Tourism Advertising in Times of Crisis: The Case of Spain and COVID-19

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

First of all, the text of the abstract needs to be broken down into short sentences. In English, long sentences must be avoided. In line 8, delete promise and leave promise of consumption without the brackets.

Page 1, line 20, and line 24, break down the sentences in two or three, please.  

English proofreading needed in the whole manuscript, especially in terms of style.  

Page 1, line 33, delete ‘our country’, just say Spain.

Page 2, line 56, revise the English of that sentence. Also, break down the sentence into three, it’s really hard to read. 

You cannot leave quotes to speak by themselves. You have two quotes (one on page 2, line 83, and another in line 86. Quotes must be explained and introduced. 

Line 90, citation needed to support that claim.

I’d recommend you to cover crisis communication in the tourism industry in the introduction, for example:

Dombey, O. (2004). The effects of SARS on the Chinese tourism industry. Journal of Vacation

Marketing, 10(1), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/135676670301000101.

Jiang, Y. & Wen, J. (2020). Effects of COVID-19 on hotel marketing and management: a

perspective article. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 32(8), 2563-2573. DOI: 10.1108/IJCHM-03-2020-0237.

Xin, (C.) J., Mingya, Q., & Bao, J. (2019). Impact of crisis events on Chinese outbound tourist flow: a framework for post-events growth. Tourism Management, 74, 334-344.

Section 2.1. 

Line 182, delete the reference to the announcement of the Spanish Prime minister, it is written in future tense when it is already in the past, plus it is not theoretical framework.

Line 184, change ‘our borders’ for ‘Spanish borders’.

Line 188, there is a massive quote, rewrite with your own words, please. 

Section 2.2. change to ‘’Tourism destination marketing”.

More focus on Tourism destination marketing needed here, for example:

Soteriades, M. (2012). Tourism destination marketing: approaches improving effectiveness and efficiency. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology.

Hays, S., Page, S. J., & Buhalis, D. (2013). Social media as a destination marketing tool: its use by national tourism organisations. Current issues in Tourism, 16(3), 211-239.

Elliot, S. & Papadopoulos, N. (2016). Of products and tourism destinations: An integrative, cross-national study of place image. Journal of Business Research, 69(3), 1157-1165.

Murray, N., Lynch, P., & Foley, A. (2016). Unlocking the magic in successful tourism destination marketing: the role of sensing capability. Journal of marketing management, 32(9-10), 877-899.

Also, in section 2.2. you should address Tourism destination marketing during crises, paying special attention to the covid-19 pandemic in particular. For example:

Arbulú, I., Razumova, M., Rey-Maquieira, J., & Sastre, F. (2021). Can domestic tourism relieve the COVID-19 tourist industry crisis? The case of Spain. Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, 20, 100568.

Hassan, S. B., & Soliman, M. (2021). COVID-19 and repeat visitation: Assessing the role of destination social responsibility, destination reputation, holidaymakers’ trust and fear arousal. Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, 19, 100495.

Vargas, A. (2020). Covid-19 crisis: a new model of tourism governance for a new time. Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes.

You could move part of the discussion about Communication in times of crisis to the Introduction.

Section 3 should be the Methodology, the analysis of the campaigns cannot be done before the methods are explained. Reorder the sections, please. 

Line 247, the paragraph is only a sentence! Break down in 3-4 sentences, please. 

Line 260, a qualitative study cannot be applied. In the Methodology, you should explain what kind of sampling, data collection, and data analysis techniques have you used here?

Line 260, what type of sampling technique have you use here? or are these case studies? It is not clear what you are doing here… Why these campaigns and not others?

Then, where did you collect the information from? social media? websites? TV advertising? Lack of detail. 

Line 286, ‘the action cannot be completed’ change for ’travelling is not possible'. 

A reference to a campaign that has not been analysed in the Conclusions doesn’t make much sense, you either analyse that campaign now or delete that reference.

The Conclusions need much more work.

Author Response

Thank you very much for the annotations.

We have split those sentences that were too long and we have rearranged the methodology section as recommended. In this sense, we believe that those points that were indicated to us about the methodology, about the selection of the campaigns, are explained between the methodology and the beginning of the analysis, being completed with the analysis table that is explained before applying to each one of the campaigns.

The corrections have been made following the indications.

Regarding the proposed references, most of them have been included to make the introduction section and section 2.2 more complete.

Any other aspect, please let us know.

Reviewer 2 Report

The impact of COVID-19 on the tourism area is an interesting topic that this paper addresses in an interesting way. However, I identify some areas of opportunity that can substantially improve the paper:

1) Despite the novelty of the topic, I recommend adding more references from tourism journals in the Introduction in order to clarify the research gap attempted to be filled by the authors. 

2) I find it more suitable to place "Methodology" after the "Theoretical Framework".

3) A "Discussions" section is missing in the study. In this section, the authors can analyze in a deeper sense the findings and explain the theoretical and practical implications of the study.

4) The "Conclusions" are very limited, and there is no mention of limitations or future research lines that can be explored.

Author Response

Thank you very much for the annotations.

We have rearranged the methodology point so that the article gains coherence and order.

We have included, in the conclusions, a future line of research (note that some new developments related to the object of the article occur after the end of the article and, although taken into account, we do not consider including them so as not to confuse regarding the objective of the same).

As it is a very particular and concrete study, adding a point of discussion would divert the objective towards another equally interesting and important route, but which, we believe, would be the subject of another article insofar as what is intended here is to circumscribe the campaigns to a very specific context and so far not happened; In other words, the discussion must take place when a time has passed, no matter how brief, to be able to have several articles related to the subject.

Any other annotations, please let us know.

Reviewer 3 Report

The abstract needs to be improved. It must include motivation, objectives, theoretical framework, methodology, and main results in a brief and concise manner. It should be coherently structured in a single paragraph.

Introduction

In your introduction, you do not discuss a number of important issues such as the research gap of your study, the study’s research question and objectives, and the contribution of this study. These issues should be discussed thoroughly before you move to the literature review which usually includes the theoretical background, hypotheses or propositions’ building, and the study’s conceptual model.

The literature review presented in the introduction should better identify, justify and explain the constructs of the research questions.  To the best of my knowledge, the contents of the paper seem original and thus should be worthy of publication. However, given the form and contents of this paper, it is sometimes difficult to make up what are the innovative parts of this work compared to the previous works and approaches on very similar topics by other authors. Please rewrite this section with all these considerations.

Theoretical framework

In your study you do not try to develop a theoretical background and your study’s conceptual model is not discussed at all. You do not have a theoretical framework to be related to help improve tourism advertising. You need to search the very good literature on developing new procedures of tourism advertising that you can find a suitable model related to your findings and then develop and discuss the propositions of your research model.

Methodology

The methods section is not clear. More detail is required regarding all the key aspects of the methods. It is recommended to indicate the software used for the statistical analyses.

It will be necessary to justify why this methodology was selected and not others.

Conclusion:

As your findings are interesting ones, you can suggest a conceptual model based on them. This conceptual model can be tested in future research. However, you can at least discuss and develop some propositions based on the relationships of your conceptual model. This section will need to be expanded with the limitations of this work and future lines of research.

Finally, it could be interesting to highlight the practical significance for organizational members of this study and make the reference to policy prescriptions that derive from this analysis, as well as the implications for future research. I will encourage the authors to expand the agenda for future research.

Author Response

Than you very much for the annotations.

We have considered the recommendations and have included the pertinent changes, considering the length of article and without its original purpuso changing, in order to maintain the spirit in which it was made.

Any other aspecto, please let us know. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

There are very few changes introduced after the review. The reviewers requested major corrections and there are only minor corrections conducted here. Especially, in the Methodology section, the comments have not been addressed. 

Author Response

Hello. Thanks for the new review. 

We comment below the changes made according to the review and pertinent observations:

We have reduced the length of the abstract sentences and changed what was indicated to us in line 8.

In the body of the article, we have reduced the length of the sentences where it has been indicated, changing expressions and verb tenses as indicated.

When we have been asked to introduce an appointment, it has been done except when it has been believed that the appointment itself introduces and explains its inclusion, understanding that more information would only be to reiterate what was expressed by the appointment.

We have included some of the recommended references as long as its content has been observed to follow the same line and intention as our article (which has been in most cases: Dombey, Jiang & Wen, Xin, Soteriades, Hays, Arbulú, Hassan, Vargas, etc.).

In section 2.1 the indicated changes have been made.

In section 2.2, even though it is a section dedicated to communication in crisis, we have modified the title so that it is more closely related to the marketing of tourist destinations, which is completed by the new references included. Although it is true that it is about explaining the context of communication in crisis applied to the months of confinement and recovery of normality in Spain, it is not a point that should, in our opinion, focus on tourism marketing, although we understand the observation that it is related and thus we believe that it is made noticeable with the changes.

For the same reason, we believe that this part is better as a separate heading and not within the introduction, which is broader in nature. The relationship of the heading to the following is better if it is kept that way.

Regarding the methodology, it has been reordered as indicated to us. We believe that the analysis method is explained by citing the references, reducing our analysis to the indicated variables to make the study something more specific (always thinking not to extend ourselves excessively, losing specificity). The collection of the campaigns has been carried out obtaining them from official sources, through any of their channels, we do not consider it necessary to point out that they are available in all of them (social networks, web pages, YouTube channels) because the public administration broadcasts and no collection action is required. The campaigns that were published during the dates of the article were selected, including the final campaign found in the conclusions.

In relation to this campaign, we have included its analysis as indicated to us, so that its inclusion makes more sense. With it, some conclusions are pointed out that are already being pointed out in the analyzes, briefly indicating the possibilities offered by the study from now on, expanding the analysis to other scenarios or including more campaigns (carried out after the end of the article).

We therefore consider that we have made sufficient changes to be able to improve the article according to the indications given, respecting the original intention and objectives. We understand that the result is positive, that the article is better (something that supports the other two positive reviews).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors attended to all of my recommendations. 

Author Response

Thank you. Kind regards.

Reviewer 3 Report

Congratulations, you have effected important improvements to its paper

Author Response

Thank you. Kind regards.