Cruising through a pandemic: Or not?

The features of the cruise value offering that once appealed to the cruising market have changed as a result of COVID 19. This paper employs a choice experiment to reveal how COVID-19 has influenced consumer preferences for and trade-offs between specific aspects of the cruise experience across four different COVID-19 scenarios. Such insight is highly valuable for cruise organisations seeking to better understand the evaluative criteria by which their consumer segments are now making decisions. Theoretically, this study employs Protection Motivation Theory to determine how ones self-rated ability to protect themselves against the virus while cruising may in turn influence choice behaviour. Our research is the first to report actual choice behaviours of cruise consumers adopting a choice modelling method.

The Pros and Cons of Online Competitive Gaming: An Evidence-Based Approach to Assessing Young Players' Well-Being.

This research addresses a lack of evidence on the positive and negative health outcomes of competitive online gaming and esports, particularly among young people and adolescents. Well-being outcomes, along with mitigation strategies were measured through a cross sectional survey of Australian gamers and non-gamers aged between 12 and 24 years, and parents of the 12-17-year-olds surveyed. Adverse health consequences were associated with heavy gaming, more so than light/casual gaming, suggesting that interventions that target moderated engagement could be effective. It provides timely insights in an online gaming landscape that has rapidly evolved over the past decade, and particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, to include the hyper-connected, highly commercialized and rapidly growing online gaming and esports sector.