Lijuan Su graduated with her PhD from the Department of Tourism, Hospitality & Event Management on Summer 2020. Throughout her program, her research focused on Big Data Analytics, Machine learning, Social Media, and Service Failure. She is now an Assistant Professor at The School of Tourism at the Sun Yat-Sen University.

Her dissertation is titled Using Big Data Analytics to Develop Effective Organizational Crisis Response in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry. Here is a highlight of her project:

The goal of this study is to help tourism and hospitality organizations to develop effective responses to crises of high visibility that are extensively discussed online. The study comprehensively examines the crisis dynamics in terms of discussion topics and associated emotions, as well as the connectivity of discussion networks and their most influential actors. It also identifies those crisis characteristics and media credibility that have the highest potential to impact the publics’ cognitive, attitudinal, emotional, and behavioral responses.

Online public response to a service failure incident: Implications for crisis communications

Lijuan Su, Svetlana Stepchenkova, Andrei P. Kirilenko

The study examines the online public response to a high visibility incident of service failure from the crisis communication and image restoration perspectives. A specific incident in a hotel of a popular chain in Beijing, China, which was widely publicized on Chinese social network Weibo, is used as an example. Applying data mining and GIS to the collected data, the study analyzes temporal, spatial, topical, and gender dynamics of public discussions to investigate the usefulness of such data for hospitality providers in crisis. The study finds evidence that the effect of the incident on the general public is moderated by spatial and personal proximity of Weibo users. The discussion topics reflect the nature of the crisis and are affected by communications from the service provider and third parties. Implications for providers of tourism and hospitality services in a crisis of high visibility are discussed.

Keywords: Crisis communications, Data mining, Service failure, Social media, Tourism and hospitality, Weibo

More about Lijuan...

With a geography and urban planning background, Lijuan is able to combine these skills into her tourism research through spatial analysis works for an interesting and successful result. She is also part of a group that helps expand EFTI’s presence in conferences in different areas such as between geographers. To move further on the way of data analytics, Lijuan also pursues a concurrent Master’s degree in Statistics given data mining and machine learning.

Very impressed by the power of headlines on social media and how cases of incidents, scandals, rumors and crisis affect performance of tourism businesses, Lijuan decided to focus her research on data analytics, social media, service failure, marketing and branding. She loves the challenges of playing with data and coding to get results, as well as is very interested about storytelling.

Lijuan focuses on monitoring the dynamics of attitudes of current or potential consumers and overall public around topics of interest for tourism businesses. By identifying segmented market and related crisis response and branding strategies she aims to help tourism destinations or corporations like hotels, restaurants and airlines to survive from bad reputation resulted from incidents of service failure, scandals and online crisis in general.

When thinking about collaborations, Lijuan affirms “I think in academia you cannot go further without coworkers”, and she heavily practices this through project collaborations. So far, she has worked with her advisor Dr. Svetlana Stepchenkova, the EFTI faculty Dr. Andrei Kirilenko, other PhD Students in the department, and even members of other institutions around the US and abroad in Russia and China, and California State Polytechnic University.

Lijuan published two articles in collaboration with her advisor, Dr. Stepchenkova, on marketing USA as a tourism destination to Russian tourists. The articles focus on analyzing image perception, attitudes, and visit intention considering psychographic characteristics, level of animosity, national attachment, and consumer ethnocentrism. Furthermore, the PhD candidate conducted a study in collaboration with Dr. Stepchenkova and Dr. Andrei Kirilenko about Floridian’s travel behavior through TripAdvisor.

Lijuan’s academic involvement doesn’t stop there: she has also participated in many prestigious conferences in her time here at EFTI. The most recent one was the China Tourism Forum 2019-US, where she was a reviewer, monitored a tourism economics session, and presented a study about spatial competition between five hotel brands in Beijing. She has also attended the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in the past two years, where she presented both times. Finally, she was nominated for Best Paper in 2017 at the Annual Graduate Research Conference in Hospitality in Tourism.

Lijuan has had all these accomplishments while enjoying her time in Florida and being a proud Gator fan. We are looking forward to what is ahead for her!