This study focuses on visible and invisible air pollutants and their impacts on China's hotel industry. Overall, visible air pollutants may block the sights and sceneries and worsen the quality of visitors' sensory experiences, and invisible air pollutants are unlikely to result in the same perceptions and sensations. Hence, different types of air pollutants may have various impacts on the hotel industry's operational performance. We employed a bootstrapped truncated regression model to investigate whether different types of air pollutants had distinctive impacts on the hotel industry. The dataset consisted of 31 provinces of China for the period 2012-2015. Empirical results indicate that visible air pollutants significantly decrease the operational efficiency of China's hotel industry, while invisible air pollutants insignificantly affect the hotel industry.
Keywords: China’s hotel industry; Data envelopment analysis (DEA); bootstrapped truncated regression; invisible air pollutant; visible air pollutant.