Towards an understanding of a child’s cruise experience

The current studies on cruise tourism lack an exploration of children’s cruise experience. The aim of this article is to obtain a deeper understanding of children’s cruise experience in the following phases: the pre-cruise decision and planning phase; the on-board engagement phase; and the reinterpretation and evaluation phase. Following an inductive qualitative approach, three sets of interviews (one for each phase) were conducted with 12 children (aged 4–14 years). The findings revealed that children play a very important role in choosing the cruise company and that while on board children want to have a certain level of autonomy so that they can co-create their own memorable cruise experience. This study contributes to the overall theory of children’s tourism experience. The managerial implications for cruise companies are outlined.     

Tourism knowledge and neocolonialism – a systematic critical review of the literature

Despite the official end of colonialism in the twentieth century, neocolonial structures of power have kept influencing the political, socio-cultural and economic arenas worldwide. Within this scenario, the tourism academy has seen its landscape develop with its own set of power structures, which have shaped its knowledge production and dissemination. However, whether and how neocolonial forces have exerted their influence on tourism knowledge production and dissemination is still a subject of debate among scholars. This paper was conceived as an attempt to cast additional light on the nexus between tourism knowledge and neocolonialism. More specifically, through a systematic review of the articles published in tourism journals in the last decade (2007–2017), this work assesses the status of the current tourism knowledge through the lens of neocolonialist theory. Overall, this critical review highlights that with some exceptions, most of the previous reviews concerning tourism knowledge only evaluate the work published in English in highly ranked tourism journals and tend to neglect knowledge systems outside the English-speaking global centres. Furthermore, previous studies exploring structures of power affecting tourism knowledge production and dissemination present limitations in terms of the themes and perspectives identified.     

Disentangling the tourism sector’s fragmentation: a hands-on coding/post-coding guide for interview and policy document analysis in tourism†

Qualitative tourism research is inevitably multidimensional. The fragmentation of the tourism sector across policy domains, scales, space and stakeholders leads to ‘blurry’ and aggregated datasets. Yet, tourism studies have a weak record in describing how results emanate from raw qualitative data. This paper presents a coding/post-coding scheme that proved robust in disentangling multidimensional tourism datasets in a middle-range research project that necessitated reflecting on the position of the researcher and the literature study during the data analysis. It describes the pragmatic decisions taken to organise the qualitative data from a research project on cross-border tourism and regional development processes. The paper also functions as a reflexive account of how this scheme came into existence. It contributes to the tools available to practically acknowledge the fragmentation of the tourism sector and the resulting multidimensional qualitative data, and calls for a more open accounting of the data analysis process and the underlying research values in tourism studies.