Trust in the tourism and hospitality industries : a stakeholder perspective

Trust is important in both inter-organizational and inter-personal relationships, making it a hot research topic in various areas. Scholars from the tourism and hospitality industries showed interests in it since the 1990s. As a complex concept, trust has been studied from divergent perspectives like employees, customers, and product/service suppliers, reflecting multiple stakeholders involved. Given varying interests and stances of different stakeholders in the tourism and hospitality context, it is necessary to examine trust-related literature in a cohesive and systematic manner. Such efforts would contribute to the knowledge dissemination, proving researchers and practitioners a comprehensive angle to examine lines of enquiries of trust. The current study reviewed extant trust research and attempted to find out influencing factors for relevant stakeholders to form trust, findings of which offer managerial and academic implications. Furthermore, some promising future research directions of trust were proposed.