped and strategized with these challenges. Next, the study explores innovative action and best practices in dealing with the pandemic. Additionally, the study focusses on the efforts of policymakers. The paper also reviews government policy and support programmes made available to the business sector during the pandemic.

The paper identifies the key pandemic-related issues and challenges faced in the tourism and hospitality industry through open-ended questions with senior industry practitioner insights and policymakers.

The study highlights emerging challenges and issues for Malaysian hospitality and tourism businesses. In addition, it offers specific recommendations and strategies to enable industry stakeholders to respond to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

These findings are of interest to Malaysian tourism and hospitality industry stakeholders and policymakers as they highlight challenges and offer possible post-pandemic solutions.

The paper reflects current issues and challenges from the perspective of tourism and hospitality practitioners on managerial and operational issues relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Globally, the hospitality industry has entered a new era of growth and transformation due to the Industrial revolution 4.0 and generational change among the consumers. The Malaysian hospitality industry is facing some issues and challenges due to this shift in the global economy, game-changing service innovation, increasing alternative service providers and the disruption of technology. The study aims to identify the issues faced by industry experts and to provide some practical solutions for industry.

The paper identifies the key issues and challenges faced by the hospitality industry by using an open-ended question-based approach among senior industry practitioners and the management representative of the Malaysian Association of Hotels.

A number of innovative recommendations are offered from an industry perspective (including best practices and benchmarking) that if adopted would be beneficial to all stakeholders and encourage tourists to embrace the Malaysian hospitality industry.

The paper underscores issues and challenges stemming from rapid tourism growth and some operational issues relating to hospitality development. The paper also identifies some recent innovations that hoteliers could implement in their respective hotels.

While there was heightened awareness on the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution (IR 4.0) prior to COVID-19, studies have shown that the adoption of these advanced technologies (e.g. Big Data, robotics, Internet of Things, etc.) continues to remain low across global industries. This qualitative study sought to explore the reasons for the low rate of adoption of these technologies and appropriate measures to enhance their adoption at hotels, through the lens of hotel executives.

Based on interpretivist's ideals, this study follows a case study design and adopts a qualitative method of enquiry. The heterogenous purposive sampling technique was employed to gather data for the study, using semi-structured interviews.

Grounded on the technology-organisation-environment (TOE) framework, the thematic analysis revealed technology, organisation and environment-related reasons for the low rate of IR 4.0 technologies adoption at hotels in Malaysia. Also, the study uncovered some interesting measures that will enhance the adoption of these advanced technologies at hotels.

This study unearths technology, organisation and environment-related reasons for low adoption, and measures to enhance the adoption of IR 4.0 technologies in hotels. This study also enlightens hotel owners and technology providers about practical issues that will ensure the successful adoption of such technologies to enhance hotel business. In line with SDG 9, this study also seeks to promote sustainable innovation in the hospitality industry. Practical and theoretical implications have also been discussed in this study.

This paper aims to provide answers to the question: “What are the key innovative strategies needed for future tourism in the world?” At the outset, this paper redefines the word “innovation” in the context of the hospitality and tourism industry. It then captures the essence of 13 proceeding papers on innovative initiatives in 17 countries and presents concluding remarks to this Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes (WHATT) theme issue on innovation (v. 11 n. 2, 2019).

This paper draws from a wide spectrum of innovation types, concepts, strategies, suggestions and solutions written by 24 authors, who cumulatively have valuable and diverse experience in managing, operating, teaching, researching and consulting on innovation.

Innovation is relevant to all macro- and micro-level aspects of all industries. In conclusion, to identify common elements in all 13 papers, the author presents a shorter definition: “Innovation is the art of implementing new ideas to improve productivity, products and services, while enhancing customer satisfaction, revenues and profitability”. In addition, he emphasizes that innovation needs vision, mission and passion!

This research contributes to the emerging research theme of innovation in the hospitality and tourism industry and extends/re-defines the word: “innovation”.

There are significant practical implications in terms of industry approaches to use innovative strategies across the world.

Readers who are interested in international best practices of hospitality and tourism would benefit from this paper.

This paper aims to profile the Worldwide hospitality and Tourism Themes (WHATT) issue “What are the key innovative strategies needed for future tourism in the world?”, with reference to the experiences of the theme editor and writing team.

This paper uses structured questions to enable the theme editor to reflect on the rationale for the theme issue question, the starting point, the selection of the writing team and material and the editorial process.

This paper provides a framework to facilitate discussions between international scholars in hospitality and tourism to re-define a buzzword. For this theme issue, the buzzword was “innovation”. Summaries of 13 papers written on innovative strategies in hospitality and tourism around the world were then analysed to fine-tune the definition.

The theme issue outcomes provide lines of enquiry for others to explore and reinforce the value of WHATT’s approach to collaborative research and writing.

The collaborative work reported in this theme issue offers a unified but contrarian response to the theme’s strategic question. Taken together, the collection of articles provides a detailed picture of the key innovative strategies needed for future tourism.

The purpose of this study is to understand the situation of hotels and tourism industry in Malaysia during and in post Covid-19 and to mitigate indirect damage caused by COVID-19 to the hotel business and tourism industry by examining the factors that have an influence on hotel’s customer satisfaction rating and revisit intention through an integration of service quality (SERVQUAL) framework and expectation-confirmation theory (ECT).

The SERVQUAL and ECT were considered the underpinning theoretical models but are integrated and extended by including a few additional variables. Data were collected from 458 respondents of travelers and hotel customers in Malaysia and analysed by applying partial least squares structural equation model technique.

The empirical results established that significant positive relationships exist between the three newly emerged independent variables (IVs), namely, hygienic practice, greenness of service and digitalization and hotel customer satisfaction towards hotel revisit intention, and only two variables from SERVQUAL, namely, reliability and assurance, have a significant relationship with hotel customer satisfaction towards hotel revisit intention. The results reveal that customer satisfaction has significant direct effect between above-mentioned IVs and customers revisit intention.

The use of purposeful sampling method in only one country might limit the generalizability of the results. Future research should be planned to duplicate the current study using a sizable sample of participants from multiple countries and include other related factors related to the pandemic phenomena such as safety, hotel location and health value offered.

Theoretical findings imply that service quality is a dynamic theory that should be examined continuously to achieve sustainable and resilient performance in today’s competitive business environment, as some modifications inevitably occur over time and new factors could be emerged. Regarding practical implications, study findings proved the great significance of assurance, reliability, digitalization, greenness and hygienic practices on customer satisfaction towards intention to revisit to hotel. Therefore, it is critical for hotel management to retain hotel business industry in a way that fits and matches customer’s health protection, meets customer’s newly prompted expectations and needs and ensures resilience during unsettled times.

This study is unique as the newly emerged variables are included in the research framework, and thus it helps to close the literature gap by introducing an integrated SERVQUAL and ECT theoretical model, which rarely performs in this context and can be replicated or extended with validated scales. This study contributes to enhancing hotel and tourism sustainable service quality performance to achieve myriad economic and health values.

The aim of this mixed methods study sought to investigate the preferences and challenges towards fourth industrial revolution (FIR) technologies adoption at hotels in Malaysia.

The study adopted partially-mixed concurrent quantitative-dominant mixed methods. The quantitative part of the study examined the preferred FIR technologies for hotels; whiles the qualitative part explored the challenges towards their adoption.

The results revealed that Internet of things, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and cyber physical systems were the preferred FIR technologies for hotels. The findings revealed significant relationships between respondents' socio-demographic characteristics (age, gender, working experience, etc.) and preferred FIR technologies. Penultimately, challenges that affect the adoption of FIR technologies including investment cost, migration cost, trust, etc., were discussed.

In effect, findings from this study provide valuable information for policy makers (i.e. hotel owners, management, technology providers and future researchers). Most especially, the study unearths specific FIR technologies preferred by the hospitality and tourism industry. Also, the significant interplay of these preferences vis a vis respondents' socio-demographic characteristics, as well as challenges influencing their adoption also have major implications for policy makers. Another valuable contribution of this study lies in the research method utilised, since most studies on technology adoption either use quantitative or qualitative. These contributions for theory and practice have been thoroughly discussed.