The hospitality industry is widely using customer data to develop successful personalized marketing communication. However, in the event of information leakage, personalized advertising may escalate customers’ privacy distress. Building on Conservation of Resources theory, this study proposes three dimensions for privacy threats that impact the relationship between personalized hospitality advertising and consumer responses. Findings from six experiments across high and low involvement hospitality products demonstrate diverging effects of personalized advertising depending on the type of privacy threat communicated. Results further indicate that customers’ psychological comfort mediates the relationship between high-personalized advertising and the customer response to the advertising when privacy threat is high. Additionally, when the perceived severity and distance of the announced privacy threat are high and low respectively, rational appeals generate higher levels of psychological comfort, while the same happens for emotional appeals when the perceived scope of the threat is high. The study concludes with value-adding theoretical and managerial implications for the hospitality industry.

This study aims to face common threats from the depletion of fish resources, the decline of production and employment as well as the increase of life risk in East Sea Rim countries, North Korea, South Korea, Japan and Russia due to the Chinese fishing fleets entering East Sea. The recent competition in fishing among fishing vessels and fleets of national origin operating in the East Sea has induced a significant change in the ecological landscape of the fishing fleets cluster while having influenced production and employment in the fishing industries of South Korea and Japan as well as life threat on the fishermen in North Korea. It seems that the population organizational ecological theory can be applied to this change. It can be seen as the isomorphism of the selection process over the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) to avoid the environment in which these North Korean fishing vessels are pushed against the Chinese fleet in the North Korean part of the East Sea. To resolve the fishery disputes or conflict in the common waters in East Sea, first of all, Chinese fishing fleets will be required to put international pressure so as to solve the unfairness of the illegal fishing and overfishing by the International Fishery Organization or the UN violations of the sanctions against North Korea selling fishing rights to China. Although it is not easy for South Korea to cooperate with North Korea in the short term, South Korea will be able to support the fishery infrastructure in North Korea in the mid- to the long-term to prevent the loss of innocent lives for their fishermen and to raise their incomes.