How real-time social media engagement shapes value co-creation and co-destruction in hospitality

Social media have become crucial for hotels to personalise communication in real time, yet the understanding of how real-time engagement influences both value co-creation and co-destruction remains limited. Adopting a time-as-process lens, this paper examines how the temporal dynamics of past experiences, present perceptions, and future anticipations interact within ongoing, situated real-time engagements, identifying critical moments of value co-creation and co-destruction. Drawing on a vignette-based role-playing design, the study simulates customer-manager interactions during a social media storm (SMS) to analyze how these temporal flows unfold in practice. The findings identify moments of engagement shaping value co-creation and co-destruction, providing hospitality managers with a more comprehensive understanding of how real-time social media engagement impacts service personalisation and its potential outcomes in terms of both positive and negative value exchanges.