The number of cultural festivals organised globally has increased primarily due to their significance in celebrating and promoting community values, ideologies, identity and continuity. This mixed-method study aims to understand the role national identity and the associated emotions play in cultural festivals. It first investigates the rationale of organising festivals to celebrate postcolonial hybrid identities via a qualitative approach in Study 1, specifically regarding the ‘Macao International Parade’. It further tests a proposed framework via a quantitative approach in Study 2, which investigates the relationships between national identity, festivalscapes, festival satisfaction, hedonic value and re-patronising intention. This study implies that the cultural festival in Macao not only recognises a unique moment in history, but also contributes to strengthening the hybrid identity in postcolonial Macao. Based on these findings, both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Policy addresses are important governmental documents that convey the government's policies and publicize the government’s work plan set for the coming year, and at the same time, carry important information about social and economic developments. This paper studies the policy addresses of Macao SAR in the post-handover period from 2000 to 2017. It aims at investigating how the linguistic configurations reflect the ideologies constructed by the government in the post-handover period. With a corpus-assisted methodology, this paper applies discourse analysis to the investigation of the policy addresses given by the two chief executives of the four different terms of the Macao SAR government. The analysis shows that the diction in the policy addresses reflects the changes in the development of Macao and in the relationship between the government and the audience in the investigated period. It is argued that a corpus-assisted investigation can reveal how discourse is shaped by social practice and how discourse is used to help construct ideologies.

Purpose – Given the increasing number of travel restrictions, the COVID-19 outbreak has dealt a crippling blow to the hotel industry, and the crisis management practices supporting the industry needs are changing as the pandemic continues. This study aims to compare how the hotel industry has responded to this crisis at the initial stage and the pandemic stage.

Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from hotel managers in Macau in two occasions, namely, early February and early April 2020. Importance-usage-performance analysis was conducted to classify six categories of practices (pricing, marketing, maintenance, human resources, government assistance and epidemic prevention) into four executable crisis management strategies (priority, maintain, low priority and possible overkill) for each stage. Follow-up in-person interviews were conducted to validate the results of the study.

Findings – In the initial stage, priority strategies should be applied in all epidemic prevention, pricing and maintenance practices and in two governmental assistance and human resources practices. In the pandemic stage, all epidemic prevention practices remain at the priority quadrant, but two pricing practices are downgraded. Hotels tended to force labour into unpaid vacations (furlough) and postpone office and system maintenance. Governmental assistance should be at a low priority.

Originality/value – This study contributes to the knowledge of contingency planning for crisis management across crisis periods. It also demonstrates the processes of importance-usage-performance analysis for researchers to undertake further studies in tourism crisis management. Timely recommendations for governments and hotel industry stakeholders are provided to cope with this crisis.

Background: In the face of the global pandemic of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19), people’s adherence to precautionary behavioral measures (e.g. social distancing) largely influences the effectiveness of those measures in containing the spread of the coronavirus. The present study aims at testing the applicability of the health belief model (HBM) and generalised social beliefs (i.e. social axioms) to explore strategies for promoting adherence to COVID-19 precautionary measures.

Methods: We conducted a telephone survey with a two-step stratified random sampling method and obtained a probability sample of 616 adults in Macao, China (18–87 years old; 60.9% women) in April 2020.

Results: Our participants showed stronger adherence to some COVID-19 precautionary measures (e.g. face mask wearing; 96.4%) but not others (e.g. social distancing; 42.3%). Their adherence to those measures was found to be significantly associated with four HBM factors and two social axioms, after controlling for gender, age, and years of education.

Conclusions: The HBM and the generalised social beliefs of social cynicism and reward for application can be applied to understanding adherence to precautionary measures against COVID-19. Strategies based on beliefs were proposed to facilitate the promotion of precautionary measures.