Abstract

The tourist area life cycle has been in existence for over four decades since its publication in The Canadian Geographer and was described as ‘one of the most cited and contentious areas of tourism knowledge….(and) has gone on to become one of the best known theories of destination growth and change within the field of tourism studies’ It was noted as one ‘Of the most influential conceptual models for explaining tourist, development’. The model was developed primarily from the Product Life Cycle model used in business and management studies and modified to explain the process of development and change that took place in tourist destinations throughout the world. The model has received considerable attention over its life span, but has often been cited from second hand sources or misquoted on many occasions. Its appearance in a non-tourist journal has resulted in it often not appearing in various early literature surveys based on tourism-focused sources and for its first decade access to the original article was limited and difficult, as demonstrated by many requests to the author for copies of the article. Electronic access to journals and libraries have resolved this problem, but its considerable visibility (in excess of 56,000 reads on Research Gate) and use (close to 5000 citations) means that it has possibly entered the realm of tourism myths and become part of accepted dogma in the field of tourism development. This could present problems to those challenging the original concept and introducing alternative or contradictory ideas and propositions, and it is perhaps, appropriate to briefly review the history of the concept.

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Abstract

The polar areas have long endured as an exotic playground for adventure in the wilderness. Tourism figures have remained low and hence the regions hold a marginal position in the global tourism system. Today, climate change and its significant impact on ecosystems and communities in high latitudes as well as geopolitical change drive attention to the polar regions. Increasing tourist numbers manifest this. While early travel records and diaries are an integral part of the history of exploration, academic research into tourism cannot be found to any greater degree prior to the 1980s This review highlights major traits in polar tourism research to date and identifies potential avenues for future research within the field. It shows that polar tourism research is a well-established orientation for tourism research today. However, great variations are in place, and far-fetched generalizations about the two polar regions are growing increasingly problematic. In this context, geographical perspectives should be utilized in order to understand polar tourism and its repercussions in a wider context of development, on different geographical scales, and even beyond the polar regions.

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Abstract

Portugal has become one of the most popular countries for digital nomadism in Europe, with Lisbon being a top-rated destination. The global digital nomad hotspots are usually more affordable destinations in which people can live better with their salaries, escaping the high cost of living in Western countries. As such, digital nomads, similar to other types of lifestyle movers, engage in geoarbitrage – the utilization of opportunities for affordable costs of living in foreigner destinations. In Portugal, governmental policies have been developing favorable conditions for these types of travelers. The launch of the digital nomad visa to attract an even greater number of digital nomads supports the growth of this social phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to examine the ways Portuguese government policies are driven by the logic of geoarbitrage, targeting affluent visitors or migrants. Despite the growing relevance of these developments, a comprehensive understanding of how geoarbitrage is constructed and practiced through public policies remains underexplored. This article addresses this gap by exploring the interrelationship between digital nomad visas and geoarbitrage practiced at an institutional level by the Portuguese government. The focus is on the recent Digital Nomad Visa (D8) as well as other residence permits such as the D7 visa previously used by digital nomads. The study shows a pathway of digital nomadism in Portugal from 2007 to the present that has been shaped by strategic policy development of the national government and targeted initiatives like the Digital Nomad Village in Madeira. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates the ways the Portuguese government enacted a geoarbitrage strategy envisioning a logic of immigration of wealthy and highly skilled digital nomads.

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Abstract

This paper combines Schumpeter’s creative destruction concept with Harvey’s urban capital circulation theory to investigate the influence of political-economic structures and crisis settings on the development cycles of urban tourism destinations. Using Beirut, Lebanon as a case study, the analysis shows how Beirut’s post-civil war trajectory triggered waves of creative destruction, driven by real estate, tourism, and creative industries, that unfolded in sub-waves across Beirut’s neighbourhoods, reshaping the urban tourism landscape. The relocation of tourism hubs acted as spatial fixes fuelled by cycles of post-crisis capital influx and by tensions between creativity and destruction by overaccumulation. Despite variations in the sources and motivations behind capital injections, their impact on the urban destination’s social and spatial fabric collectively led to creative destruction. The analysis reveals the path-dependent and temporally sensitive nature of urban tourism development patterns, which in the case of Beirut was structurally entangled with broader capital dynamics. Tourism plays a dual role as both a mechanism for advancing capital interests and a source of disruption within capitalist urban transformation processes.

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Abstract

This study focuses on Las Vegas’ Historic Westside and analyzes how prolonged historical geographies of segregation shaped the area’s tourism present and future. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, railway and highway development adjacent to this neighborhood led to redlining and discriminatory practices. While the area experienced a cultural and economic revival in the mid-twentieth century—with Jackson Street being nicknamed ‘The Black Strip’—it later faced decline and exclusion from the city’s tourism economy due to systemic racism. While research has explored revitalization processes in Black communities, few works have specifically examined their role as destinations. We conducted a qualitative study among Westside residents, small business owners, politicians, and activists to uncover tourism placemaking processes. Moreover, we analyzed archival material, such as newspaper articles, oral histories, and public documents from the City of Las Vegas. While community members expressed their desire to share their rich Civil Rights history and cultural heritage with tourists, they acknowledged the area’s socioeconomic challenges as an obstacle. On the one hand, territorial stigmatization causes tourists to be discouraged from visiting the area due to incorrect perceptions about crime and violence. On the other hand, revitalization strategies that could improve the area’s reputation and attract more visitors might result in harmful forms of gentrification and enhance undesirable kinds of ‘poverty tourism.’ One of this work’s main contributions is the analysis of the relationship between a difficult past and a tourism-oriented future, heard in the voices of those who are often ignored but directly affected by planning strategies and policies. Our findings aim to encourage both academics and professionals working with communities that experience spatial racism to undertake a historical geography approach rooted in decolonial and Critical Race Theory. In line with recent research on Black travel and regenerative tourism, this study advocates for a shift in power dynamics that focuses on inclusion, co-governance, and participatory practices.

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Abstract

Tourism geographers have long addressed the spatiality of injustice, taking concern with the struggles over access to resources and capital that shape inequities in tourism-dominant landscapes. And yet, the substance of justice, that is, what we really mean by ‘justice’ is rarely discussed, with tourism geographers possessing a hesitancy to engage in the constitution of justice, preferring practice-informed ‘bottom up’ identifications. This article argues that there is a requirement to openly discuss the substance of justice, to consider the specificities of claims in relation to one another, avoid extreme relativism whereby all claims to justice are equally valid without grounds for critique, and steer clear of any reductions in its political and analytical utility. To facilitate consideration of a distinctly spatial reading of justice for tourism geographers, we propose a framework to consider injustice as governance-informed situated, patterned and collective in ways that inhibit self-development and self-determination. We end with an articulation of three ways through which the proposed framing brings benefits to tourism geographers: (1) Proposes a distinctly spatial reading of justice, (2) Articulates what might constitute injustice, beyond the universalism/pluriversality binary, (3) Facilitates consideration of the forms of justice worthy of attention.

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Abstract

Dominant narratives in tourism shape perceptions of place, often marginalising certain localities, people, and perspectives. This study examines digital counter-narrative place-making in rural communities and the equalising possibilities it can provide. We combine Doreen Massey’s relational theory of place with Hanna Meretoja’s dialogical narrative theory, following a dialogical narrative approach. Empirically, the study draws on a digital place-making project conducted in Ardgour, Scotland, and the Upper Kemijoki river area, Lapland. Utilising audio tours co-created with the local communities, we explore how the local narratives challenge and reframe prevailing tourist representations and culturally dominant narratives, fostering recognition of different perspectives, extending both residents’ and visitors’ sense of the possible, and enhancing equality and justice in tourism. Although community-created audio tours do not have the reach of dominant narratives and have other limitations in their equalising possibilities, they can establish deeper connections to place. Our relational theorisation of counter-narrative place-making contributes to theory in both tourism geography and the wider field of human geography, and our method of analysis can give new analytical ideas to both. A further contribution is our focus on the counter-narratives of rural communities, which has been lacking in previous tourism studies.

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Abstract

What if the future of sustainable tourism lies not in transactions, but in the ancient wisdom of reciprocity and relational ethics? This conceptual paper applies Jaakkola’s theory adaptation approach by revising tourism concepts through the lens of Indigenous worldviews and anthropological Mauss’s (1925) theory of Gift and Counter-Gift. Rather than proposing a new theory, the paper reframes existing ideas to highlight relational ethics over transactional logics. By doing so, the article explores how tourism can benefit from understanding the deep social bonds created through reciprocity and contributes to developing the concept of regenerative tourism, while echoing ongoing Indigenous research.

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Abstract

This collection advances geographic approaches to accessible tourism through six contributions that collectively double the published resources on this topic within Tourism Geographies. Accessible tourism enables people with access requirements to participate in tourism with independence, equity, and dignity. Despite the growth of accessible tourism research, geographic, spatial, and/or mobilities approaches have been conspicuously absent. Thus, the contributions of this collection include new toolkits to support more inclusive and co-designed accessible tourism (Dickson et al., Citation2024; Lu et al., Citation2025; Wan et al., Citation2024) and greater conceptual depth related to embodied tourism (im)mobilities (Chan et al., Citation2025; Cockburn-Wootten et al., Citation2025; Farkic et al., Citation2025). Progressing towards accessible tourism’s aim of seamless and equitable tourism experiences, geographic perspectives will have an important role to play in addressing the crucial research gaps that remain: destination-scale analyses, whole-of-journey approaches, and inclusive stakeholder-led methodologies.

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Abstract

This study examines how the designation of Batur as Indonesia’s first UNESCO Global Geopark in 2012 has reshaped volcanic landscapes, socio-economic structures, and cultural life in Bali. Drawing on the framework of Landscape Political Geology, it traces how geological forces, spiritual cosmologies, and global heritage regimes converge to transform both land and livelihoods. Using a mixed-methods approach—combining qualitative interviews, secondary statistical data, and documentary analysis—the study reveals how the geopark has generated new opportunities—particularly in tourism and service employment—while simultaneously marginalizing small-scale farmers and miners, restricting ritual access to land, and intensifying governance tensions between state authorities, external investors, and village communities. These processes have reconfigured Batur’s material and symbolic landscapes, shifting its status from a sacred mountain–lake complex to a commodified tourism asset, yet one that remains deeply embedded in local cosmologies. The study contributes to debates on the politics of nature and tourism geographies by showing how geoparks operate as contested arenas where geology, power, and culture are continuously renegotiated.

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Abstract

The Australian settler government has repeatedly promised Indigenous peoples (Anangu) of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park that they will benefit from settler government’s use of their lands as a significant tourism destination, yet the Anangu community of Uluru remains one of the poorest communities in Australia. This article utilises historical analysis and qualitative interviews with Anangu, Parks staff, and tourism staff to chart key dynamics in the relationship between the tourism industry and Anangu over 39 years of Joint Management in the Park. We show how the prioritisation of settler logics of tourism and work over Anangu benefit is not just an arbitrary cultural decision meted out in day-to-day interpersonal relations but is built into the geographies and temporalities of work in the Park. Highlighting how Anangu benefit is deferred through settler logics of work draws attention to the possibility for alternatives that are founded on Indigenous lifeworlds. This article’s analytic focus on quotidian, relational dynamics in intercultural contexts brings insights from Indigenous and settler colonial studies into tourism research and demonstrates a new way of identifying opportunities for transformation in Indigenous tourism industries in settler colonies. From a practical perspective, these insights underscore the importance of developing shared understandings of what meaningful and good “work” is in intercultural industries and highlights possible interventions into entrenched dynamics between Indigenous and settler peoples in these contexts.

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Abstract

This study investigates the regenerative potential of community-based ecotourism (CBET) through the lens of culinary value chains and experiential perspectives, analyzing their role in promoting cultural preservation, environmental stewardship, and local economic resilience. Employing Critical Place Inquiry (CPI) and ethnographic research methods, including participatory video, photography, walks, and mental mapping, the research examines the integration of Indigenous knowledge and place-based culinary traditions in fostering sustainable tourism models within Trà Vinh province, Vietnam. Findings reveal that culinary practices are deeply embedded within broader ecological, cultural, and social landscapes, functioning as socio-ecological systems that bolster local agency, facilitate intergenerational knowledge transfer, and promote environmental protection. The research identifies four key place-based resources—culinary diversity & cultural identity, gastronomic harmony & social cohesion, environmental conservation & sustainability, and cultural exchange & intercultural understanding—critical for understanding the significance of place in CBET. Case studies exemplify how community-led culinary initiatives, rooted in Indigenous knowledge, strengthen agricultural traditions, foster biodiversity, and enhance community resilience. The study demonstrates that incorporating participatory methods enhances the comprehension of place-based tourism practices, positioning culinary value chains as essential mechanisms for preserving cultural traditions and ecological well-being. It offers novel insights into the transformative capacity of localized, community-based ecotourism, highlighting the crucial role of Indigenous viewpoints in tourism planning and advocating for holistic, inclusive, and sustainable culinary tourism strategies that lead to net-positive socio-environmental outcomes.

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Abstract

This review tracks the genealogy of the term militourism and its development and use since the early 1990s primarily through the scholarship of Teresia Teaiwa. It begins with a discussion of the concept’s emergence, with particular attention to the Pacific region, and examines other sites where the term has shed light on tourism and militarism’s collusions. In addition, the review considers scholarship that works with and through the term militourism, but which do not necessarily engage with its specific analytic. The review also examines the centrality of race, indigeneity, and gender in militourism’s analytical scope, and notes how its origins in the militarized Pacific necessarily tether the term to land and decolonial struggles.

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Abstract

The global rise of heritage tourism has intensified struggles over the ownership, meaning, and spatial governance of religious sites, yet the contested interplay of ideology, power, and sacred space remains understudied. This article addresses this gap through a longitudinal analysis of China’s Famen Temple, where two decades of state‑led tourism development have reconfigured sacred space through historical reinterpretations, institutional transformations, and spatial negotiations. Drawing on critical heritage studies and qualitative fieldwork, the study reveals how official discourses strategically reframe religious pasts to align with contemporary economic and ideological agendas, manifesting in spatial restructuring, ritual commodification, and redistributed power among stakeholders. Heritage tourism here emerges as a contested process: state and commercial actors leverage tourism for territorial control and economic growth, while monks and local communities navigate, resist, and adapt to these changes. The tensions between economic imperatives, religious traditions, and authoritarian governance illustrate that sacred sites are neither passively secularised nor sacralised but continually redefined through socio‑spatial contestation. By framing religious heritage as arenas of political negotiation, this study advances critical debates on tourism’s role in spatialising state power, arguing that such transformations reflect broader global struggles over cultural legitimacy, authority, and the right to define “heritage” itself.

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Abstract

This paper utilises bibliometric data on peer-reviewed publications to examine the characteristics and dominant narratives in overtourism research to date. Departing from earlier state-of-the-art reviews, it introduces a spatial perspective with a distinct focus on spatial processes and geographical scales. The analysis identifies six overarching themes in the literature, which predominantly centre on metropolitan contexts and are characterised by a normative critique of tourism. While the literature often identifies the causes of overtourism at either the global or local scale, proposed solutions tend to emphasise local-level responses, particularly through planning and destination management. The paper makes two key contributions: first, it highlights the need to broaden overtourism research beyond its current urban and metropolitan focus to encompass a wider range of geographical contexts; second, it emphasises the significance of engaging with geographies of scale to address overtourism not merely as a local planning challenge, but as a structural and systemic issue demanding multi-scalar interventions.

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Abstract

Tourism is vital in ensuring thriving communities in peripheral areas of the Arctic. However, many Arctic destinations have seen a dramatic increase in visitors, raising concerns about their ability to withstand tourism pressures. Simultaneously, socioecological systems in the region are undergoing rapid transformations with significant implications for future development. This study, based on qualitative research conducted from 2020 to 2024, explores how tourism actors at Arctic destinations navigate these changes and engage with various scales of tourism governance. Our findings highlight divergent approaches to governance: Svalbard’s top-down regime focuses on strict environmental preservation but faces resistance from local tourism actors, while Greenland is prioritizing tourism as a development strategy, aiming to balance national goals with local community needs. Despite differing views on regulation, tourism actors in both destinations seek greater involvement in tourism decision-making. We argue that employing place-based, collaborative, and adaptive governance approaches is essential to address common challenges such as sustainability, climate change, and (over)tourism in Arctic regions.

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Abstract

Individual preferences are known to be influenced by people’s lived experience at home and on holidays, however, the factors contributing to higher or lower resource demands by hotel guests are not well understood. We advance a practice-based ‘Resource Cultures’ framework and examine the daily energy and water consumption rates of hotel guests from geographically diverse climates vacationing at a ecolodge in tropical North Queensland, Australia. Specifically, guests’ (n = 395) ‘home’ climate zone and continental origin, as a proxy for cultural background, are examined as potential drivers of resource consumption. The results show that climatic origin is a stronger determinant of resource use than cultural origin. Guests originating from tropical and arid climate zones used significantly more water and energy than those from warm temperate zones. Electricity consumption was highest among guests from humid tropical and subtropical climate zones, whilst those from arid climate zones used the most water. The findings provide empirical evidence of the influence of origin-related drivers of resource consumption patterns with tangible implications for accommodation providers. Considering guests’ climatic and cultural origins in targeted pro-environmental communication will enhance the effectiveness of operators’ sustainability programs. Furthermore, these factors should be considered when benchmarking resource use among comparable hotels.

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Abstract

Projects are a standard strategy for rural tourism development. This study builds on the premise that sustainable rural tourism is conditioned by the involvement of key stakeholders and entrepreneurs’ ability to creatively and responsibly utilise local resources for tourism purposes. Accordingly, this research explores the project format as a framework for facilitating engagement and entrepreneurship. The empirical context is Visit Village, a collaborative tourism initiative in rural Sweden. This qualitative case study has followed the Visit Village project closely for nearly three years. Data was collected from observations, reviewing documents, in-depth interviews, and informal conversations. The analysis focused on the actors involved in the project, their respective roles, and the interactions between them. This study applies the Civic Wealth Creation (CWC) theoretical framework for stakeholder engagement. The framework directs the analysis to the meso level of the entrepreneurial ecosystems, where interactions generate value and promote positive social impact. The findings indicate that projects can be a fruitful setting for entrepreneurship by providing access to resources, knowledge, and support and forming communities and creative spaces; concurrently, the findings corroborate the difficulty of involving key stakeholders. The intricacy seems to lie in the incompatibility of the project format and the modus operandi of small-scale entrepreneurs and the local community. The analysis suggests generating a sense of progression, kinship, and ownership to adjust the project to the stakeholders’ logic of action. Owner-managers of local tourism businesses emerge as natural CWC promoters, and the study recommends entrusting embedded and entrepreneurial individuals with formal responsibilities in tourism projects. The analysis also underlines the need for project leaders to redefine their roles throughout the process.

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Abstract

Airbnb research has focused primarily on a small number of Western countries. This study examines Airbnb and its hosts in a destination in the Global South—Bocas del Toro, Panama. Through an exploration of the nexus between Airbnb hosting and lifestyle migration, the study introduces the phenomenon of ‘Airbnburbs’—new geographical spaces shaped by external property investment, situated outside major population or touristic centres, and characterized by a plethora of short-term rentals. The research entailed a descriptive case study with two parts. The first part involved analysing the growth and current footprint of Airbnb in Bocas del Toro. Next, interviews with twenty local Airbnb hosts were conducted to investigate their motivations, experiences, and perceived impacts. The findings show that Airbnb has expanded quickly throughout Bocas del Toro, particularly in areas beyond traditional tourist centres. Interviews found that younger hosts were motivated to use Airbnb primarily to minimize work hours and facilitate their desired lifestyles. Hosts also tended to concentrate in ‘Airbnburbs’, often developed by converting forested land into foreign-owned enclaves. Such neighbourhoods were largely controlled by lifestyle migrant entrepreneurs to suit their lifestyle and income demands, while generally failing to create income-generating opportunities for locals. This research suggests ways these spaces might become more inclusive and proposes new areas for future research.

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Abstract

Cultural memory, which shapes a collective understanding of historical experiences and influences identity, is crucial in the Indigenous context but has been understudied in tourism. This study examines the role of the Guthi system, a cultural space of Indigenous Newars from Khokana, Nepal, in the construction and sustenance of cultural memory across time and location. Employing a multi-phased qualitative approach, the study reveals how the Guthi system, rooted in the Indigenous Newars’ relational ontologies, integrates spiritual, cultural, and societal elements into a living archive of traditions and practices. The findings elucidate the processes of enacting and sharing cultural memory, demonstrating its impact on collective sensemaking within Indigenous tourism contexts. Moreover, the study identifies key factors influencing this process, including adaptive preferences, path dependence, and Indigenous values, which shape community engagement with tourism opportunities. This novel contribution to Indigenous tourism research illuminates the intricate relationship between cultural memory, collective sensemaking, and the translation of Indigenous knowledge and practices into tourism initiatives.

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Abstract

The commercial spaceflight industry is progressing rapidly. Yet, there is a lack of research theorising what the spatio-temporal contours of sustainability look like if the biosphere, along with its finite resources and limited ability to sustain continued population growth, constitutes a boundary that can be readily transcended. Informed by the concept of sustainable trajectory, this paper presents a conceptual model that extends the traditional spatial (e.g. national, global) and temporal (e.g. near future, intergenerational) scales that sustainability discourses in geography are typically predicated upon. We conducted a critical narrative literature review to analyse the implications of space tourism in the context of sustainable trajectory. Our analysis highlights deep tensions between the perspectives of sustainability typically promulgated in academic spheres and the path dependencies currently being formed by private spaceflight companies.

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Abstract

The ‘working holiday’ model of youth mobility has evolved alongside backpacking in recent decades. Increasingly, backpackers on working holidays are seen as a potential labour source in many nations, due to the flexible and highly mobile capacity which suits much agricultural work. We discuss the evolution of Australia’s Working Holiday Maker visa program, which highlights the tensions between tourism, labour, and migration. The term ‘backpacker’ is widely used in Australia interchangeably with the ‘Working Holiday Maker’ visa, identifying both a tourist subculture and what has become an essential migrant worker cohort in horticulture and a staple part of rural tourism and economies. But their presence, and the agricultural industry’s dependence on them, manifests what we identify as a ‘tourism-migration nexus’, that is, where labour chains, tourist flows, and the complexities of bilateral government agreements influence the migration trajectories of these working visitors. We draw on scholarship across backpacking, tourism and migration, in dialogue with recent policy and government inquiries, in order to trace the evolution and changes in the Australian Working Holiday Maker visa and the implications that this has on tourist mobilities as well as longer-term migration journeys.

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Abstract

This paper examines the political geography of land use management in developed western economies. It explains why tourism stakeholders continue to struggle to gain legitimacy in many protected area management decisions. The reason is that the politics of public land management, in general, and protected area management, in particular, are highly polarised between well-established stakeholder coalitions that try to influence government policy, but espouse contrasting strong or weak sustainability ideologies. Tourism is a disruptive force that sits awkwardly in this dyad, neither fully belonging to nor alienated from either camp. The net result is that tourism interests are often viewed with suspicion, for while they may share much in common with other stakeholder groups, its unique needs also pose a threat to traditional, long standing inter-organisational coalitions that dominate the politics of public land management. The issue is complicated further by the diverse nature of what ‘tourism’ entails, for the range of commercial activities varies from operators with a strong ecologically based focus, through to higher impact horse and vehicular access tourism and high impact roofed accommodation, resort development and consumptive forms of tourism. As such, tourism stakeholders struggle to gain trust from other stakeholder groups in the political arena.

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Abstract

Since the launch of Tourism Geographies in 1999, annual international tourist arrivals have surged from 664 million to 1.4 billion, with greater numbers of domestic tourists traversing within borders. Transportation improvements have made travel more efficient, affordable, and accessible, while the digital revolution has introduced social media, the sharing economy, GPS technology, and artificial intelligence to travelers. This forward-thinking collection offers the latest research in tourism geographies, drawing from a collective body of work developed over the last quarter century. During this period, the subfield has evolved from a convergence of geography and tourism studies into a critically engaged, multidisciplinary branch of the social sciences. With roots in social and cultural geography and cultural studies, tourism geographers offer a critical approach to tourism studies, which foregrounds the role of place, space, people, and the environment. This collection illustrates how contemporary tourism geographies scholarship has built on this critical foundation to transcend the disciplinary walls of geography. Tourism geographies has long existed on the verge of disciplinary borders, accounting for the broad range of scholars and scholarship from social science disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, history, environmental studies, and planning, among others. This collection provides essential frameworks for foundational and emerging themes in tourism geographies, deepening understandings of tourism discourse and practice and setting the stage for the subfield’s next act.

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Abstract

This study explores how local communities in Fiji perceive the portrayal of their home in films. Yet little is known how local communities collectively construct and interpret the cinematic representations of their homeland. This is important given the need for local community support for tourism. Through in-depth interviews with 22 Fijian residents, and drawing on social representation theory, the study reveals that locals use anchoring to interpret film depictions through their existing cultural values and experiences. While residents take pride in scenic locations featured in films, they also express disappointment, confusion, and concern over the lack of cultural authenticity and the perpetuation of stereotypes. These social representations shape how locals engage with film-induced tourism and influence their relationships with visiting film-induced tourists. The findings highlight the importance of cultural sensitivity and collaboration with local experts in film production to ensure an accurate and respectful portrayal that aligns with the host community’s collective identity and shared understanding of their land and way of life.

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Abstract

This paper explores the intersection of dark tourism and spectral geographies, offering a critical examination of how spaces of death, disaster, trauma, and painful memories are shaped by hauntings and spectral presence. Drawing on hauntology and the work of Derrida, as well as on work in spectral geographies, it proposes spectrality not as a metaphor to analyse places connected with literal ghosts and supernatural presence, but as an analytical framework that reconfigures our understanding of temporality, spatiality, and presence within dark tourism sites. This article, as introduction to a collection of works on the nexus between dark tourism and spectral geographies, argues that spectrality offers a qualitative and transformative rethinking of dark tourism, revealing how disruptions in linear understandings of absence and presence, and past-present-future temporalities can produce sites that are emotionally and politically charged, and ethically complex. The collection interrogates how ghostly traces—whether of colonialism, disaster, or ecological loss—complicate linear historical narratives. It positions spectrality as a transformative and generative lens through which to engage with dark tourism’s critical potential in negotiating memory, justice, and intergenerational trauma.

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Abstract

Macau is a Special Administrative Region (SAR) located in the south of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Settled by the Portuguese it was the last European colony in Asia. Over the centuries as a maritime city Macau saw its fortunes coming as trade boomed in the 16–17th centuries; however, with the establishment of Hong Kong as a port city the importance of Macau decreased. The authorities resorted to gaming and tourism as key sources of tax revenues eventually in 2000s becoming ‘Las Vegas’ of Asia. As the pandemic hit China and the rest of the world, Macau was isolated, gaming revenues declined temporarily and the Macau authorities decided to diversify its offer of tourist attractions. Although Macau has already been recognised as a UNESCO heritage site with a well-preserved historic core since 2005, two new attractions were developed to help reposition Macau as a city with a rich cultural history. The two new sites that opened in 2023 were the long abandoned Iec Long firecracker factory (益隆炮竹厂) in Taipa and dilapidated Lai Chi Vun shipyards in Coloane. Iec Long firecracker factory is unique, as it blends an interface with nature (green space dominated by the century old trees), a public space and interpretative displays of how the industrial activities were performed. In this paper we use mixed methods approach to provide a ‘thick description’ of Iec Long firecracker factory as an interplay of affective and material elements. Drawing on the existing literature we further advance how assemblage thinking can contribute to analysis of industrial heritage sites as tourist attractions. Additionally, drawing on the first-hand empirical data and the context of ongoing urban revitalization in Macau we scrutinise heritage-tourism dichotomy and demonstrate how we can better understand the meanings of heritage co-created from below.

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Abstract

Over the past twenty-five years, conceptualisations regarding where, when and how tourists travel have undergone profound changes. For many years, surveys, maps relying on tourists’ recall, and physical surveillance were the only means through which the mobility of tourists could be tracked. The internet, cellular phone networks and satellite-based technology has facilitated new methods to collect data, including Bluetooth tracking, Wi-Fi tracking, mobile phone data, social media and GPS location-based data. It has also facilitated new forms of data, including big data, real-time data collection and continuous tracking data. Moreover, it has enabled new forms of data analysis including automation, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics. As a result of these innovations, researchers have extended theoretical knowledge within tourism geographies, particularly in relation to tourists’ spatiotemporal activity including visitation patterns, activity within specific locations, dispersal patterns and the impact of mobility upon emotions. This paper reviews the history of tourist tracking over the last 25 years, along with conceptual findings that have emerged from innovations in technology. It argues that there have been four stages of tourist tracking, namely: the pre-technology era, the tourist tracking 1.0 era characterised by the emergence of Global Positioning Systems technology, the tourist tracking 2.0 era whereby mobile phone, internet, and location-based technologies were developed, and the recent 3.0 era that is characterised by artificial intelligence, physiological sensors, mobile eye tracking and real time tracking. The paper concludes by highlighting future research needs, including predictive analysis, ethical considerations and use of tracking technology to encourage activity change.

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https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2412550

Abstract

Digital volunteer tourism (DVT) has emerged as a viable alternative to positively impact destinations when travel is impossible during times of crisis. This leaves volunteers, the ‘agents’ in volunteer projects and development work, who might often identify with a destination or specific cause, without a tangible link to the locality. Raising the important question of what role being physically connected to the locality plays in voluntourism; this study focuses on volunteers’ perception of their own impact in an out-of-reach destination. Through online fieldwork during an eight-week internship with a volunteer organisation in Fiji, this paper offers first insights into the phenomenon of digital voluntourism by discussing the role that a link to the destination and a sense of place play in still feeling to be making a difference. Furthermore, this debate reveals whether and how DVT intends to stimulate a sense of belonging of those volunteers to foster their sense of responsibility, while juxtaposing these digital programmes to in-situ voluntourism. This paper, therefore, constitutes one of the first contributions conceptualising the geography of digital voluntourism, arguing that while DVT has its merits in contributing to the sustainable development agenda, the physical distance and isolation from the place where this impact should be felt compromise their feelings of achievement and understanding of the locality even more than in usual voluntourism projects.

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How effective are podcasts in disseminating academic research and engaging audiences beyond traditional scholarly channels? This study investigates the Tourism Geographies Podcast to assess its value as a research communication tool. The objectives were to explore how podcast participation shaped academics’ approaches to dissemination, the visibility and feedback they received, and the comparative benefits of podcasting over conventional outputs. Data were collected from 29 podcast guests across three seasons through written, audio, and interview responses (29.9% response rate). Thematic analysis revealed three main outcomes: the need for simplification and clarity, greater awareness of diverse audiences, and enhanced reflexivity about the broader relevance of research. While large-scale professional impacts were limited, participants reported increased visibility, recognition, and confidence in public engagement. Podcasts were consistently valued as accessible, conversational, and democratic. These findings suggest that podcasting fosters knowledge translation and offers a participatory, socially responsive complement to traditional dissemination. This algins closely with and contributes to the emerging field of Digital Humanities and Social Science.

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Abstract

The polar areas have long endured as an exotic playground for adventure in the wilderness. Tourism figures have remained low and hence the regions hold a marginal position in the global tourism system. Today, climate change and its significant impact on ecosystems and communities in high latitudes as well as geopolitical change drive attention to the polar regions. Increasing tourist numbers manifest this. While early travel records and diaries are an integral part of the history of exploration, academic research into tourism cannot be found to any greater degree prior to the 1980s This review highlights major traits in polar tourism research to date and identifies potential avenues for future research within the field. It shows that polar tourism research is a well-established orientation for tourism research today. However, great variations are in place, and far-fetched generalizations about the two polar regions are growing increasingly problematic. In this context, geographical perspectives should be utilized in order to understand polar tourism and its repercussions in a wider context of development, on different geographical scales, and even beyond the polar regions.

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Abstract

The pandemic has drawn attention to the unsustainable nature of tourism, intensifying social and economic inequalities and heightening issues of urban vulnerability. As destinations reimagine their future, a holistic approach that addresses social and ecological perspectives through collaboration, stewardship and environmental ethics is required. Regenerative tourism enables destination communities to develop new ways of thinking and build the capability and capacity to work towards embedding tourism practices and ecological processes that advocate human and non-human health and wellbeing. As the tourist-historic city of York, United Kingdom emerged from the pandemic, practice-led regenerative development was evident in the city’s framework for post-Covid recovery and renewal. Semi-structured interviews with leading stakeholders identified how communities can build sustainable city ecologies through living systems thinking, evidenced through collaborative models of engagement. In York, the pandemic catalysed community stewardship and a re-orientation towards a more inclusive tourism environment. This research demonstrates how regenerative practice principles manifest in the interconnections and the networks that support the distinctive qualities and needs of York’s local communities. The study also contributes to understanding how regenerative tourism approaches support cultural revival, as evident in York. Such approaches to tourism management in historic cities highlights the transformative potential of practice-led regenerative development as a tool for addressing tourism development concerns in urban spaces.

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ABSTRACT

To assess tourist motivations at the battlefield site on Kinmen Island of Taiwan, an empirical investigation was conducted. From a convenience sample, we collected 437 effective responses of respondents including domestic and international tourists with different cultural background in Kinmen. The structure of motivation was first examined via factor analysis. Then ANOVA analysis was applied to address the influence from demographic aspects such as gender, age, and nationality. Our results show that personal, spiritual, experience, physical, and emotional perspectives are five major sources of motivations. More importantly, age and nationality are confirmed to be two major dimensions to segment tourists in the context of battlefield tourism. Tourists with older age have higher motivations toward the battlefield site in comparison with young tourists. In addition, tourists with different cultural background based on different nationalities are significantly motivated by various motivational factors. The example of Kinmen contributes theoretically to a better understanding of the motivational attributes in a battlefield site, and how they represent a basis for increasing tourist perceptions. The motivational mechanisms and factors explored in this case can be incorporated into marketing strategies. Additionally, our results also provide a viable basis for the tourism authorities concerned to reevaluate the essence of its tourism industry in the context of battlefield resources and attractions.

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Abstract

This study analyzed tourism history, management, and impacts in the city of Asheville in Western North Carolina, a prime tourism location for over a century. First marketed for its healthful mountain air in the mid-1800s, its proximity to the famed Blue Ridge Mountains remains one of the city’s major attractions. Over the years, Asheville expanded its tourism opportunities and now sits atop dozens of ‘Top 10’ lists. With over 10 million annual visitors, residents have expressed concerns about the repercussions of tourism, including increased cost of living, decreased quality of life, impaired access to natural and cultural sites, and degraded ecosystems. This research explored tourism management and its impacts in Asheville and on residents through an extensive literature review and interviews. Using a regenerative tourism lens, this study developed recommendations for Asheville’s tourism management. To address the growing overtourism repercussions, it is recommended that Asheville take steps toward more sustainable and regenerative tourism management and development. Proposed solutions are presented, including implementing a sustainability pledge, creating a destination stewardship management body, engaging the community, redistributing occupancy tax revenue, and educating visitors. These proposed solutions may apply not only to the situation in Asheville, North Carolina, but also in similarly sized tourism destinations globally that are striving for resilient, regenerative tourism.

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Abstract

This review summarizes some key moments in the development of ethics in tourism research and practice where three main areas of concern are identified: socio-economic inequalities, cultural discriminations, and more-than-human speciesism. Following a brief historical review, the paper delves into some current trends and ethical concerns in tourism geographies, which trace back to the utilitarian ethics within which contemporary tourism emerged, after which, and with the growing concerns about tourism’s negative impacts, normative and moral approaches to ethics held sway. Then the paper addresses a critical gap in tourism ethics’ research and practice. With few exceptions, tourism environments are seen as something apart, things to be managed, developed or even protected, where the focus is instrumental on how these environments can be maintained or manipulated for human benefit. This modernization paradigm and its promise of progress through growth, together with a tourism industry that (re)produces colonial structures through neocolonial practices reinforced by neoliberal globalization has contributed to a host of present-day challenges and injustices. We argue that to address the injustices above and current existential crises like climate change, and other threats to socio-ecological well-being, a paradigm shift in tourism thinking is needed. Specifically, we propose embracing posthumanist ethics as a novel, experimental (as against normative or moral), situated (as against universal), and affirmative (as against oppositional) critique of structural injustices and structural power; epistemological pluralism (as against essentialism), acknowledging the relationality proper of indigenous cosmologies and other traditional knowledges (where more involvement from the Global South is needed); and a new materialist ontology that overcomes human exceptionalism and abandons oppositional binary thinking. In other words, what is needed, is an affirmative posthumanist ethics for tourism that is relational, plural and differential.

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Abstract

The ‘turn to the sea’ through yachting tourism recorded during the Covid-19 pandemic prompts the relocation of the sea, including its nature and culture, back at the centre of processes of change in selected coastal resorts. The recent revamp of regenerative thinking in tourism offers a theoretical and practical ground on which to consider the development potential of yachting tourism as agent of societal change and coastal resort evolution. Using the Northern Adriatic Sea as a geographical point of reference, and Rimini as an exemplary model of second-generation coastal resort, we used a constructivist variant of grounded theory. Findings show that in the Northern Adriatic Sea area some favourable conditions do exist for the YT sector to contribute to reconnecting humans with the nature and culture of the sea confirming its regenerative tourism potential. Nevertheless, formal efforts to support the needed for a cultural shift, from international agencies to local administration, are undermined by a culture of the sea that is fragmented by the disjointed agendas of distinct sea communitas.

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Abstract

This commentary reviews the state of island tourism literature with specific reference to publications in the journal Tourism Geographies. Despite over 44 years of literature about island tourism, the field remains underdeveloped, with several under-researched critical areas, including adaptation, investment, proximity, and small islands. The Western Hemisphere, except the Caribbean, is the most under-researched area for island tourism. Some important island tourism topics include community, culture, disaster, governance, and tour operators. A focused compendium about island tourism is needed to support the sustainability and resilience of these vulnerable and fragile landscapes that are perhaps the most constrained in terms of economic opportunities for viability. A recommendation has been made for the furtherance of island tourism as a separate field within the tourism academy.

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Abstract

Today’s multiple crises call for alternative approaches to tourism and nature contemplation. Neoliberal conservation proposes the commodification of nature as a solution to these crises, for instance, through tourism development in private protected areas (PPA). PPAs combine privatisation with the commodification of nature for tourism, illustrating neoliberal conservation. Critics of neoliberal conservation question these practices, claiming that they foster inequality, enclosure, and people’s alienation from nature, leading to displacement. Alternatively, post-capitalist convivial conservation strives to overcome the human-nature dichotomy entrenched in market-based instruments of mainstream conservation. This study analyses tourism management in PPAs in the Serra the Tramuntana, a protected mountain range in the tourist hotspot Mallorca (Spain). The objective is to clarify whether PPAs can align with convivial conservation by supporting decommodification and commons management. A qualitative method based on interviews and participant observation is used to conceptualise decommodification based on the commons. The results demonstrate that PPAs can contribute to the decommodification of nature contemplation and tourism when responsibility and decision-making are shared through commoning. This paper argues for rethinking tourism through a convivial conservation lens, offering a post-capitalist alternative to mainstream conservation and tourism practices by emphasising commoning as a pathway to decommodify nature.

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Abstract

This state-of-the art review provides an overview of feminist analyses of tourism that have been published in Tourism Geographies since 1999. The review first introduces feminisms as political projects, forms of activism, diverse theories, and as ways of knowing that have critically informed tourism knowledge production. It then offers reflections on the development of feminist tourism geographies over the past two to three decades, before outlining several trends that have more recently contributed to feminist understandings of tourism spaces and places. Our review then identifies avenues for future research and for cross-fertilisation between tourism geographies scholarship and scholarship relating to indigenous and decolonial feminisms, feminist political ecologies, and feminist economic geographies.

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Abstract

Tourism development can significantly affect the environment and communities in popular travel destinations, often overpowering Indigenous peoples by the sheer dominance of this economic sector. However, the local population can regain control over tourism development in a destination. This paper addresses the research question of how Indigenous peoples can protect themselves as well as their land from the pressures of mass tourism. More specifically, it analyzes the example of the Kanak from the Isle of Pines in New Caledonia, who play a key role in the island’s tourism development, ensuring it aligns with their cultural values and norms. For example, no hotel can be built on the Isle of Pines without the consent of the customary authorities and the Indigenous community. This presents challenges to external investors like Club Méditerranée, the pioneer of the all-inclusive resort model, an innovative approach in hospitality. This paper explores the Kanak community’s resistance to Club Med’s resort establishment in the 1970s, despite pressures from foreign investors and the local government. To answer our research question, we used ethnographic research methods and archival data analysis. Our findings reveal that customary land tenure allows Indigenous communities to maintain ownership of their land while preserving autonomy and control over resources and decision-making processes. The Kanak opposition to Club Med was successful due to three empowerment factors: the broader recognition and adherence to customary law, the emergence of the Kanak independence movement and land restitution claims, and the active involvement of Indigenous peoples in the implementation of tourism projects. This ‘NOvative’ approach – marked by the opposition towards Club Med – allowed the Kanak community to maintain control over tourism development. By adapting it to suit their insular pace and scale, they have demonstrated how Indigenous peoples can shape tourism in ways that respect their customs and lifestyles.

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Abstract

Advancement of Indigenous rights through tourism requires practitioners and researchers to think carefully about the roles and responsibilities of Indigenous methodologies and decolonising work. In adopting a stance of refusing colonisation, reflections on tebrakunna country are aimed at introducing ways for Indigenous scholars to accommodate both cultural protocol and western scholarship requirements without compromise.

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Abstract

Themed spaces and theme parks constitute of significant human-based desires and linguistic discourses that stabilises/destabilises their social identities and materialities. This paper draws on a relational materialist perspective to examine Singapore’s longstanding themed space, Haw Par Villa, to offer insights into its social and material stability and instabilities. Relational materialism facilitates observations and analysis of interactions of humans and their material worlds on the same ontological plane where human’s agencies are de-centred. Social and material objects are seen to operate in mutually constitutive fashions. The development of a site/theme park and its larger country context are conceptualised here as ‘assemblages’ using DeLanda’s brand of assemblage theory to reveal the operations of human-based ‘desires’ alongside material agencies. Specifically, the desires of the founder and the key discourses related to the founder’s name helped constitute and stabilise the social identity and materiality of the Haw Par Villa through its eventful history of physical destruction, reconstruction, rebranding and reimagining. Despite his eventual non-involvement with Haw Par Villa’s management due to his passing, the founder’s desires and discourses linger on in various forms, resulting in subsequent attempts to rework the identity and materiality of this themed space failing if the attempts are not congruent on some level with the founder’s desires and discourses. This resulted in the failure of first, the state and, subsequently, private endeavours in re-constituting the themed space. In doing so, this paper contributes to a socio-material understanding of the resilience and sustainability of themed spaces.

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Abstract

Disasters, resulting from natural hazards, have a profound impact on communities and places, revealing vulnerabilities while shaping unique identities. Regenerative tourism offers promise in aiding recovery and revitalization, supporting local economies, and fostering a transition to alternative development approaches. Drawing on emerging conceptual frameworks in regenerative tourism, this paper proposes their application in post-disaster contexts. It explores walking itineraries as potential regenerative practices, embodying spiritual and political acts of re-signifying place. Using the Cammino nelle Terre Mutate case study, which traverses rural villages in central Italy struck by violent earthquakes in 2009 and 2016–2017, the study examines the application of regenerative thinking in post-disaster tourism practices. It illustrates how walking itineraries, when guided by regenerative principles, can facilitate the coexistence of humans and the environment, which includes natural hazards as intrinsic components of a dynamic living system. This study highlights the role of communities in enhancing system capacity, revealing the inherent potential of affected areas beyond recovery, and paving the way for tourism as part of a regenerative process. However, tourism’s effectiveness depends on nurturing a regenerative mindset and harnessing transformative capacities to stimulate local economies and imaginaries, prompting a re-evaluation of tourism’s role in local development.

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Abstract

Justice is integral in transformative tourism approaches that call for a complete restructuring of the travel and tourism sector worldwide. While justice through alternative tourism models promotes responsible, sustainable transitions in the tourism sector, these models are frequently informed by a perceived binary between the social and the environmental and long-held patterns of West-centric thought and West versus ‘the rest’ power dynamics, found both in tourism theory and practice and within justice frameworks. In this article, we explore the potential of the regenerative development paradigm to bridge these divides and adopt a pluriversal lens to devise a more just practice of tourism. The holistic, transformative tenets and pluralistic perspective of regenerative development and tourism are used to build a novel framework for justice. The framework’s capacity to analyse, unlock and catalyse place regeneration in different knowledge systems and restore just relationships has been leveraged in two rural areas in Colombia and Ecuador. Collecting data through mixed qualitative methods that combine reflexive ethnography with in situ and online interviews, we identified actions taken to address local inequalities and challenges while fostering pathways to the systemic transformation of residents’ livelihoods. These place-specific actions inspired by ancestral traditions have revitalised the areas’ ecosystems, including local human communities and the latter’s tourism activities. The discussion of results examines the potential of pluriversal regenerative development and tourism principles grounded in diverse knowledge and ethics frames to guide actions for systemic social and environmental justice.

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Abstract

This commentary explains how backpacker research has been developed within and beyond tourism geography in the past 25 years. Based on a selective review of the backpacker literature, it identifies three enduring issues to form the basis for a future research agenda. Firstly, the question of how to define backpackers. Secondly, the methods used to understand backpacking. Thirdly, the debate regarding whether or not backpackers and working holiday makers are synonymous. The paper argues the lack of a shared definition of backpackers distorts perceptions of their impacts, particularly around the question of economic benefits. There are implications here for the tourism industry, the agriculture industry, the academy, and all who depend upon backpackers and/or working holiday makers for their livelihoods.

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Abstract

This paper investigates the relational nature of place-making at sacred heritage sites, taking Kyoto, Japan, as a case study to analyse how domestic tourists construct meaning in interaction with the spatial environment. Based on 11 semi-structured online interviews with Japanese spiritual tourists, an in-depth exploration of participants’ interactions with and co-construction of sacred spaces was conducted. The analysis centres on two themes. First, visitors embody fluid, overlapping roles that blend secular and sacred motivations, moving beyond fixed categories of insider or outsider. These hybrid roles reflect the fluidity of visitor identities and intentions in their engagement with sacred sites. Second, the paper highlights the agency of the places themselves in place-making processes. Sacred sites such as Kiyomizu-dera and Fushimi Inari Taisha are not passive backdrops. Rather, they are active participants that shape visitor experiences and interactions through their physical, natural, and sensory affordances in the form of: (1) a bridge to the supernatural; (2) human-made materiality; (3) natural materiality; (4) atmosphere. Consequently, we conclude that a relational understanding of place-making at sacred sites should recognise the complex interplay between the fluid role of visitors and the active agency of the sites, a process in which both human and non-human actors co-construct the meaning and experience of place.

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Abstract

Religiously motivated travel, such as pilgrimages, is one of the oldest forms of tourism. Over the past fifty years, religiously motivated tourism has experienced significant growth. Religious tourism has evolved in diverse contexts and locations, and it is increasingly explored by scholars from various fields. Existing literature on religious tourism suggests a growing diversification of visitors, who are driven by the diminishing significance of traditional religious beliefs in contemporary societies. Scholars have indicated a global decline in engagement with organised religions, possibly attributed to modern scientific knowledge, rational thinking, and secularisation. Consequently, there is a growing trend where individuals travel to religious and pilgrimage sites that hold personal significance or meaning for them. In the post-pandemic context, more attention should be given to the wellness aspects of religious tourism, including the mental, physical, and spiritual health benefits. Religious tourism, especially in developing regions and remote areas, has been viewed as part of economic diversification strategies. To provide pathways for how religious tourism can actually benefit the local community and economy in practice, there is a need for more in-depth research and analysis. More critical research can explore how economic development influences or impacts poverty alleviation, sustainability, accessibility, and environmental impacts. For future research, beyond tourists’ perspectives, more attention on the perspectives of communities and local stakeholders is required. Since Western contexts, conceptualisations, methodologies, and interpretations still dominate the field, it is essential to incorporate holistic perspectives and understandings from a broader body of scholars. Encouraging local scholarship is important to foster more balanced discussions within this field of study. Methodologies should expand and become more creative, moving beyond quantitative studies and incorporating more fieldwork. Scholars need to address practical problems related to religious tourism sites by collaborating with policymakers, tourism operators, local communities, and religious associations.

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Abstract

This commentary reflects on the geopolitical and the kinopolitical intersections of tourist places, performances, and placemaking. All tourism can be said to be geopolitical, as well as kinopolitical. Tourism involves uneven relations of (im)mobilities that are shaped by and shaping of state power, state borders, national identities, and political alliance and conflicts. Geopolitical relations affect who can ‘play’ at being a tourist, where they can play, and how places rise and fall in the geopolitical theatre of desirability, security, and affordability for different types of tourism. Kinopolitical relations affect how these relations play out in actual places and embodied performances. The current inequalities of the global economy foster geopolitically uneven tourism constellations, with crucial societal and ecological impacts that are the core question of the future of tourism within a system of kino-geopolitics.

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Abstract

Ghosts, hauntings and the spectral are intrinsically linked to sites of dark tourism. Supernatural stories commonly emerge in places connected with tragedy, death and the macabre, forming spectral geographies in which the past and present intertwine. Visiting places of supernatural significance has long been of interest to tourists (Holmes and Inglis, 2004), however, in the last two decades a considerable ‘ghost-hunting’ subculture has emerged alongside commercial events and tourist attractions dedicated to engaging visitors with spectral possibilities (Eaton, 2020; Ironside, 2018). As a result, places associated with ghost folklore including private homes, hotels, and heritage buildings, have become popular travel destinations due to their supernatural associations. Film and television media are often credited with the popularisation of haunted places (Edwards, 2019; Hill, 2010); however, more recently web-based and social media platforms have become spaces for promoting, reporting, and sharing paranormal experiences. In this paper, we explore the construction of spectral geographies, specifically haunted houses, through online narratives. By drawing upon textual analysis of both marketing and online reviews we analyse two cases, 30 East Drive and The Ancient Ram Inn, and explore how these private homes have been transformed into sites of dark tourism through digital storytelling and discourse. Through our analysis we consider how personal experience, intertextuality, and uncanny signifiers contribute to a form of placemaking through digital media and storytelling (Halegoua & Polson, 2021), experiential consumerism (Pine & Gilmore, 2011) and an evolving spiritual quest culture (Eaton, 2015).

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Abstract

This brief commentary develops an argument for a critical geopolitics of smart tourism. Several critical geopolitical issues related to smart tourism deserve more attention in tourism studies, including the digital infrastructuralization of tourism in the context of platformization and data governance geopolitics. The commentary focuses on smart tourism as a new paradigm in digitally mediated tourism, one which shifts the conversation regarding the digital geographies of tourism from controlling the transboundary flow of digital information to controlling physical spaces that have themselves become digitally platformized. The commentary also focuses on China as a paradigmatic site of smart tourism development and promotion. Here, the geopolitical issues swirling around smart tourism can be seen quite clearly. The commentary concludes with the observation that the digital infrastructuralization of tourism introduces not just a new layer of geopolitical issues to account for in the tourism encounter with places, but also technopolitical effects that also shape that encounter in important ways.

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Abstract

This paper critically reviews tourism geopolitics’ lifespan with a focus on both recent developments and its longer history. Contemporary times show increased attention paid by geographers to tourism geopolitics. This work follows more intensive global cross-border leisure travel underpinned by strong expressions of nationhood. The everyday geopolitical dimensions of tourism reverberate across scales and inform diplomacy, international relations, border controls, and shifting regional alliances. Yet there is a longer intellectual history to tourism geopolitics. This review attends to a few of the concept’s origins in tourism geography.

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Abstract

This review of the intersection between popular culture and tourism surveys progress in the field and suggests directions for future research. Popular culture as fuel for niche tourism, interpreted in relation to nostalgia, authenticity, and identity, has been supplemented by research on embodiment and performativity, and the influence of social media. Popular culture remains a strong rationale for travel and is thoroughly imbricated in tourism’s corporatised and platformised industry superstructure. Yet, as subcultures and social media proliferate globally and are refracted by cultural diversity and a more disruptive world, research will need to adapt accordingly, linking structural analysis of industry consolidation, cyclicality, and fluidity, with critical cultural theories in order to pluralise, diversify and contest understandings of popular culture and its connection to tourism.

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Abstract

Tourism and geopolitics are intrinsically linked. However, current studies on the geopolitical facets of tourism are insufficient. This article first reflects on the diversified understandings of geopolitics and how these different interpretations are reproduced in existing tourism geopolitics scholarship. We then elucidate the multiple complicated and intimate entanglements between tourism and geopolitics and highlight the often underestimated geopolitical agency of tourism. Following this, we evaluate the state of the extant research on this topic. Finally, we suggest three directions for future research: (1) deepening theorisation and operationalisation, (2) attending to agency, mechanism, and non-state actors, and (3) adopting a spatially sensitive perspective. In summary, we argue that further conjoining the relatively isolated tourism and geopolitics terrain benefits both disciplines of tourism geography and political geography, and calls for the development of innovative interdisciplinary, theoretical, and methodological approaches to advance the field.

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Abstract

This conceptual essay extends decolonisation debates to the broader context of decoloniality of praxis. It acknowledges the significance of epistemological and pedagogical decolonisation but argues that these do not fully engage with the entrenched coloniality in tourism in Africa. The essay problematises the conventional explanations for Africa’s underperformance in international tourism and its erasure of Africans as tourists. It proffers pragmatic arguments for decolonising tourism in Africa, given the unprecedented decline in international tourism during the Covid-19 pandemic, the historically contradictory images of Africa, the latent demand for domestic and regional tourism, the youthful population of Africa, and the possibility of Africa-wide freedom of movement emanating from implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area. The article emphasizes the need for concomitant representivity of Africans as producers and consumers of tourism experiences from within the continent, partly facilitated through principles of subsidiarity, although potential resistance to such a pursuit is acknowledged.

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Abstract

This article examines tourism as an everyday geopolitical project. Following feminist, queer, Black, Caribbean and Latin American contributions to the critical analysis of tourism geographies, it turns the attention to tourism’s capacity to produce and reinforce uneven geographies, recreate colonial relations, and catalyze racialized and gendered dispossession. In doing so, it insists on the violent geographies of tourism and their sedimentations in everyday life.

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Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, environmental crisis and increasing growth in tourism prompted interest in more responsible tourism. So called responsible tourism (RT) entails diverse ingredients and an aim of this research is to understand if residents of community owned nature-rich land believe they have responsibility to share with visitors, or if their focus is shifting toward prioritising environmental conservation and or personal wellbeing. In this case study a unique perception of RT emerges in Knoydart Scotland, born from a pronounced awareness of biocultural heritage and a self-directed understanding of landscape as cultural. A distinctive feature in this case study is an expression of abundant generosity evolving from participants’ embodied understanding of the integration of culture and nature. This commitment to a cultural landscape is particularly noteworthy since it is set within a location presented to tourists as ‘wilderness’. Findings suggest that it is meaningful to explore historically evolved cultural understandings of ‘islandness’ and biocultural heritage, before promoting exogenous RT strategies. This research revitalizes frequently discredited notions about what responsible and sustainable tourism involve, as well as offering a rare example of the impacts of ‘islandness’ within a mainland setting.

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Abstract

The spectral geography of the colonial legacy in Bristol is marked by a series of absences from official and tourist narratives about the city. The people and practices of the Atlantic slave trade are part of the historical and contemporary fabric of the city and persist as ever-present spectres. There are significant differences of view that agree with little beyond that the city was a major port of Empire and a significant site in the triangular trade. Bristol is commonly portrayed as a multicultural city with a rebellious spirit and a strong commitment to social justice. This urban imaginary is evident in accounts of the removal of a statue of Edward Colston, a slave trader and philanthropist, during a Black Lives Matter rally in 2020. The now empty plinth of the Colston statue has become a contested, liminal space that sits between disparate interpretations and radically different points in time in terms of social relations. Individual and collective memories and stories about slavery constitute hauntings in a spectral geography of Bristol. Such stories are rarely heard, and the city is thus haunted by the absences of the voices of those enslaved and a lack of knowledge of the role of slavery in the growth and historic prosperity of the city. Little has been done to incorporate such dissonant heritage and so the histories of slavers, slavery, and slaves are not significant themes in tourism marketing, attractions or experiences in the city. This paper demonstrates that a process of coming to terms with difficult heritage and associated hauntings offers significant potential for tourism to contribute to historic and contemporary social justice.

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Abstract

The boundaries between tourism and migration are blurry. This blurring has been beneficial for the governments of wealthy countries enabling them to import a large and flexible temporary workforce that can be directed toward regions and industries where there are labour shortages. Such is the case with the Australian Working Holiday Program (AWHP); a historically tourism-focused cultural exchange program that began in 1975. Since the 1990s, the Australian Government has leveraged the AWHP to support several of Australia’s critical industries. This has been achieved through the tweaking of mobility infrastructures that link Working Holiday Makers’ (WHMs) ability to stay in Australia to employment conditions. Such conditions increase precarity among WHMs, directing them towards remote regions and industries where there are evident labour shortages. While these mobility infrastructures significantly benefit Australia’s economy, they result in WHMs being highly vulnerable to exploitation. Such vulnerability is layered with WHMs from less wealthy, non-English-speaking countries facing the highest levels of vulnerability. This study investigates the way mobility infrastructures in the AWHP influence WHMs’ mobilities, as well as how such mobilities are experienced in uneven and unjust ways. There is urgency to interrogate the role that such programs play in contributing to unjust mobilities, and to query the attendant implications for sustainability.

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Abstract

This paper focuses on the settler colonial landscapes of tourism in the regional city of Dubbo, Australia. Dubbo is situated on Wiradyuri Country in the Orana region of New South Wales. Focusing specifically on the heritage-listed Old Dubbo Gaol and the Dundullimal Homestead, a former pastoral station, I explicate how these tourist sites offer experiences that normalise settler dwelling and occupation of First Nations Country. The Old Dubbo Gaol and Dundullimal occupy a broader settler colonial landscape where Dubbo is presented historically as ‘empty’ until settlers exploited the town’s ‘natural’ resources. By occluding the relationship between invasion, pastoralism, and Indigenous dispossession, the sites reproduce for visitors settler colonial metanarratives of dwelling. Using Tim Ingold’s notion of taskscape, I show how the tourist sites create taskscapes which invite visitors and consumers to engage in settler forms of dwelling that normalise a settler colonial landscape. Tourist taskscapes consist of the activities and interactions in a heritage site that encourage visitors to take an active role in experiencing place and history. By aligning these experiences and activities to settler narratives and histories, the sites interpellate visitors into the processes of autochthony that were/are used to negate First Nations sovereignties. While these taskscapes are leaky and contain the presence of First Nations in select parts of the heritage sites, the taskscapes dominate heritage tourism and normalise settler colonisation as a feature of place-making that does not require explicit explanation or education.

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Abstract

The fast-changing social media landscape have seen a paradigm shift in how we interact with and research space, place and environment in tourism. Social media presents both challenges and opportunities for tourism geographies due to the vast amount of and various data types. This research provides a concise state of the art and critical review of the history of social media research in tourism geographies by identifying the current status quo and research gaps. Accordingly, I highlight several directions for future tourism geographies research including cross-modalities of social media content, semantics and sense of place, technology and artificial intelligence in social media, social media communication, theoretical engagement, ethics and methodological considerations. This review calls for future research to develop innovative interdisciplinary, theoretical, and methodological approaches to advance theories and practices in social media and in relation to tourism geographies.

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Abstract

Regenerative tourism argues that addressing the current ecological crisis requires inner transformation, referring to changes in people’s mindsets, values, beliefs, and worldviews. Combined, they influence the systems we create and, as such, represent deep levers for systems change. Yet, an in-depth analysis of the inner dimension in the context of regeneration is missing. It is unclear which qualities foster inner development towards regenerative change. Using the concept of leverage points and through a scoping review and thematic analysis of 309 articles on regenerative approaches, regenerative tourism, and the inner dimension of sustainability, this study proposes the Inner Regenerative Development Framework, a whole-person approach constituting aspects of our inner world that enhance our ability to work regeneratively; conceptualised here as Inner Regenerative Development. The framework brings together cognitive, affective, grounded, and holistic aspects of ourselves, encompassing 12 inner leverage points and 85 inner qualities serving as the basis for interventions, a few of which are proposed as starting points for inner-outer transformation. Collectively, these elements highlight the inner domains, capacities, and practices that can be cultivated to support regenerative tourism from the inside out.

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Abstract

Alongside the growth in the animal-based tourism industry, the volume and diversity of research on related issues has increased considerably over the last half century. The extant literature explores a very broad range of themes on animals in tourism. Several scholars before us have provided useful analyses and summaries of the existing knowledge: the dominant themes; the various research methods used by researchers; the geographic spread of research contexts; and stakeholder roles and perspectives, among other categories. This brief state-of-the-art review, which aims to build on the existing work, is not intended to be exhaustive. Instead of merely rehashing what is addressed in the literature, we identify a few central and emerging debates on animals in tourism in the post-2000 era, organised under three broad categories: (i) human-animal relations (animal ethics); (ii) sustainability in animal tourism; and (iii) the growing influence of social media and its hashtag movements. The conclusion draws attention to some notable gaps in the literature, on which we invite further exploration. These include the opportunities and risks presented by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other technologies; divergent cultural lenses in interpreting the role of animals in tourism; and animals in tourism education curricula. We hope that this review enlivens interest among tourism geographers around these critical areas.

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Abstract

The tourist area life cycle has been in existence for over four decades since its publication in The Canadian Geographer and was described as ‘one of the most cited and contentious areas of tourism knowledge….(and) has gone on to become one of the best known theories of destination growth and change within the field of tourism studies’ It was noted as one ‘Of the most influential conceptual models for explaining tourist, development’. The model was developed primarily from the Product Life Cycle model used in business and management studies and modified to explain the process of development and change that took place in tourist destinations throughout the world. The model has received considerable attention over its life span, but has often been cited from second hand sources or misquoted on many occasions. Its appearance in a non-tourist journal has resulted in it often not appearing in various early literature surveys based on tourism-focused sources and for its first decade access to the original article was limited and difficult, as demonstrated by many requests to the author for copies of the article. Electronic access to journals and libraries have resolved this problem, but its considerable visibility (in excess of 56,000 reads on Research Gate) and use (close to 5000 citations) means that it has possibly entered the realm of tourism myths and become part of accepted dogma in the field of tourism development. This could present problems to those challenging the original concept and introducing alternative or contradictory ideas and propositions, and it is perhaps, appropriate to briefly review the history of the concept.

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Abstract

The evolution of tourism mobilities and their interactions with place have always comprised of ambiguous change dimensions relative to the social, spatial, and socio-spatial mobility of both guest and host communities alike. While different forms of tourism can offer opportunities for empowerment, they can also limit opportunities in ways that are unevenly distributed throughout the social spectrum. The aim of this opening to the special issue is to critically explore the different spheres in which social and spatial mobilities are enacted, reproduced, challenged, and negotiated in the context of the sub-discipline of tourism geographies. It considers multiple perspectives, while focusing on how ‘social mobility goes on holiday’ in three different spheres: (1) consumer societies, (2) regimented mobilities, and (3) empowerment through tourism, making specific reference to gender issues. Against this backdrop, emerging themes are discussed with reference to the entanglement of contemporary crises, and the societal and spatial im/mobilisations of subaltern communities, refugees, lifestyle migrants and local collectives. In this way, the frameworks proposed in this special issue help to analyse current societal and spatial challenges, and offer comprehensive answers through processes of theorisation and empirical interaction.

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Abstract

This article examines the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical integration of postcolonial cinema into critical tourism education. These works help viewers understand the influence of film as a primary source of postcolonial gaze, with the goal of decolonizing tourism studies. Postcolonial cinema reconnects geographic inquiry with the impacts of colonialism and postcolonialism on people and places in specific localities and across regions. Critical pragmatism is presented as synthesizing critical theory’s emphasis on listening, reflecting, and deliberating and traditional pragmatism’s emphasis on practice and place, as well as mixed research methods and multiple realities. Critical reflexivity is explored in critical tourism studies as relocated in pragmatist thought and a basis for abductive methodology and pedagogy. Abductive methodology is identified as a basis for addressing complex tourism issues and researcher positioning, while abductive pedagogy creates transformative learning environments where shared dialogue generates new knowledge. Critical pragmatism, enriched with gaze and reflexivity honed through postcolonial cinema, addresses perceived ontological and ‘realist’ deficiencies in critical tourism studies, while offering an alternative philosophical framework for informing and contrasting popular epistemologies and methodologies.

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Abstract

Research has exposed how colonial power relations operate in and through various domains of tourism. As byproducts of Western academia, tourism research and education are significant sites where the structures, systems, and narratives of Settler colonialism can become further entrenched and legitimized. What research methodologies can challenge the colonial complexion of tourism research and enable tourism students and scholars to confront how their identities and responsibilities are tethered to (Settler) colonization? We argue that collective memory work (CMW), a participatory and participant-focused methodology, can contribute to these disruptive aims by examining individual experience as embedded and imbued with social meaning. Our ultimate objective is to situate, articulate, and reflect on the use of CMW as an unsettling methodology in tourism research and education contexts. Since 2016, we have used CMW to engage Settler Canadian graduate students in a process of critically analyzing individual memories and collective experiences of tourism and Indigenous–Settler relationships. After establishing theoretical and political contexts of Settler colonialism, we present an overview of CMW’s feminist and transformative underpinnings and explain how these are being adapted into the methods of our ongoing research with students. Preliminary insights from this research illuminate CMW as a consciousness-raising pedagogical methodology that, in focusing in on Settler memory narratives, helps make space for decolonization in tourism and tourism research.

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Abstract

In 2022, Thailand became the first country in Asia to decriminalize the possession of cannabis. Despite the government’s unwillingness to legalize recreational cannabis or promote cannabis tourism, a recreational cannabis industry fueled by tourism quickly emerged on a large scale in just a few months after decriminalization. Through the tourism worldmaking theory, the article seeks to show how cannabis tourism has taken shape in a semi-legal context following the decriminalization of cannabis in Thailand. Through a qualitative methodology combining document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and active participant observation, it is shown that following legislative changes, a recreational tourism industry has rapidly developed alongside the medical cannabis industry in which an array of cannabis products and services for tourists have emerged in the country’s major tourist destinations, transforming the tourism landscape of these places. Cannabis tourism has grown rapidly despite legal restrictions and government rhetoric aimed at preventing recreational cannabis tourism. The article aims to show that after opening Pandora’s box through the decriminalization of cannabis, cannabis tourism has developed on its own where many market-driven actors capitalized on this new economic opportunity following years of loss of income due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Abstract

Although sustainable tourism research is a rich and diverse field, it still suffers from a few important shortcomings. Negligible attention has been given to various possible pathways to sustainable tourism (as opposed to sustainable tourism as a ‘goalpost’) and there is an insufficient understanding of how the interconnections and interdependencies within tourism as a complex system shape the pursuit of sustainability. What is therefore needed is a sharper focus on the actual processes that must unfold for a transition to sustainable tourism to take place, and a better conceptualisation of the tourism industry as a multi-actor and multi-dimensional socio-technical system. We argue here that the sustainability transitions agenda, which has developed over the last two decades at the interface of innovation studies, evolutionary economics, studies of technology and science, and various other fields, offers a promising way forward for the desired pathway towards sustainable tourism to be comprehensively understood and more effectively followed. In order to set the scene for the individual contributions to this collection, we elaborate on this argument by highlighting the key strengths of the sustainability transitions agenda and identifying their potential to help tourism scholars move the work on sustainable tourism in new, unprecedented, and imperative directions. Our overarching aim is to lay the foundations for bridging the gap between (sustainable) tourism research and the sustainability transitions literature to move this combined agenda forward.

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Abstract

Based on the case study of the ‘Arctic’ Village (Mohe, China), a popular tourist site renowned as China’s northernmost point and the best Chinese site to view the northern lights, this article investigates China’s ‘indigenising’ Arctic tourism that transcends conventional geographical boundaries of the Arctic Circle. It introduces ‘awkwardness’ as an empirical affect and an analytical concept to chart the way the village’s tourism practices and perceptions reinforce, challenge, and diverge from the state-centred account of China’s Arctic aspirations and re-territorialising efforts. Under the framework of an ‘awkward’ geopolitics of tourism, three interrelated types of awkwardness are analysed: embodied awkwardness, identity awkwardness, and demonstrative awkwardness. Each concerns a distinct geopolitical facet of village tourism at the spatialities of the body, village, and museum. The main argument is that affective experience not only mediates geopolitical power in tourism practices but also conceptually reconfigures the nexus between tourism and geopolitics across multiple scales. Incorporating awkwardness into tourism studies advances affective tourism and tourism geopolitics by offering an affective lens to reconceptualise contradictions, ruptures, and ambiguities inherent in associating geopolitics with mundane tourism practices and perceptions.

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https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2021.1965202

Abstract

Potential to identify and cultivate forms of post-capitalism in tourism development has yet to be explored in depth in current research. Tourism is one of the world’s largest industries, and hence a powerful global political and socio-economic force. Yet numerous problems associated with conventional tourism development have been documented over the years, problems now greatly exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Calls for sustainable tourism development have long sought to address such issues and set the industry on a better course. Yet such calls tend to still promote continued growth as the basis of the tourism industry’s development, while mounting demands for “degrowth” suggest that growth is itself the fundamental problem that needs to be addressed in discussion of sustainability in tourism and elsewhere. This critique asserts that incessant growth is intrinsic to capitalist development, and hence to tourism’s role as one of the main forms of global capitalist expansion. Touristic degrowth would therefore necessitate postcapitalist practices aiming to socialise the tourism industry. While a substantial body of research has explored how tourism functions as an expression of a capitalist political economy, thus far no research has systematically explored what post-capitalist tourism might look like or how to achieve it. Applying Erik Olin Wright’s Citation

2019 innovative typology for conceptualizing different forms of post-capitalism as components of an overarching strategy for “eroding capitalism” to a series of illustrative allows for exploration of their potential to contribute to an analogous strategy to similarly “erode tourism” as a quintessential capitalist industry.

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Abstract

The interplay between borders and tourism has fascinated tourism geographers for decades. However, only recently has tourism geographies research on borders mirrored border studies by interweaving tourism with its spatial, cultural, political and economic embedding in order to understand tourism’s socio-spatial place-making and bordering effects. We utilize the highly influential framework for border studies of van Houtum and van Naerssen to reflect on the state of the art of the tourism geographies of borders and make sense of recent developments in the field. The framework focused on the bordering, ordering and othering of society and space, referring, in turn, to creating a sense of boundedness, a process of meaning-making and a process of socio-spatial distinction through the symbolic and material construction of borders. We show that after decades of often descriptive research underpinned by state-centered understandings of how territorial borders have influenced tourism’s growth and development, recent developments in tourism geographies started linking up process-based understandings of borders with reflections on tourism’s place-making role. Our review highlights two important points. First, while massive strides have been made in recent years regarding the process-based understanding of tourism’s constitutive role in bordering processes (and vice versa), the cross-pollination between border studies and tourism geographies research on borders is still incomplete. Second, there is a need to move beyond insular tourism research to see how tourism’s place-making role related to borders and territory manifests in practice. We conclude that tourism is deeply embedded in bordering, ordering and othering society and space, both as an expression and as a driver of, or agent in, these processes, leading to tourism-specific impacts on the spatial environment and to broader socio-spatial (and inherently political) place-making outcomes.

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Abstract

Destinations with populations of African descent have continuously experienced negative stereotypes portrayed in traditional Western print media. These narratives have expanded to fake news circulating among individuals online, which calls for new techniques in combatting this issue. As there is limited evidence related to fake news in destinations, this research examines how fake news has emerged as a means of reinforcing negative stereotypes for destinations by examining three cases. It proposes a geographical perspective for understanding the production of fake news in tourism as simulated performances incorporating the setting of the frontstage, gazers and changing identities. These aspects drive the visibility, legitimacy and resistance to fake news, which can affect economic gains and conflicting discourses regarding these destinations. This research moves away from conceptualising fake news as solely narratives, as has been done previously. As a result, it draws attention to the spatiality of the phenomenon, which can provide practitioners with insights for developing and implementing destination image repair strategies. Practitioners should incorporate gazers into their strategies for combatting stereotypes. They also need to carry out continuous and real-time repair alongside bunking strategies prior to and during performances. Debunking strategies should provide contextual data in order to be effective. Alongside the empirical contributions, the research enhances the theoretical underpinning of fake news, social media and generally technologies in tourism through the application of concepts within media and black geographies research. These research areas remain understudied in tourism but can serve as pathways to guide further analyses on race in online contexts.

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Abstract

This discussion provides a critical review of gender issues in tourism geographies. It maps historical and contemporary developments and provides a future research agenda that suggests moving beyond binary and Western gender discourses.

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Abstract

Digital nomadism has become a rapidly growing subject of interest both in the public and scientific domain especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. Conceptual and empirical developments in research on digital nomads show that the geographic perspective on digital nomadism has been very limited. The geographical framing of digital nomadism and publications in the geographical fora are still scarce. Despite the accelerating trend and potential transformative effect on places, the perspective of place (or speaking in tourism terms—destination perspective) on digital nomadism has been very limited, with the major focus being on the travellers and their experiences. In this article, I will discuss the existing knowledge on digital nomadism through a central geographical concept of place. Among other topics, I will show the way place is involved in the production of digital nomadic mobilities, especially in relation to the issue of geoarbitrage and local impact; specifically, the way place is connected to coworkcation and visa policies. I focus on the main research themes in digital nomadism and show the way they inform geography and tourism geographies.

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Abstract

In marking 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived to Jamestown, United States in 1619, the Ghana government through the Ghana Tourism Authority initiated the Year of Return 2019 (#YOR2019). The goal was to unite Africans in the diaspora with those on the continent, especially in Ghana, through a year-long calendar of commercial and commemorative slavery heritage tourism activities ranging from visits to slavery sites, healing ceremonies, theatre and musical performances, festivals, investment forums and relocation conferences. When a destination tourism product is rooted in a less-than-desirable past, how is ‘balance’ achieved between commercialization and commemoration? In exploring this conceptual question, we developed a methodological innovation utilizing the social media platform Twitter for data collection. Using a social media crawler coded in Python programming language, we scrapped tweets from the accounts of the Ghana Tourism Authority prior, during, and after the YOR2019 based on hashtag searches. After data cleaning, 1010 tweets were inductively analysed using NVIVO qualitative data analysis software. The findings revealed three emergent themes along a commodification-commemoration continuum: (1) the eventification and festivalisation of slavery heritage tourism, (2) celebrity co-production of YOR2019 experiences through social media and (3) pivoting from a predominantly slavery heritage destination to a destination that focuses on other touristic and business travel. Ultimately, YOR2019 marked a significant push by Ghana to move into a ‘Beyond the Return’ phase that pivots away from slavery heritage towards a more well-rounded tourism product for roots, leisure, and business travellers. The research established that commodification in slavery heritage tourism does not inherently destroy cultural meanings but provide new commemorative meanings for a new generation of Black travellers searching for more than just their roots.

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Abstract

This study was prompted by a lack of empirical research addressing the overlap between sense of community and eudemonic well-being components, the limited attention paid to immigrant perspectives in well-being studies, and the presence of under-researched type of festival and population. To address these gaps, this study aimed to identify the dimensions of sense of community and the well-being outcomes of diaspora festivals. The study targeted an understudied group and its festivals: those of the Ethiopian diaspora community in the United States. Guided by the constructivist grounded theory method, the study obtained data through guided interviews, and simultaneously analyzed them to construct six domains of a sense of community applicable to diaspora festivals. The six elements of a sense of community were a sense of belonging, a sense of togetherness, serving the com­munity, recognition, social support, and connection with diaspora, and comprised at least one eudemonic well-being component. Engagement, positive relationships, finding meaning in life, and a sense of achievement, were inherent in more than three of the six domains of a sense of community. Other well-being elements such as physical health and spirituality were evident in one domain. In conclusion, this study offers theoretical contributions to festival tourism, community psychology, human/tourism geography, and positive psychology research in multiple ways.

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Abstract

This research brings an original anthropological approach to the understanding of how the tourism industry negotiates the construction of elusive, magical geographies. Fairy tourism or ‘fairy hunting’ has been acknowledged since the nineteenth century, but is largely overlooked in tourism literature, despite increasing exposure to fairy motifs through multi-media platforms, including films, gaming, and literature. This study examines fairy festivals using a theoretical framework based on the novel concept of ‘liminal affective technologies,’ (LATS), that are designed to enhance transformative potentiality. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis method is used to analyse how fairy festival producers generate approximations of Fairyland. To create fairyscapes, their organisers devise LATs, such as situating the events in places that are bucolic, mystical and connected to local folklore, and staging workshops, music, and activities, such as wish-making, using fairy-themed motifs, to reinforce the magical narrative. Yet several festival producers ‘toned down’ the troublesome or Pagan elements of the fairyscape, explaining the surreality of their events to visitors as dreamscapes.

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Surfing ecosystems—surf breaks and their surrounding areas—can provide multifaceted benefits, including support for tourism industries, personal and social wellbeing and shoreline protection. Previous research has predominantly concentrated on quantifying direct expenditures, sidelining non-market values, and failing to consider the interactions between multiple ecosystem components. To address these gaps, this paper provides a review of key principles of environmental economics and natural resource management in relation to surfing ecosystems. We examine how the value of surfing ecosystems can affect (and be affected by) factors related to environmental sustainability, tourism demands and economic development. We propose a novel framework for characterizing the values of surfing ecosystems and conducting economic assessments, based on six main features: (i) surf breaks, (ii) surfing resources, (iii) surfing ecosystems, (iv) economic values, (v) economic valuation, (vi) equity and sustainability. This structured approach may serve to improve decision-making processes concerning environmental changes that impact surfing ecosystems, including tourism management plans and environmental regulations. Our study aligns with broader global initiatives to better account for ocean-based values and support sustainable, nature-based tourism.

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Abstract

Issues with social and ecological sustainability in tourism should be seen as the result of widespread neoliberal policy making. This has led to tourism strategies that focus largely on growth of visitor numbers and spending. This paper investigates the transition to alternative strategies based on degrowth and regeneration, applying doughnut economics to urban tourism development. Action-oriented workshops were used as a research method. The workshops were offered to Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs) and municipalities of seven cities in the Netherlands. Drawing from this method, this paper aims to investigate how and to what extent the doughnut economics model can be applied to an urban tourism context in order to facilitate a sustainability transition and what barriers are encountered in doing so. It also sheds light on the role academia can have in instigating change in practice. The results show that the doughnut model can be used in an urban tourism context to help DMOs and municipalities rethink their current strategies and replace them with more sustainable ones. However, even though the workshops made the majority of participating stakeholders question growth-based tourism strategies, neoliberal thinking often (unconsciously) prevails. The biggest barrier was found in the cultural dimension, underlining the argument that a sustainability transition in tourism can only happen if the mindset of the individual people in the tourism system changes (Grin et al., Citation2010; Loorbach et al., Citation2017). Future research could benefit from innovative research methods, for example by incorporating design thinking, to further facilitate such a transition in tourism.

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Abstract

The blue economy is formally recognized by the United Nations as a term that aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of economic activity that takes place within or through ocean and freshwater bodies of water. Optimally, the blue economy subscribes to sustainable economic principles and a set of guidelines to ensure the protection of all marine and freshwater resources and ecosystem services. All marine forms of tourism, coastal tourism and freshwater tourism activities are part of the blue economy and has made a significant contribution towards sustainable economic practices in these spaces. However, there is a lack of consensus about what the blue economy is, how it should be measured and how to regulate sustainable performances across multiple diverse sectors of activity. This presents tourism scholars with an opportunity to make a contribution to the development of this concept and to ensure that tourism related activities are sufficiently accounted for in the planning and policy development of blue economies around the world.

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Abstract

A healthy diet is vital to sustaining tourist mobility. In cross-cultural mobility, tourists must face strange local eating environments in tourism place and the complex health problems that these environments may cause. Existing research on tourist food consumption and health mainly addresses health from a biomedical perspective by emphasizing food nutrition and hygiene. We adopt an assemblage approach to understanding health as a relational outcome determined by multiple material, psychological, and cultural dimensions. Using Chinese outbound travel to Spain as a case, we explore how psychology, dietary habits, and cultural beliefs interconnect with the foods in novel cross-cultural environments to generate healthiness. A semi-structured interview method was used to collect data in Barcelona and Madrid. We construct three formulas to illustrate the health assemblages in tourists’ food consumption. In the food-psychology assemblage, tourists believe that low-risk foods are healthy. Neophobic tourists avoid tasting novel local foods due to unknown health risks, whereas neophiliac tourists show fewer similar health concerns. In the food-dietary habits assemblage, healthy dieting is the habitual and comfortable diet. Tourists with Chinese dietary habits are uncomfortable eating novel local foods. Cosmopolitan tourists, who incorporate various food habits in their diet, switch freely between different foods to obtain health. In the food-cultural beliefs assemblage, traditional Chinese cultural beliefs of yin-yang balance affect tourists’ health experience through diet. Tourists carefully choose local foods to achieve a cold-hot balance to keep health. These three health assemblages indicate that food health in tourism is a relational result of multiple dimensions.

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More and more research has been conducted to examine individuated, affective, and embodied themes related to heritage landscapes. Following this recent trend, the paper analyzes how tourists experience heritage landscapes to retrieve positive feelings from the past and thus seek inspiration for a better life. Specifically, this paper has two objectives. First, it examines the embodied interactions between tourists and heritage landscapes in Lijiang Old Town, a well-known cultural heritage site in Yunnan, China. Studying these interactions will add substance to the affective aspect of heritage landscapes, showing the cultural value of heritage to individuals who live in a speedy world. Second, this paper attempts to understand the complex feelings developed by tourists towards heritage landscapes. We find that leisurely tourists attempt to enjoy heritage landscapes in order to counter their hectic pace of life in China’s big cities. They engage in either strolling in the town to decode the cultural values of heritage landscapes or staying put to immerse themselves in a heritage aura, for the purpose of relaxation and slowness. All the positive feelings in the town can lead to selftransformation and even spiritual rejuvenation. By apprehending heritage for inspiration, a situated and relational picture of tourism consumption unfolds to highlight how tourists develop a subjective sense of and feeling about heritage..

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Technological developments over the last two decades have allowed researchers to employ advanced tracking technologies to collect high-resolution spatial and temporal data. Despite the extensive use of these technologies in tourism research, they have not yet been applied to the existing indicators of tourism demand. The current paper aims to fill this lacuna, proposing the use of tracking technologies to measure tourist activity in destinations and, in particular, extreme conditions such as tourist saturation and overtourism. It introduces a new index for tourism demand, the Intensity-Density Index (IDI), based on high-resolution data in time and space. After presenting an overview of the common indicators for measuring tourism demand, the most common indicators, the Tourism Intensity Rate (TIR) and the Tourism Density Rate (TDR), are calculated twice, using traditional methods and advanced tracking technologies. The second calculation is based on a unique survey conducted in Israel between 2015 and 2017, which included some 3,000 tourists whose activity in the destination was documented entirely on a national level and at high resolution. Finally, the methodology for calculating high-resolution (HR) indicators using GPS data is presented, resulting in the IDI. Advanced tracking technologies’ use in calculating the IDI not only helps present tourism activity more accurately in terms of time and space but can also be applied in tourism management to serve as a tool for effective planning.

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Given the presence of societal scale risks such as pandemics, war, climate change and artificial technology, the future of tourism will operate increasingly in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world. As such the present course of tourism research is unsustainable. In this paper, the authors draw upon the evolutionary paradigm in futures studies to identify a series of historical turning points in the development of tourism futures research. These include forecasting tourism demand using quantitative methods; the appointment of the world’s first tourism scenario planner; the establishment of the European Tourism Futures Institute; the creation of academic credibility through the Journal of Tourism Futures; the effect of COVID-19 on tourism research; and finally, the accelerator effect of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on our consciousness and awareness of the future. In conclusion, the authors offer a series of futures turning points identifying the direction of tourism futures, scenario planning and foresight within the realm of tourism research.

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Abstract

Examining the contemporary movement of Black Travel, the special issue explores the intersection of racial inequities, Black belonging, and tourism, drawing inspiration from articles published in the special issue “Unpacking Black Tourism”. The collection critically analyzes historical and contemporary dimensions of Black travel, challenging traditional white-centric narratives in tourism scholarship. It highlights the emancipatory and community-building aspects of Black tourism, emphasizing its role in joy, discovery, and resilience against racialized oppression. Addressing the historical neglect of racial inequity in tourism scholarship, this special issue responds to critical moments spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement, extending the political and racial reckoning into tourism scholarship and practice. The state of society is explored in the context of the ongoing global reckoning with systemic racism, connecting legislative efforts to suppress discussions of critical race theory with challenges in the travel and tourism industry. Methodological frameworks are critically analyzed, advocating for the incorporation of Critical Race Theory and counter-narrative storytelling in tourism studies thereby challenging Eurocentric ideologies and advocating for justice across tourism scholarship. The state of praxis addresses challenges in researching Black tourism and the erasure of Black voices, highlighting Tourism RESET, a collaborative initiative focused on race, ethnicity and social equity in tourism. Contributions to the special issue showcase theoretical, methodological, and political explorations of Black tourism, emphasizing intersectionality as a common theme. The manuscript concludes with a call to action, urging academia to challenge dominant ideologies, adopt anti-colonized pedagogies, and embrace diverse perspectives for a more inclusive understanding of tourism and our world.

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This paper offers a multidisciplinary overview on the concept and reality of affective and spatial atmospheres. Initially, the paper provides a synopsis on the disciplinary origins of the concept in philosophy, cultural geography and architecture, and then outlines how tourism research has more recently started adopting the atmosphere perspective. Research on spatial atmospheres has primarily been concerned with collective affective phenomena in space, but has also been characterised by inconclusive debates regarding where transpersonal affect ultimately emanates from (quasi-objective environmental origins vs relational body/’Leib’-centred origins). While these are important debates which have implications, the practical and empirical operationalisation of the atmosphere concept is just as relevant. This holds particularly for tourism, where providers try to engineer desired moods and ambiances. The paper concludes by identifying current gaps in the literature and outlines future directions for research into atmospheres, in the tourism field and beyond.

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Second homes are essential resources for tourism and recreation. Climate change is projected to transform tourism geographies and threaten economic and recreational activities. Based on building and housing register data and national models for climate change hazards, this paper investigates whether second homes in Denmark are potentially affected. Five different hazards are used to describe climate risk based on the RCP8.5 scenario: sea level rise, storm surge events, coastal erosion, flooding from watercourses, and terrestrial groundwater. It is estimated that between 2020 and 2070 a significant number of second homes will potentially be affected by one or more of these hazards, with terrestrial groundwater being the most frequent. GIS-analysis shows the detailed geographical distribution of the affected second homes, while regional grouping highlights the most affected regions. A compound risk analysis demonstrates that a significant proportion (approximately 25%) of the Danish second homes will be affected by either one or more hazards. The analysis thereby highlights how amenity rich geographies are threatened by climate change, which could cause these areas to become risk prone. This provides a background for discussing the implications for land use policy of transforming geographies. The article highlights a need for strategic planning and active engagement with second to protect the recreational potential of second homes and local economies in coastal zones.

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Concerns about the effects of climate change have led to an interest in identifying ways to foster sustainability transitions. In the Global North, a key approach is to eventually eliminate dependence on carbon emitting energy while moving towards renewable sources, including wind power. Since wind farms require vast amounts of land, inevitably this explains the presence of such installations in many rural regions. This situation has alarmed various stakeholders, including those involved in tourism, who see such developments as threats to idyllic notions of rurality and, by default, to the transformation of the countryside for visitor experiences. Through a series of case studies in rural Sweden, we explore the attitudes of tourists towards the presence of wind farms in the landscape. Overall, study respondents recognize the need for such installations since most accept the necessity to embark on sustainable energy transitions. In this way, they understand that many parts of rural Sweden are transforming into spaces where sustainable energy future must be negotiated. Ultimately, sustainability transitions lead to the rethinking of conventional perceptions around rural space and tourism. We suggest that geographical research on sustainability transitions in tourism should account for conceptions of rurality that involve assemblages of imagination, place framing, and power relations in sustainability transitions. This conceptualization is necessary for achieving just and sustainable energy futures.

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This paper rethinks tourism and its spatial implications under the terms of the Anthropocene. This rethinking recognises our intricate dependencies with each other and the places and spaces we make in the everyday. The paper argues for the need to create thick and rich stories, stories which can counter the current dominant consumptive desires. Herein stories of ‘earthly attachments’ and ‘conviviality’ are proposed, centred on care, responsibility and reciprocity. The place of tourism geographies is arguable in valuing multiple perspectives from the more-than/non-human world and the other in their myriad manifestations and geographical variability. Realising the virtual potential of earthly attachments, makes each and every place rich, meaningful and a source of inspiration for us all. Telling stories thereof, enlivens the senses and thereby offers a way to penetrate the desiring machine of consumptive capitalism which at current animates our needs and wants and is leading to the climate catastrophes of the Anthropocene.

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One of the last decade’s major challenges faced by tourist cities has been dominated by the increasing tourism flows that have harmed the quality of life of residents, the neighbourhood’s sense of belonging, and the stakeholders’ concerns regarding reliance on tourism. However, tourism mobilities are not the only drivers of structural change in cities. The advent of temporary residents, digital nomads, international students, short-stay expats, and creative workers have shaped the way cities have evolved together with tourism mobilities. This paper will present research conducted in the Vila de Gràcia neighbourhood in Barcelona, which has undergone a thoughtful transformation in terms of tourism-oriented businesses specialisation, housing market prices, sociodemographic changes, the use of public space and nightlife leisure. Gradually, the Vila de Gràcia neighbourhood has become an emblematic area of leisure and tourism consumption experience in Barcelona. Based on ethnographic fieldwork begun in 2017 and in-depth semi-structured interviews with lifelong and new residents, the research analyses residents’ attitude toward touristification processes related to social discontent, nightlife noise, the rise in housing market prices and overcrowding.

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Events have long been occasions to bring people together, with this congregative function contributing to their potential to shape and define place and space over time. Events are uniquely able to both reflect contemporary residential identities as well as shape future ones. Event studies have hitherto focused on festivals, mega-events, sporting events and a broad exploration of sustainability’s three pillars. However, it remains a young field of study, ripe with opportunity for in-depth exploration in a plethora of topics. This research note proposes several promising avenues for generating knowledge and practical insights in the future. These include examining a wide range of events and their connections to identities, a deeper dive into sustainability concepts, resources and security, stakeholder roles, exploring the effects of events on residential populations and legacies, as well as the implications of technological advancements.

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Although nature-based recreation areas are among the most popular tourism destinations in the U.S., African Americans are far less likely to visit them compared to White Americans. This paper offers a critical analysis of the phenomenon often labeled Black under-participation or under-representation (BUPR) in nature tourism. First, I use the concept of the White racial frame to unpack the White centrism and normalism embedded in the notion of BUPR and explain how it erases Black Americans’ historical relationship with nature while concealing centuries of Black exclusion in great outdoors. Second, I use the notion of the White-Savior Industry Complex to critique diversity initiatives of public park and tourism agencies, namely lack of strong sense of ownership in their historical Black exclusion. Finally, I make three recommendations for rectifying the enduring racial oppression in nature tourism.

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If you possess a smartphone and use applications that are functionally bound to location, you are familiar with locative media. This genre of digital platform enables navigation and wayfinding, as well as promotes and rewards exploration. Surprisingly, the touristic significance of this has been seldom investigated. This article unpacks the capacity of TripAdvisor to facilitate and limit spatial exploration by analysing its non-digital antecedents, including travel agencies and guidebooks, attending to the dual governance they enact. It is argued that TripAdvisor acts as a geo-pastoral technology which orders the conduct of spatial subjects – both mobile and mapped – and the environments in which they move about and operate. This Foucauldian-Latourian framework is elaborated with findings from an ethnographic project exploring the social life of TripAdvisor within a literary-inspired touristic scene in Edinburgh, Scotland. In doing so, it positions this concept as a tool for analysing how human social actors become involved with locative media platforms in their efforts to navigate environments characterised by the now mundane dynamics associated with algorithmic governmentality. The modes of governance identified through this genealogy have ontological implications for how we research, teach about, and manage hospitality work, tourism services and geographies in the digital age.

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Provocatively drawing inspiration from an episode of the Netflix series Black Mirror and China’s Social Credit System this article critically examines the politics and practices of datafication, quantification and qualification associated to the Airbnb platform. It first explores some of the ideas and ontological claims that endorse Airbnb’s digital infrastructure. Secondly, it looks at how the company’s use of data management and metrics has become increasingly instrumental in maintaining control over hosts and guests and obtaining desirable and profitable outcomes. It does so by unpicking various applications and technologies used by Airbnb to monitor, record and measure the behaviour of hosts and guests. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Airbnb hosts and their participation in forum discussions the article discusses how people understand – and resist – Airbnb’s ‘ranking logic’ and the ways in which their Selves and their homes should be rated and ranked and put into circulation as ‘value’ by the platform. In particular, the article argues that, through the review and rating system incorporated in the platform, both guests and hosts actively contribute to the production of a set of constantly changing hierarchies that represent the driving force of Airbnb as a biopolitical social regulator.

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Welsh and coal heritage may seem synonymous in the context of Welsh identities. One of seven national museums, Big Pit and its associated memory work reflect and shape the intertwined dynamic discourses of Wales and coal for visitors. We explore these discourses through a mixed methodology, highlighting the changing and transcalar nature of Wales itself, particularly the devolution of the tourism, heritage, and culture sector in 1997 from the UK Government to the Welsh Government. How have the discourses of National Museum Wales and Big Pit shifted in conjunction with devolutionary power transfers? This paper reflects upon the complicated and fluid discourses of Welshness within the museum’s landscapes. Migration, the dialectic of capital industrialization, and the romanticization of the banal activity of work are all central to these discourses at the Big Pit. Transcalar relationships of tourism and heritage fuel and challenge these discourses as the Big Pit sits on the edge of a UK National Park, on the European Route of Industrial Heritage, and as a central institution of the Blaenavon Industrial Landscape UNESCO World Heritage Site. These interscalar and geopolitical relationships of memory, heritage, and tourism emerge from our multisensory analysis and speak to questions echoing across the United Kingdom and other multi-nation states navigating spatial and temporal shifts in the geopolitics of their tourism sectors. All industrial heritage sites navigate national identities in overt and covert ways. The relationships between resources, heritage sites, the state, and visitors shape the landscapes of industrial heritage sites and their embeddedness into community and national narratives. As Big Pit has transitioned from a small industrial heritage site managed by the UK-overseen National Museum of Wales towards a major tourist attraction and equal member of the seven-site Welsh-overseen National Museum Wales, we identify geopolitical shifts in coal and national heritage.

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The concept of ‘overtourism’ has boomed in the past five years as the latest term to refer to anti-tourist sentiment in tourist hotspots. News media’s widespread use of the term suffers from conceptual slippage and a tendency to incite moral panic. However, a deeper theorization of overtourism as embodied, place-based social conflicts shows that this phenomenon is not about absolute visitor numbers or particular tourist activities, but rather about the connection between place, class and the political economy of tourism. Drawing on Urban Political Ecology and qualitative case-studies of freedom camping in two urban areas of Aotearoa New Zealand, we examine how social conflicts between tourists and hosts erupted in poorer urban areas as NIMBYism in privileged areas with greater access to state resources pushed freedom campers out. Both hosts and tourists are agentic in these encounters. Locals frustrated with tourist behaviour they deem visually invasive and physically polluting ‘police’ freedom campers, ranging from facilitating formal police action and governance regulation to vigilante behaviour. Freedom campers subvert these acts of policing, often through the very rules and technologies that are in place to regulate and monitor them. At the heart of these issues is a problem of neoliberal governance which stresses tourism’s ‘economic benefit’ to the

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This article examines social disadvantage in tourist sites through the lens of labour geography by focusing on the residential trajectories of a sample of workers in Barcelona (N = 8,651) over a decade (2008–2019). Contrasting with the common view that tourism growth brings prosperity to local communities, it suggests instead that buoyant destinations may be prone to leaving their workforces behind. Path analysis modelling reveals that tourism sector workers are at a higher risk of residential displacement. Our analysis unearths stratifications in such results, pointing to different tactics to cope with housing market pressure depending on sex, age, and nationality. Residential displacement and the self-imposed devaluation of housing conditions are introduced in this paper as key avenues leading to social exclusion. In this sense, we contribute to the concern of critical tourism geographies with the inequality and disadvantage ingrained in tourist space production, bridging to the domain of labour geography and social mobility. The city of Barcelona offers a template for other urban contexts that have been reliant on tourism as a major driver of economic growth in recent decades. Following the call for closer attention to labour in the debate on transitions to sustainability in tourism, our results hint at future research avenues that extend their interpretation.

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This study addresses the gap opened up by the increasing attention in evolutionary economic geography (EEG) studies on the role of the state in economic path creation. The study links the path creation notion of trigger events with political economy perspectives to investigate the role of the state in destination emergence. We offer insights into understanding how the state utilises trigger events for new path development through the case study of Unity Park in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A qualitative research approach is adopted that involves key informant interviews, analysis of policy documents and observations. The findings reveal that the idea formation for this destination developed along incremental changes in public policies until a state official seized a political transition event as an opportunity to cause a decisive shift in its trajectory. This incident triggered more real-time opportunities for the state to influence the development of this tourism destination through the application of power and agentic processes. Thus conceptually, we found that while public policies shape destination development visions, it often takes trigger events and strong state involvement to broker new destination pathways. The study contributes to broadening the current understanding of the state’s role in path creation and the significance of trigger events as well as offering empirical evidence on the political-economic mechanisms involved in destination development processes.

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This study explores the affective worlds of its two authors and our responses to personally significant moments when confronting the transatlantic slavery discourses of Liverpool. Inspired by non-representational thinking and the concept of affective atmosphere, we consider our traditional values and beliefs, rooted in the Chinese philosophical understanding of humanism, and reveal how these conflicted with the encountered slavery discourses and shaped the (non)representations of affective experience in slavery spaces. Our experiences suggest that affective encounters in these slavery spaces appear to represent a highly nuanced, complex and personalised assemblage of sensing, feeling and affecting, and some parts arrive much faster than our thoughts, reflections and rationalisation, but can be easily overlooked in verbal representations. This autoethnography further highlights the significance of visitors’ personal characteristics (identity, gender, bodily capacity, and cultural values), their interaction with multiple-sensory input in the setting and the rhythms of drifting, in shaping affective conflicts and reconciliations at the newly-encountered components, situations and relations. This study also offers practical implications in terms of experience design and the destination management of dark and slavery tourism sites. Our experiences provide novel insights into why and how tourists interact with and make sense of the designed setting and objects around them, which can further inform tourism managers about their visitors’ needs, motivations, desires and expectations. The findings and method of this study support the human-centered approach to dark tourism, suggesting that visitors’ experiences as human beings rather than simply as consumers can inform such design. We should not only consider visitors’ cognitive and emotional involvement in the place but also their embodied and deeper affective responses.

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Few tourism sites possess the combined attributes of dark tourism and diaspora tourism, and journeys to these liminal spaces can unearth complex and nuanced emotions. While previous studies have added knowledge to the experiences of diaspora tourists, little is known about the liminal experiences at dark diaspora tourism sites. While most studies attempt to explore the experiences of tourists to destinations, there is neoteric interest in understanding the hermeneutics of these experiences by offering insights into the contextual interpretation of events. To investigate these, we integrate liminality and stimulus organism theories within a framework of interpretive phenomenology methodology. Forty interviews were conducted with dark diaspora tourists. The study revealed minor and major themes including enlightenment, visceral conflicts, identity dilemmas, and renegotiation of diasporic experiences. Ultimately, it is only by probing the interpretations of dark diaspora experiences from visitors’ own narratives that deep concealed meanings to liminal experiences can be uncovered. The research indicates that experiences at dark diaspora sites vary and result in diverse effects on individuals’ experiences and subsequent interpretations.

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This study explores overtourism in the resort town of Sagada, the Philippines, which has experienced an influx of tourists over the past few years. Qualitative methods – including in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, participant observation, and informal conversations – were used to collect data from 2017 to 2019. A conceptual framework using systems theory guides the data analysis while social exchange and stakeholder theories are also employed. Research findings suggest that although Sagada has immense problems, including inadequate facilities, lack of policies, and insufficient preparedness, stakeholder collaboration has helped mitigate the problems brought by mass tourists. This study finds that when community cooperation is attained, issues brought about by overtourism can be mitigated, and solutions can be crafted.

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https://www.tourismreset.com/projects/

Abstract

Black travel experiences are not monolithic. In fact, Black travelers increasingly express their dissatisfaction with tokenism and the performative nature of checking the diversity box. To keep an authentic conversation about Black lives in the travel space – the goal of this manuscript is to take a deeper look into the nexus and intersectionalities of Black travelers and how their experiences in the tourism landscape both collide and diverge from each other. As a research team, we interviewed several Black travel influencers, bloggers, and community leaders who all shared one strong message – Black travel is not a monolith. Informed by intersectionality theory and Black geographies, we identified four major themes around the challenges of marginalized identities of Black travelers inclusive of being: Black and a woman; Black and queer; Black across nationalities; and Black with a disability. By bridging the gap between academia and industry, our hope is to curate a future road map for Black travel that values and empowers intersecting identities of Black travelers.

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Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual (LGB) people can experience discrimination because of their minoritized status, which can be exacerbated when they come from a less privileged group or background compared to the rest of society. Travel can play a unique role in their lives by providing an opportunity to escape the constrictors of how one is defined and positioned in their home environment. The experiences enabled through travel can help build capacities that enhance well-being and the ability to cope with prejudice at home. This paper explores how LGB people with intersectional identities perceive the role of travel in contributing to their well-being and the activities they participate in while travelling. We frame intersectionality as one’s sexual orientation and the differences arising from one’s relative socioeconomic status. Through an online survey of 473 Australian LGB people, we identify five well-being segments, which differed on their socioeconomic status, travel activity choices, and sexual orientation. The results have implications for how travel is a well-being tool that supports different segments of LGB people through the provision of pleasure activities while also facilitating self-development, social contribution, and minimizing the impact of negative experiences on day-to-day life.

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This article examines how digital nomads (generally defined here as those from the Global North working remotely without a permanent home) reacted to the COVID 19 pandemic. Using social media data and 37 indepth interviews with digital nomads from 16 countries, it argues that many in this group continued traveling to maintain their identity and avoid border closures and lockdowns. the article explores how they rationalized their mobility while navigating feelings of guilt, avoidance of shame, and deflecting accusations of geographical and epidemiological selfishness. New geopolitical conditions created both barriers and travel loopholes, with participants therefore attempting to maintain their group identity through movement while also limiting their social media participation to avoid moral sanction. Drawing on Mimi sheller’s work on mobility justice, the article closes by demonstrating how mobility guilt may be a phenomenon that outlasts the pandemic.

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The Margaret River region (Western australia) is a popular international tourism destination. since its emergence in the late 19thcentury, tourism in the Margaret River region (MRR) has interacted with a number of regional industries including timber, dairy, and wine. these interactions have changed from ‘supportive’ to ‘competing’ reflecting various changes in the market and the availability of common local assets such as forest, land, and public funding. While timber and dairy had an important influence on the evolution of tourism in the region, it was the emergence of winethat shifted tourism the most.Using selected concepts of evolutionary economic geography (eeG), mainly path-dependence, path-reformation, interpath relations, and triggering events, this paper demonstrates how tourism has interacted with different other industries and how these interactions have shaped the MRR as a wine-tourist destination. the paper shows how two related triggering events contributed to the emergence of wine-tourism as a new path in the region – a pro-cess referred to as ‘path-blending’. in this respect, the paper provides empirical evidence that triggering events can result in multiple new paths and can also significantly shape the relations between new and existing regional paths. as such, the paper responds to the call for breaking away with the ‘single path view’ in research on industrial evolution, and for more attention to the various relations between tourism and other sectors within a tour-ist destination

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Lampedusa (Italy) and Lesvos (Greece) have become significant locations where the interaction between migration and tourism is expressed through the presence of volunteer tourism, which, along with supporting migrants, has spawned new practices, such as visiting emblematic sites of migrants’ passage, presence, and death. This study investigates the emergent practices of memorial tourism from the perspective of mobility justice. Specifically, considering this liminal practice, the study seeks an alternative route to the dead-end of political possibilities of volunteer tourism, by exploring, rather than denying, the paradoxes it produces. The study employs a comparative ethnographic approach using a multimethod process, including an online survey, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation. The author spent six months on Lampedusa and Lesvos as a volunteer. Via these tools, the research explores how volunteers’ actions reinforce and confirm mobility inequalities. Specifically, migration is ‘memorialized’ by volunteer tourists, while concurrently the individuals migrating, and in certain cases even those who return after completing their migratory path, have no access to the spaces of memory on Lampedusa and Lesvos. While volunteer tourists’ practices and relationships to these spaces can engender a growing awareness of the phenomenon of migration, an investigation of the emerging paradoxes argues that despite the risk of reproducing the forms of exclusion and injustice that volunteers seek to counter, some subjectivities gain new, significant positions that cause forms of resistance to the disciplinary power of the border regime.

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Urban slums, especially in the Global South, have become popular attractions for tourists interested in sites off the beaten track and more authentic encounters with local culture. This practice has drawn attention from the media and extensive academic research, pointing out its controversial character due to the uneven power relations between hosts and guests and the commodification of poverty to turn it into a tourist attraction. Though acknowledging this pitfall, this work takes a different approach. We argue that tourism has agency in co-producing meanings and values in the process of making and consuming slums as tourist places. Within this process, the cultural capital of slums may find new avenues of legitimization. We critically analyze how discursive practices may valorize and legitimize slums as spaces for cultural production and consumption and the role of tourism in ordering, valuing, and visualizing vernacular cultural landscapes. The paper examines the case of favelas in Rio de Janeiro open to tourist visitation. Using as sources 79 articles from virtual media outlets (a mainstream, hegemonic newspaper, and a popular grassroots publication), official social media accounts, and tourism policies, we leverage Foucauldian discourse analysis and scrutinized the data, drawing insights on three categories of legitimization: authorization, rationalization, and moral evaluation. Our main findings show that tourism is often portrayed as a justification for securitization policies, as well as for fiscalization and formalization processes. Tourists were perceived to have authority in evaluating and valorizing slums’ cacophonic landscape beyond the evaluations of hegemonic social and political elites, which makes for a potential avenue of legitimization. However, in employing a more critical scope, two questions resonate: (1) who benefits from the valorization of slums’ cultural capital and, (2) who decides on the social validity of emergent cultural elements?

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Nature-based tourism in the desert can play an important role in reconnecting people with nature. Tourist experiences are influenced by imaginaries as well as the spiritual and aesthetic values of the landscape, promoting a new identity through a sense of transformation and belonging. These Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) shaped as well by geopolitical imaginaries have as yet remained unexplored. They are important, new contributions to the body of research. How do German-speaking group and cruise tourists imagine the desert and how do they experience the cultural values of the dry ecosystem ‘in situ’? Primarily, in-depth interviews and travel ethnography were applied along with photography and content analysis of marketing material. To support these methods, a survey was distributed to mega-cruise tourists visiting the desert. Results show that group tourists in particular romanticize an imaginary, quiet, empty place similar to a sacred space, promoting self-transformation, a deep connection with the space and sociality with nature and/or with others. Their experiences also enhance empathy for the natural environment through ‘self-immersion’, creating profound well-being. While in the desert, group tourists engage in a multi-sensuous immersion and spiritual transformation, while cruise tourists enjoy an adventure experience. 74% of the cruise tourists enjoyed being in a completely different environment. But, due to noise, overcrowding and built infrastructure, some CES such as silence, finding solitude and viewing of the sands are diminished. A proposed framework takes into account the influence of geopolitical imaginaries and the spiritual and aesthetic values of the desert leading to the core spiritual experience. Such a framework can justify the long-term protection of the desert, and its high cultural value, as well as an environmental ethic.

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This exploratory study presents Greenland as a case of a peripheral destination that complicates and contradicts global definitions of sustainable tourism. Using empirical data that consists of 39 semi-structured interviews, the author employs an inductive approach to discuss the conceptualisation of sustainable tourism according to local stakeholders in Greenland. The key points of conflict surrounding sustainable tourism in Greenland are identified and discussed, with a focus on how local stakeholders contradict each other, and on how the debates prevalent at the local scale can inform tourism development in other peripheral places. The paper contributes to academic literature by offering a deeper understanding of how core-periphery dynamics can influence perceptions of and priorities for sustainable tourism in peripheral places. It benefits the industry by exposing the main debates around the issue of sustainable tourism in Greenland, which can be used to inform the nation’s tourism development.

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Diaspora tourism has become a significant form of transnational mobility that underlies many issues in the field of tourism and migration studies. Despite a considerable body of research that focuses on tourism motivations of home return and its social functions in collective identities and meaning-making, the political roles of diaspora tourism in shaping ethnic bonds and transnational networks need to be further acknowledged. Since 2014, a group of Muslims from Kazakhstan have travelled to China to celebrate their return after over 140 years of displacement from their homeland. Interviews with local officials and residents in Xi’an illustrate the political factors of host governments and local Muslim communities in organising the formal group tourism events. Unlike informal and personal travel, such officially organised diaspora tourism does not serve as a simple act of homecoming. The host governments have used it as a political tool to shape transnational networks and domestic ethnic governance under the discourse of ‘Belt and Road’ initiative. To fulfil this political agenda, the official narrative of diaspora tourism involves a process of remembering and forgetting, and the creation of itineraries that authenticates the imagined ancestral homeland while effacing the unsettled past. The itinerary of tourism events and related cultural practices focuses on a shared ethno-religious identity and common interests of cultural and business exchange between the selected diaspora representatives and host communities. However, due to its political nature, the sustainability of diaspora tourism does not only relate to funding and resource management. Such organised diaspora tourism is also closely associated with the shifting ethnic and migration policies of the host nation-state.

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Despite existing in practice, as well as in other social science and policy literature, narcotourism has not appeared in tourism journals, and its full scope remains unarticulated. This paper aims to introduce narcotourism to a broad audience of tourism scholars, provide its conceptual foundations, and guide subsequent tourism scholarship on this topic. Looking beyond writings that have previously focused on the consumption of drugs during travel and tourism experiences, this paper presents a conceptual framework distinguishing six different tourism-related activities encompassed by the term narcotourism: consumption-oriented narcotourism, production-oriented narcotourism, acquisition-oriented narcotourism, dark heritage narcotourism, narcotrafficker tourism and emulatory narcotourism. This framework describes the hallmark characteristics of each form of narcotourism, identifies linkages between these forms of narcotourism and other areas of tourism scholarship, and concludes by suggesting a future research agenda for narcotourism. Given a long history of association between tourism activities and drug consumption, shifting legal dynamics regarding drug use, insights emerging from related disciplines, and narcotourism’s coexistence alongside myriad forms of tourism already explored by tourism scholars, this paper provides a timely foundation for future research on narcotourism within tourism studies.

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Tourism is undergoing major changes in the advent of social media networks and other new forms of digital technology. This has affected a number of tourism related processes including marketing, destination making, travel experiences and visitor feedback but also various tourism subsectors, like hospitality, transportation and tour operators. More radical than the change in technology itself, the COVID-19 pandemic has hastened questions of digitality and virtuality to the fore in tourism (and not just there). An already substantial and growing body of research has investigated these developments, both regarding tourism processes and industry subsectors and it has grown substantially since the pandemic. Still, largely overlooked are the effects of these changes on questions concerning inequality. This paper provides an overview of recent discussions on this topic, presenting an analysis of extant material and provides ideas of where to take the research further.

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Olympic cities increasingly draw on New Urban Tourism (NUT) principles as part of a host’s strategic tourism development objectives. By doing so, governments and event organisers seek to entangle visitors with local urban, cultural and everyday life. Yet, empirical evidence generated across previous Olympic cities illustrates how hosts often fail to encourage such host–guest interactivity. This is a critical tourism geography and consumption issue repeatedly identified across host city contexts. To address the disconnect between inbound urban tourists and host communities, Tokyo 2020 explicitly placed NUT objectives at the heart of official bid and policy promises. On the basis of a 33-day walking ethnography in Tokyo as well as 26 interviews and documentary analysis, our work details a set of strategically planned and creative NUT initiatives deployed by the public, private sector, and host community in the lead up to the Tokyo 2020 Games. Some of these include state-funded walking tours and city volunteer guide networks; tourist boards promoting local-grassroots festivals; through to joint collaborations between local tourist boards and ‘Timeout’ to produce local guides – constituting a productive step forward for showcasing the local culture outside tourist bubbles. Furthermore, we illustrate how Tokyo’s urban landscape closely intertwines tourist bubbles with local neighbourhoods affording a potential balance between staged and spontaneous host–guest interaction. Our conclusions emphasise the conceptual, social, and economic implications for strategic planning and implementation of NUT in Olympic cities and its potential contribution to inclusive and sustainable development.

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This paper draws on sustainability and ecotourism literature and aims to identify the deterrents to ecotourism development. The research opted to use Abaca Ecotourism Park, located in the Koroyanitu National Heritage Park in Western Viti Levu Fiji, as a case study. Three studies exploring management, local residents, and tourists’ perspectives were undertaken to determine the factors that deter from the further development of the selected ecotourism project. Study 1 conducted an interview with the management team of the ecotourism park to gain insights into the factors that influenced the project’s development. Study 2 was undertaken with the villagers who reside in the region where the ecotourism park is located. Longitudinal secondary research covering 20 years of data was used in Study 3 to identify tourists’ visitation and consumption patterns. Some findings were consistent across the three studies. The results reveal a range of deterrents to the ecotourism development, including infrastructure constraints, issues related to inequality, overdependence on neighbouring countries, and political vulnerabilities. The implications for the literature and practitioners conclude the paper.

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Abstract

In many respects Tourism Studies appears to be increasingly divided between the unquestioning embrace of the market, on the one hand, and questions of discourse, culture, and representation on the other. This apparent rift also conceals a growing convergence around the significance of ‘culture’ and cultural analyses in tourism, brought about by greater engagement with post-structural theory and a concomitant retreat from political economy. Accordingly, this paper evaluates the scope and potential for a revitalized radical critique of tourism that engages with issues of power, inequality and development processes in tourism whilst acknowledging the significance of cultural diversities. Some commentators, such as Aitchison, suggest the ‘cultural turn’ and, more broadly, the emergence of a sub-discipline of critical Tourism Studies, has shaken up the conceptual and theoretical foundations of tourism research and, in so doing, has delivered new insights into the discursive, symbolic and performative realms of tourism and tourist experiences. Whilst this has perhaps resulted in a more nuanced appreciation of the social and cultural dimensions of power manifest in tourism (particularly into its dominant discourses and representative frameworks), the emphasis on the latter at the expense of production and material aspects of tourism and mobility, has meant that tourism often appears detached from the forces of structural power that characterize twenty-first century capitalism and globalization. In response, this paper draws on Marxist political economy and a historical materialist method of inquiry, in order to both critique the ‘critical turn’ and to reflect upon tourism's relationship to the economic and political relations of power in the contemporary global (dis)order. In doing so, this paper puts forward the case that tourism research needs to further engage with some of the major themes and theoretical debates related to processes of globalization, capitalism and structural power if it is to engage with issues of substantive import related to critical scholarship and social justice.

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Abstract

Little research has been conducted on the place-making agency of farm tourism. Yet farm tourism is an increasingly important tourism activity that yields many economic, sociocultural, and environmental benefits. To shed more light on this subject, participant observation of, and semi-structured interviews with, farmers and visitors at farms on the Hawaiian island of O’ahu were conducted. The results revealed that through farm tourism, the tangible and intangible assets of the farms became recreational and educational resources, infusing the farms with new meanings and values and transforming them from agricultural productionscapes into places that were also consumptionscapes. The physical environment surrounding the farm, farm visitors and their externalities, community involvement with the farm, and the farmers’ entrepreneurialism and desire to educate the public about agriculture and perpetuate their traditions, emerged as place-making influences. These findings corroborated those of other inquiries on place-making in tourism, facilitating the theorization of this process. Conceptual models of the posited antecedents, processes, and outcomes of place-making related to farm tourism, and tourism in general, are presented, and recommendations are advanced for further research that will contribute to theorization in this area.

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Abstract

The purpose of this Special Issue is to frame island tourism research while bringing to the forefront the myriad of challenges facing islands to develop successful tourism destinations. Islands are special geographic features spread all across the globe, and tourism has been an important economic activity for many of these often resource constrained territories. If tourism is a means to economic prosperity, then island destinations need to explore several considerations and build resilient tourism economies that can overcome external shocks. While tourism researchers have noted island tourism research in book and article titles, when addressing the occurrence of tourism in islands, the body of work surrounding tourism in islands requires framing, as a wide array of concepts has been explored including sustainability, resilience, development, economies, impact, destinations, trends, planning and prospects. With such variety, island tourism research has seemed to lack direction or form. Herein, this Special Issue seeks to address this by framing island tourism research around the themes of Lifecycles, System Decline and Resilience. Tourism growth and development occur as a process over a period of time and this flow can be illustrated using tourism arrivals. Ongoing flows of visitors are expected to take a particular course and understanding changes in that course relates to identification of system decline. Finally, building resilience means gaining the capacity to adapt to and successfully manage changes in the dimensions and nature of tourism.

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Abstract

While backpacker social identity remains an important theme among tourism researchers, its influence on sustainable behaviors has received limited attention. We examine the impact of backpacker social identity on sustainable behavior based on both a structural modeling approach and regression analysis. A survey of 400 backpackers is conducted within Cape Coast, a major tourism hub in Ghana, West Africa. Supporting seven out of eight hypotheses based on PLS-SEM, social identity has a positive effect on sustainable behavior, which in turn positively affects satisfaction suggesting that the more backpackers identify themselves with this group the more sustainably they behave. Additionally, social identity has a negative impact on unsustainable behavior which negatively impacts behavioral intentions. These findings suggest that individuals who identify themselves as backpackers are less likely to engage in unsustainable behavior. Findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the nexus between backpacker social identity and sustainable behavior.

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1.     Where does the question of authenticity originate?

2.     What do you think are some of the biggest challenges of the authenticity concept?

3 What do you think are biggest misconceptions about authenticity in tourism research/among tourism researchers? 

4 The interest in dichotomizing authentic/inauthentic persists in the industry and in much academic research. What are your views on this?

5 Why do you think tourism researchers often argue that authenticity is difficult to define? What contributes to this complexity?

6 Why do yuo think authenticty has had such a long shelf-life in tourism studies?

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Abstract

This is a follow-up to the study ‘A mindful shift: an opportunity for mindfulness-driven tourism in a post-pandemic world’, which was published in Tourism Geographies. The original paper advocated that, during a major crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the focus could be put on (more) mindful tourists as a driver of mindful change for the global tourism industry. In this follow-up study, we discuss the mindfulness-based approaches as feasible, low-cost solutions to reduce negative psychological effects in many tourism settings as well as a strategy to ensure the tourism industry’s pro-longed sustainability during and after the pandemic. We start with the underlying mechanism of mindfulness practices as a technique to cope with the pandemic and, from a managerial standpoint, discuss the different roles of mindfulness within the envisioned courses of tourism development in a post-COVID-19 future.

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Abstract

Transformational system change is required to respond to the current climate emergency and the COVID-19 induced structural break presents an opportunity to progress such change. While the tourism industry accepts the need for change, how this may look like remains unclear. This article contributes to identifying pathways by presenting critical reflections on the research process and findings from a three-year research project on reducing climate change risk in Vanuatu. The approach is anchored in systems thinking and draws on the concept of leverage points. Seven points are identified for intervening in the tourism system to reduce climate change risk and achieve varying levels of systemic change. Each is explored in the context of Vanuatu before its broader relevance is discussed. The findings highlight the importance of engaging with deeper influences of risk and unsustainable system outcomes. This has implications for how decision-makers approach crisis management and what ‘tourism recovery’ means, especially when considering that system resilience might stand in the way of more profound transformational change required to address long-term risks.

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Abstract

Tourist experiences are the product of a temporally extended series of events and activities. The temporal distance from actual experiences distorts the recalled evaluation of their experiences so tourists photograph to record their experiences and consume the place. Tourist photographs build a positive image of a destination when they effectively evoke positive feelings (i.e. affective image) and provide clear information about the physical and functional characteristics (i.e. cognitive image) of the destination. Despite its strong evocative power in constructing a meaning and assessing the place and experience, colour receives little attention in existing tourist photograph literature. Assuming colour as a proxy of tourist experiences, I explore whether, and how, colour in tourist photographs represents tourist experiences and destination consumption. The psychophysical paradigm, which proposes that the quality of the scenery or landscape reflects not only its intrinsic attributes but also the eyes of the beholder, provides a theoretical foundation. A purposely developed colour extraction and analysis tool identifies colour distribution patterns from 2,131 tourist photographs and Leximancer discovers word-like concepts (e.g. regular nouns and adjectives) from the corresponding comments and tags collected from the Facebook of Queensland Tourism Board in Australia. Findings reveal five distinctive groups based on colour distribution patterns and associated concepts. For example, tourist photographs of Fraser Coast show dominantly blue and secondarily orange whereas photographs of Sunshine Coast show balanced blue and orange. Tourist photographs from the destinations sharing similar geographic characteristics often display dissimilar colour patterns. It suggests that destinations can be grouped together by colour patterns and conceptual similarity, instead of geographical characteristics. The results further support that colours in tourist photographs are a significant representamen of tourist experiences and destination image.

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Abstract

Promotion of volunteer tourism is couched within notions of ‘giving back’, drawing on affective sentiments of ‘care’, ‘compassion’ and ‘empathy’, reinforced by neo-colonial and neoliberal notions of developmental aid. It is not surprising then, that scholars are turning to theories of affect to make sense of the embodied, emotional aspects of the volunteering experience. We build on this emerging research trajectory by arguing that in drawing attention to the unequal geographies of international volunteering, the complexities and nuances of affect and emotion demand an engagement with theories that are more attuned to ambiguity, in order to open up dialogue for multiple possibilities. We critically engage with extant theorisations of affect as autonomous in volunteer tourism encounters to explore these possibilities. However we find a tendency within the conceptualisations of affect as autonomous (re)creates binaries, albeit in distinctive forms - with a focus on possibility - to the detriment of power. We therefore turn to decolonial feminist contributions to understand subjectivity, positionality and the pivotal role of the body in research in non-binary ways. We use this framing to reflexively re-engage with fieldwork six years on from a volunteer tourism site in Ecuador to demonstrate the nuances and complexities of theorising the affective aspects of volunteer tourism encounters. We focus this analysis around three key themes that arose in this re-engagement with the fieldwork: i) vulnerability and unlearning ii) critical intimacy and iii) affective closures. We conclude by arguing that the affective spaces in volunteer tourism are at once bound up in, and shaped by, the larger processes of neoliberalism and neo-colonial legacies, while at the same time, they contain borderland encounters of intersubjective relationalities and moments of vulnerability, care, critical intimacy and emergent decolonising connections.

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Abstract

To date, there has been limited research concerning the methodology and approach to Gulag heritage and how it has been memorialised and commodified for tourism purposes. The recent cultural commodification of the Soviet past and the development of participatory visitor experiences at Gulag museums in Kazakhstan necessitate to advance understandings of the roles authenticity and performance play in the management of Gulag museum practices in the country. Using a qualitative case study research approach based on a combination of semi-structured interviews with stakeholders involved in the development of Gulag tourism including senior management of museums, museum guides, policy-makers, tourism operators, local NGOs and experts in Soviet Gulag heritage, direct observations and qualitative document analysis of two Gulag museums and sites in Kazakhstan, the commodification and management of Soviet Gulag heritage is explored. Results reveal that beyond objects on display and images regarded as interpretive illustrations that allow visitors to connect with the past and verify history, dioramas and staged performances re-enacting various elements of the Gulag life are used as immersive and emotional tools to accentuate the ‘dark’ atmosphere of the epoch and induce a more impactful and participatory visitor experience. The findings contribute to literature on authenticity and performance in Gulag tourism by examining the delicate question of the extent to which stakeholders involved in the management of the Gulag tragedy can offer meaningful visitor experiences that are historically accurate and protect the dignity of the victims while adapting to the dynamic roles of museums as heritage and education sites.

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Abstract

High hopes are pinned on tourism and its catalytic potential to foster growth in remote rural areas. In the Zambezi region of northeastern Namibia, tourism plays a key role in the design of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) programmes for nature conservation. Local communities form conservancies, small village-based entities of bottom-up nature conservation activities. These conservancies are granted rights for the use of natural resources, which are then transferred to tourism investors and trophy-hunting companies. Thus, conservancies partly determine tourism’s developmental outcomes on a local level. By applying a global production network (GPN) approach, the objective is, first, to assess how much of the turnover generated in the Zambezi region remains in the region and, second, to examine the extent to which conservancies, as newly formed local institutions, enable communities to capture value from tourism. A mixed-methods approach is applied, using a business survey, qualitative interview data and financial reports which allow a calculation of value capture. Roughly 20% of the value generated by the tourism industry in the Zambezi region is captured locally. In addition, conservancies play a key role in the GPN, acting as hinges between the local and the global: conservancies are involved in the production of the resource, mediate in strategic coupling processes and use regulatory and bargaining power to capture value. Conservancies therefore have the potential to increase local gains from tourism. On the one hand, these results underline the importance of local institutions for value capture in GPN analysis. On the other hand, as local linkages are limited and the level of local ownership is low, policies are needed that ensure the participation of local residents beyond direct transfer payments from private enterprises to communities.

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Abstract

Classic Anglo-European definitions of tourism as recreational travel have hindered more nuanced locally-grounded understandings of travel phenomena elsewhere in the world. Moreover, contemporary global labor and educational mobility have produced novel travel forms and behaviors that straddle the Western categories of “tourist” and “migrant.” The purpose of this analysis is to examine Toraja (Indonesia) perspectives on travel which can be instructive for correcting the binary divides between tourism and migration that have long plagued dominant Western models of travel. Drawing from data culled from long-term qualitative fieldwork and online research, I convey three ethnographically-grounded stories of Toraja migrants on return visits to their homeland in order to destabilize Western-centrism in tourism studies. Research findings underscore contemporary travel understandings and practices that do not fit neatly with Western mutually exclusive categories of “tourism” and “migration.” These Toraja practices encompass local historical patterns of travel for experiential/financial enrichment (merantau), migration and tourism. This study also advances tourism scholarship by highlighting the importance of local knowledge and demonstrating the value of ethnographic storytelling as a scholarly strategy for destabilizing orthodox Western-centric theoretical understands of tourism. The global significance of this place-based research is that tourism studies can be enriched by widening our lenses to also consider emigrants on return visits to their homelands.

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Abstract

Religious tourism refers to contemporary patterns of travel to sacred places and has taken many forms owing to different motivations of visitors. Researchers have discussed motivation, activities, and behaviour of visitors in framing what constitutes religious in religious tourism, but little attention is given to spatial manifestations of religious practice. Towing this direction, I examine the significance of religious practices to spatial arrangements in Hindu pilgrim towns in India by juxtaposing the concept of “spatial practice” from Lefebvre’s theory of production of space with an indigenous approach called the “sacred-complex model”. A fieldwork based collective study of six pilgrim-towns, namely, Alandi, Jejuri, Pandharpur, Tuljapur, Shegaon, and Shirdi, which represent a full spectrum of religious tourism destinations in India, provides a sound comparison of similarities and differences in spatial practice of religious tourism. In this analysis, four themes emerge: (1) the engagement of religious actors in religious rituals and performances over space defines the boundaries and territories of the sacred and religious; (2) the performance area of religious practice has reduced from traditional pilgrimage landscape to specific routes providing access to the main attraction which is a built structure (shrine/temple); (3) religiousness is also created by non-religious and seemingly “profane” commercial activities; (4) without the explicit expression of religiousness there is no opportunity for religious tourism or any other form of tourism. They are organized and presented following different principles from attractions elsewhere in the world, and that they are more important in the lives of the Indian people who visit and maintain them than they are to the Western tourist. Using spatial lens has reinforced that religious as a prefix, is a stronger and an essential concept for religious tourism in the non-western context of India, that needs to be factored in for sustainable management of religious tourism destinations.

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Codina, R., Lugosi, P., and Bowen, D. (2022). 'Place, power, and tourism in value-creation: contesting the plaza in Pisac, Peru', Tourism Geographies, 24(4-5):pp. 879-901.

Abstract

Place, power, and tourism intersect as disparate actors attempt to create and extract different forms of value from shared spatial resources. In Pisac, Peru, various stakeholders pursue their interests through and in relation to the plaza. Participant observation and interviews show how traders, residents, tour guides and municipal agents make competing claims over place through their engagement with evolving tourism practices. Power is exercised through physical and symbolic visibility, tactical use of expertise and control of information, temporal and spatial orchestration of mobility, acts of micro-aggression leading to exclusion and invisibility, coupled with unfulfilled political promises and inaction regarding governance. These practices and strategies help to construct and extricate economic, social, and political value from intersections of tourism and place.

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Abstract

Tourist homes, private residences that rented rooms to traveling guests, were once a popular form of tourist accommodation in the United States. Reaching their peak in the early 20th century, tourist homes largely became obsolete as hotels and motels were able to provide relatively inexpensive and standardized forms of hospitality. As a result of their meteoric rise and fall, and the private nature of the lodging, tourist homes have been neglected in studies of historical tourism and hospitality. However, tourist homes occupied an important position in providing welcome and other forms of hospitality to travelers, particularly Black Americans, in the first half of the 20th century, and this role deserves to be recovered and recognized. An exploration of tourist homes listed in the Green Book, a Black American-centric travel guide published during the Jim Crow Era, reveals that tourist homes not only lodged travelers overnight, but also significantly contributed to forms of mobile resistance against white supremacy. Specifically, through a conceptualization of hospitality as resistance, tourist homes enabled opportunities for Black Americans to gain economic and social capital through processes of welcoming and establishing ‘Black counterpublic spaces’. Particularly through constructions of home-like environments, tourist homes presented spaces that served as moorings within larger mobility networks, countering white supremacist attempts to immobilize and disadvantage Black Americans. Given these contributions to resistance and Black mobility, tourist homes deserve to be included in studies of tourism, hospitality, and Black geographies as important sites of welcoming, resistance, and resilience.

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ABSTRACT

Tourism is a global phenomenon yet non-Western travel and tourism mobilities are under-researched and lack theoretical development. In the South Pacific, a region which is increasingly receiving geopolitical attention, there is substantial knowledge of inbound tourism but outbound and domestic forms of travel are less known. To understand the travel and tourism mobilities of Samoans, a concurrent mixed methods design of surveys supplemented by interviews with both urban and rural Samoans was employed. Samoan understandings of travel and tourism are expressed via the concept of malaga, which has a range of meanings including ‘migration’, ‘movement’ or ‘travel back and forth’. For Samoans, travel was for cultural and familial purposes, including the maintenance of cultural bonds through fa’alavelave (traditional obligations) and visiting friends and relatives (VFR). The migration of Samoans to various Pacific countries such as Australia, New Zealand and the USA has generated more need for travel and has helped to make mobility a routine aspect of Samoan social life. The travel mobilities of both urban and rural Samoans were influenced by a mix of cultural and familial obligations, leisure and tourism goals, and work-related purposes, blurring the lines between tourism and other forms of mobility. This paper advances knowledge of Samoan forms of travel and tourism mobility, providing important insights into the travel practices of a Pacific Islander people at a time when the South Pacific is becoming a site of intensifying geopolitical competition.

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Ce Qu, Chaozhi Zhang, Shiwei Shen & Daniel H. Olsen (2022) Heritage conservation and communities’ sense of deprivation in tourism: the case of the Hani community in Yunnan, China, Tourism Geographies, DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2021.2016936

Abstract

Communities play a critical role in the development and maintenance of sustainable heritage tourism. However, conflicts often arise when these communities are ignored or marginalized in the heritage tourism development process. This paper examines whether the community located within the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces, a World Heritage Site in China, views the designation and subsequent tourism development as beneficial or not. The findings show that there are significant differences in opinion between the local Hani people and non-Local Hani and outsiders who live in the heritage area. The local Hani feel a greater sense of deprivation due to de-empowerment and economic inequalities as compared with non-Local Hani and outsiders. This deprivation has reduced their motivation to conserve their own heritage, while the non-local Hani feel a greater sense of gain and a newfound appreciation for their personal and collective heritage identity. Frequent interactions between the two groups have led to local Hani people resisting the heritage preservation responsibilities enforced upon them.

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You can reference it here:

Niamh Espiner, Emma J. Stewart, Helen Fitt, Shannon Page & Stephen Espiner (2021) From tents and maps to vans and apps: Exploring camping mobilities, Tourism Geographies, DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2021.1964588

Abstract

Mobile camping in a tent or vehicle is an increasingly popular way for tourists to experience place and movement as part of their leisure travel. Allowing tourists to save money, stay close to attractions, and maximise flexibility in their travel, camping provides a convenient accommodation option for domestic and international tourists alike. In the past, camping research has often been conceptualised using theories related to place. Contemporary camping can be interpreted as increasingly mobile in both the movement of people and information, which complements traditional conceptualisations of camping in the literature and in management approaches. Through 17 exploratory qualitative interviews with camping managers in the Mackenzie and Waitaki Districts of New Zealand, this research considered camping manager perspectives on the increasing mobility of camping in New Zealand. Qualitative analysis of these interviews, using Cresswell’s mobilities concepts as a framework, revealed a dynamic camping landscape inextricably enmeshed with complex political meanings about campers and movement. The findings allow the characterisation of campers as Self-Sufficient Spenders, Basic Budgeters, and Kiwi Classics—each representing distinct profiles in relation to mobilities notions of rhythm and speed. Subsequently, we suggest that the increasing mobility of camping needs to be acknowledged both in management approaches and future conceptualisations of camping.

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Which can be found here:

Denis Tolkach & Stephen Pratt (2021) Globalisation and cultural change in Pacific Island countries: the role of tourism, Tourism Geographies, 23:3, 371-396, DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2019.1625071

Abstract

Globalisation is often perceived as a threat to the preservation of traditional cultures. There are various approaches to understanding the impact of globalisation on culture. Pieterse’s three paradigms of globalisation and culture, clash of civilisations, McDonaldisation and hybridisation, provide a useful theoretical foundation for understanding how tourism impacts culture. The three paradigms of globalisation assess cultural change holistically. Cultural change in Pacific Island countries (PIC) due to globalisation, especially tourism’s role, in this change, is the focus. Data are sourced via interviews with various tourism stakeholders from Fiji, Tonga and Cook Islands. Tourism is only one driver of cultural change. Other forces include mobilities, migration, diaspora, geopolitical change, technology and popular culture. Examples of the clash of civilisations paradigm include geopolitical changes resulting in different tourism markets and the imitation effect from diaspora and tourists. Commodification of cultural performance for both tourist and local consumption and use of popular culture, for example the animated film Moana, are viewed as McDonaldisation of culture. Participants’ reflections on ongoing evolution of culture including the integration of PIC into the world economy, through increased mobilities and technologies, exemplify hybridisation. In general, the three PIC are found to be culturally resilient. Culture of these PIC is resilient with Pacific Islanders maintaining agency over change, however the impact of various globalisation factors demand effort in preserving culture in the long term.

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You can read all about it here:

Julia K. Giddy (2021) Uber and employment in the Global South – not-so-decent work, Tourism Geographies, DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2021.1931955

Abstract

Due to its global standards and brand recognition, Uber has become an important form of transportation and is now found throughout the world. It has played a role in transforming local mobilities in many cities, particularly those lacking efficient public transportation options. Uber has played a particularly important role in increasing mobilities in places with security concerns, such as South Africa, due to their competitive rates, the accountability of drivers, and their innovative security features. Uber promotes itself as a peer-to-peer platform that connects drivers to riders, calling drivers ‘partners’, and vehemently dismissing any claims that it is an employer. The company advocates the ability of Uber to increase economic upliftment, particularly in the Global South. South Africa has staggering urban un-and-underemployment rates and, therefore, Uber can be seen as a potential tool for job creation or a means of supplementing low and inconsistent wages. A critical analysis of these claims demonstrates the manner in which Uber has emerged as an employment mechanism in South Africa within a ‘decent work’ framework. The findings are based on an analysis of detailed questionnaires distributed to Uber drivers based in South Africa as well as ethnographic research. It also draws on secondary sources, such as driver forums, newspaper articles and the Uber South Africa website. The findings demonstrate the many challenges faced by Uber drivers such as long working hours, low fares, subcontracting of drivers and concerns over driver safety. The paper introduces primary research in the form of driver surveys and questions the discourse propagated by the company as a mechanism for economic upliftment. In particular, the results show that working for Uber, according to these results, should not be considered decent work.

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The full article can be found here:

Choe, J., & Lugosi, P. (2022). Migration, tourism and social sustainability. Tourism Geographies, 24(1), 1-8.

Abstract

In practice, the distinctions between tourism and migration are blurred. Tourism often drives various forms of mobility, and an international workforce is central to maintaining functioning tourism economies. This piece sketches out some critical themes and issues concerning intersections of tourism and migration, considering their relationships with and impacts on social sustainability. It highlights the contradictory ways in which tourism and migration are approached as political, social and economic phenomena. Whereas tourism is often viewed more positively, migration is recurrently politicised, and seen to challenge social systems and cultural values, despite the reliance of tourism on migrant labour. The discussion outlines the relevance of social sustainability to studies of migration and tourism. These include the need to assess how tourism planning, development and governance of tourism impacts on the sustainability of communities, which consequently influences attitudes towards migrants and tourists. It also reflects on how migrant-local connections may evolve, creating opportunities for positive, symbiotic co-existence, alongside exploitative relationships. It concludes by inviting further studies examining new forms and interactions between migration and tourism, which considers how research can contribute to greater social sustainability.

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Revati’s research and practice are in resource governance and community dynamics in India. Since 2011 she has worked in natural resource and protected area contexts, examining questions of local engagement with resources, forest rights, conservation governance and markets. Her work is grounded in understanding contexts, identities, positionalities and community dynamics in relation to structural processes. Her doctoral research was in political ecology of (eco)tourism and intersectional community dynamics at Corbett Tiger Reserve (Wageningen University and Research, Netherlands).

She is currently a faculty in the School of Development at the Azim Premji University in Bangalore, India.

The full paper can be read here:

Revati Pandya, Hari Shankar Dev, Nitin D. Rai & Robert Fletcher (2022) Rendering land touristifiable: (eco)tourism and land use change, Tourism Geographies, DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2022.2077425

Abstract

Critical research concerning ecotourism has revealed the activity’s socio-economic impacts, including low-wage employment-based dependencies for many rural communities. While these dynamics are important, a crucial aspect of the ecotourism industry that falls outside this conventional sort of dependency is land use dynamics, specifically land use change, sales and entrepreneurship. We examine these dynamics in Corbett Tiger Reserve, India, where promotion of (eco)tourism since the 1990s has influenced significant changes in local land use. These changes were initially facilitated by outsiders buying land and setting up hotels and resorts in villages adjoining the Reserve. Empirical research reveals that while this initial boom of outsiders buying land has waned, land owning villagers are now setting up tourism enterprises on their own land, thereby diversifying land use from agriculture to tourism. Critical agrarian research has shown that material and symbolic factors influence farmers’ decision-making regarding land use change. An agrarian studies perspective thus facilitates a nuanced understanding of tourism-related land use diversification and change. By bringing agrarian and ecotourism studies approaches together here, we contribute to both by emphasising the importance of (eco)tourism in agrarian change and of attention to land use change in ecotourism studies to understand how rural people negotiate and navigate (eco)tourism in relation to land use. We also contribute to tourism geographies more broadly by highlighting how land use decision-making shapes local spaces in the course of ecotourism development. We draw attention to the broader processes of and impacts of ecotourism that shift generational rural land use influenced by changing values of land outside a protected area. Rendering land touristifiable deepens villagers’ dependence on the market and alienates them from their land. Ecotourism commodifies nature, and we show that this commodification extends to rural land outside of ecotourism zones per se.

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Schänzel, H. A., & Porter, B. A. (2022). Sexual politics in the field: gendered research spaces in tourism geographies. Tourism Geographies, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2022.2077426

Abstract

Sexual violence and harassment in field research is an uncomfortable and under-discussed phenomenon in the social sciences. Tourism geographies, being cross-cultural, often require solo fieldwork that exposes one’s gender in geographically remote locations. There is a pressing need to normalise the discussion of sexual politics in the field, specifically concerning occurrences of gender-associated risks in fieldwork and report on the unexpected physical and mental health risks for women researchers. This study takes a feminist theoretical lens to unpack the hidden dimensions of women engaged in ‘voluntary’ risk taking by conducting field research in male-dominated research environments. Taking an exploratory approach within an interpretivist paradigm, this study is based on the fieldwork experiences of 13 women from diverse cultural and academic backgrounds with the participants sharing their subjective realities of researching in tourism geographies. A thematic analysis revealed the two key themes of risk/perceived vulnerabilities and wellbeing/care in the field as paramount for field research spaces for women, along with 11 subthemes. Findings reaffirmed the political nature of tourism geographies fieldwork and the need to challenge sexual politics and patriarchal domination, including for LGBTQ researchers. Further, the results highlighted the intersectionality of race and gender of women’s experiences of sexual violence and other risks in the field. Thus, the findings suggest an urgent need to provide an imperative for fieldworker safety, wellbeing considerations, and alternative ways of researching.

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Jones, T. E., Bui, H. T., & Ando, K. (2022). Zoning for world heritage sites: dual dilemmas in development and demographics. Tourism Geographies, 24(1), 33-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2020.1780631

Abstract

Since listing as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) in 1999, Hoi An Ancient Town in Vietnam has been transformed by tourism development with visitor numbers increasing more than sixteen-fold. Beyond positive economic impacts, tourism has generated considerable funds for conservation, with revenue assisting authentic restoration of the town’s historic center. However, tourism impacts have provoked criticism linked to social sustainability, examined in this paper using the core-and-buffer-zone principle - a neo-normative spatial planning framework. Our longitudinal, mixed-method analysis from development and demographic perspectives combines interviews and census data with spatial planning guidelines and maps. Findings show that architectural renovations, accompanied by stricter regulations and hierarchical World Heritage Site zoning, legitimized rapid development of Hoi An’s buffer zone in tandem with ‘museumification’ of the core, epitomized by the central clustering of traditional wooden architecture renovation projects. By 2010, population in the core had declined by 20% as ‘adaptive re-use’ of heritage buildings paved the way for conversion of private residences into shops or other services and the core transformed from living heritage into a tourism stage. Demographic and development trends reinforced the dual hierarchy, although attempts to mitigate museumification, including a series of craft villages around the perimeter, provided impetus for revitalization of the newly-expanded buffer zone. Our findings highlight certain implications of spatial zoning for social sustainability, pointing the way for better integration with adaptive re-use policies. Our study contributes to further the debate on social sustainability at a living heritage site by investigating the bipolarity between museumification of the core and concurrent development of the buffer zones. The implications of our study extend beyond the current context of developing Southeast Asia, as this paper draws parallels and expounds opportunities for more site-specific planning and management of World Heritage Sites.

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Eva C. Erdmenger (PhD) is currently working as a research associate at the University of Trier (Germany) where she also started her academic career in Applied Human Geography with a focus on tourism geography. Afterwards, she completed her Master’s degree in Tourism Destination Development at Dalarna University (Sweden). As part of her Master’s thesis, Eva specialized in tourism governance. Back at the University of Trier, she completed her PhD research project on inclusive urban destination governance, community PROsilience, and socially sustainable tourism development. From April 2023, Eva will be open to new challenges and is looking forward to the next step of her carreer.

The full paper can be found here:

Eva C. Erdmenger (2022) The end of participatory destination governance as we thought to know it, Tourism Geographies, DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2022.2086904

Abstract

In response to rising anti-tourism movements, the role of residents in destination governance has experienced a revival in tourism research. Participatory destination governance approaches have been advocated as problem-solvers for increasing conflicts, yet their implementation is still lacking. Besides a considerable amount of positivist research drafting the best participatory governance model, the socially constructed perspective of those who are supposed to participate has been widely neglected until now. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to reveal residents’ views on participating in tourism activities and destination governance processes. In pursuit of this, a mixed qualitative research method of focus groups and photo elicitation has been deployed in Copenhagen and Munich in 2020 following a social constructionist epistemology. The findings confirm that residents are not willing to participate in destination governance per se due to a lack of time, access, awareness, prioritization, knowledge, qualification, and opportunities. At the same time, residents were interested in a socio-cultural exchange with like-minded tourists and are generally proud to share their city. Ultimately, the perspectives of residents on tourism should be considered for the implementation of an inclusive urban destination governance. Via psychological, political, and social empowerment, destination governance should foster residents’ (1) motivation to connect with other city users (including tourists); (2) opportunity to influence local tourism development if they are affected by it; and (3) ability to benefit from local tourism (at least indirectly). Ultimately, by understanding how and to what extent residents’ are actually willing to participate in tourism and its governance enables tourism professionals to proactively realize a more resilient destination development while mitigating potential social conflicts caused by the renaissance of (over)tourism.

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The full paper can be read here:

Loretta Bellato, Niki Frantzeskaki & Christian A. Nygaard (2022) Regenerative tourism: a conceptual framework leveraging theory and practice, Tourism Geographies, DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2022.2044376

Abstract

The sustainable tourism development agenda is widely criticised for being co-opted to serve continual economic growth, driving environmental devastation and social inequalities. In response, calls for a fundamental paradigm shift have become louder. Subsequently, a novel approach has emerged, regenerative tourism, which belongs to a long lineage of regenerative development approaches drawing from Western science and Indigenous perspectives, knowledge systems and practices. The paper develops a conceptual framework consisting of five design dimensions and seven practice principles based on practitioner consultations and an appraisal of the theoretical and practical dimensions of regenerative tourism. Consequently, the conceptual framework offers practical guidance for tourism stakeholders working towards regenerative futures. Arguably, this is the most comprehensive review of regenerative tourism to date and contributes to scholarship through its examination of the transformational potential of the regenerative tourism paradigm and related approaches.

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