反季旅游与旅游季节性平衡:研究述评与启示

季节性是旅游产业最重要的特征之一,对旅游业发展具有重要的影响作用。国内外学者对旅游季节性的含义、测度、成因和影响进行了大量研究,并提出了一些缓解旅游季节性的措施和方法。近年来渐渐兴起的反季旅游成为应对旅游季节性的有效措施。深刻理解反季旅游的内涵和特征,努力实现反季旅游常态化,能有效解决旅游季节性造成的产业失衡问题。但从国内外现有文献来看,有关反季旅游的研究成果却十分有限。文章的主要工作是对旅游季节性和反季旅游相关的国内外研究成果进行梳理,并进一步对反季旅游研究和开发的策略进行分析。首先,对气候与旅游方面的研究文献进行了简单回顾;其次,对旅游季节性的国内外研究成果进行了综述;然后,对反季旅游的概念和内涵进行了剖析和界定,并重点对利用反季旅游缓解季节性的研究成果进行了讨论;最后,提出了我国反季旅游开发的对策和建议。     

Cultural and non-cultural tourism: Evidence from Italian experience

Cultural tourism is recognized as one of the main resources used to counteract seasonality in tourist destinations, being by its very nature non-seasonal. Moreover, according to the generally accepted stereotype, cultural tourists tend to be ageing and therefore more likely to travel also during the off-peak season than younger tourists. Our data show that international cultural tourism has increased in Italy during the last 15 years, but this increase has not contributed to reducing seasonality. We have conducted a statistical analysis of the data in an attempt to explore the possible reasons behind such an unexpected finding. By comparing foreign cultural and non-cultural tourists through several socio-economic-demographic variables, our results highlight the fact that a “new (and younger) cultural tourism” is emerging in Italy. Consequently, promoting cultural tourism is just one component for effectively counteracting seasonality. Nevertheless, promotion should also focus on the dual concept of “cultural tourism/ageing tourists”.     

Factors influencing the relevance of air quality in the attractiveness of a tourism destination: Differences between nature-based and urban destinations

Assessing tourism destination attractiveness is a dynamic procedure influenced by constantly changing factors. Despite the existence of various studies on destination attractiveness, less attention has been devoted to measuring the relevance of air quality. The growing concerns related to the impacts of air pollution worldwide, make it imperative to develop attractiveness models which incorporate air quality. Based on survey data collected from 625 visitors, this study examines the importance of air quality when selecting tourism destinations and the factors influencing it. Findings reveal a moderate importance of air quality when selecting tourism destinations, with pro-environmental behaviors at home, perception of the destination's air quality, age, and visitor origin being the most influential factors. The results show that air quality has higher importance when visiting nature-based destinations.     

Characterizing destination networks through mobility traces of international tourists — A case study using a nationwide mobile positioning dataset

This article demonstrates how large-scale tourist mobility data can be linked with network science approaches to better understand tourism destinations and their interactions. By analyzing a mobile positioning dataset that captures the nationality and movement patterns of foreign tourists to South Korea, we employ a few metrics to quantify the network properties of tourism destinations, aiming to reveal the collective dynamics of tourist movements and key differences across nationalities. According to the results, the number of inbound tourists to destinations follows a log-normal distribution, which indicates a notable heterogeneity of destination attractiveness. Although this finding holds across different nationalities, we find that tourists from different countries tended to visit different places in South Korea. A community detection algorithm partitions South Korea into several tourism regions, each covering a set of destinations that are closely connected by tourist flows. The implications for transportation development and regional tourism planning are discussed.     

Ancient poetry in contemporary Chinese tourism

Classical poetry is an important part of Chinese culture. This study explores its roles in contemporary Chinese tourism based on participant observation of tourist destinations in the Three Gorges and surrounding area along the Yangtze River and content analysis of tourism guidebooks. Classical poetry is used to guide Chinese tourists in terms of what to gaze at and how to gaze. Specifically, first, poets and their poems create historical and cultural value for a place, which forms an essential foundation for its attractiveness as an object for Chinese tourists gaze. Second, poems may be used to enhance tourists' aesthetic appreciation of a landscape along the spatial and temporal dimensions, creating transcending poetic experiences. Such influence of classical poetry exemplifies the cultural continuity in China that should be well understood and considered in contemporary tourism. Implications in tourism development and marketing, aesthetic experience creation, environmental interpretation, and literary tourism are discussed.     

The vulnerability of destinations to climate change: A comparative analysis of contextual socio-political factors

Climate change affects tourism and tourism affects climate change. Thus, both adaptation and mitigation strategies are needed to guarantee the sustainability of destinations. As well as the direct impacts of climate change, the effectiveness of these strategies determines the vulnerability of destinations. This paper compares the Riviera Maya (Mexican Caribbean) and Alt Maresme (Spanish Mediterranean) to identify the contextual socio-political factors that influence the vulnerability of destinations to climate change. Thirty-six semi-structured interviews were conducted with key stakeholders from tourism and the environment, public organizations, NGOs, and different levels of the public administration at both destinations. This research focuses on the perception of risk and agenda setting, the stakeholders’ involvement and the limitations of public action. The results show that awareness is greater, climate change is more important to the tourism agenda and private organizations are more involved in the Riviera Maya than in Alt Maresme. Five socio-political aspects are identified and discussed to explain the results: the destination’s evolution; the characteristics and evolution of tourism policy; extreme meteorological events as breaking points for policies; the socioeconomic context and the dependence on tourism; and the characteristics of the tourism offer, such as the dependence on natural resources and seasonality.     

Implications of climate change for tourism in Australia

This study assesses the impacts of projected climate change on Australia's tourism industry. Based on application of the Tourism Climatic Index, it investigates potential changes in climatic attractiveness for Australia's major destinations, and discusses implications for tourist flows and tourism planning, development and management. Australia may see considerable changes in spatial and temporal patterns of climatic suitability for tourism, with a southward shift in the most desirable conditions and a decline in the climatic attractiveness of northern locations. For destinations in which conditions are projected to decline, increased investment in indoor amenities may become increasingly necessary; where conditions are projected to improve, the provision of adequate infrastructure to accommodate potential increases in visitation and implementation of mechanisms to minimise the impacts of excess use may be more important. Adoption of a pro-active rather than reactive stance to climate change will maximise the ability of tourism stakeholders to successfully adapt.     

Innovation,sustainable tourism and environments in mountain destination development: a comparative analysis of Austria,Slovenia and Switzerland

This paper contributes to the comparative tourism sustainability debate in the context of mountain tourism destinations. It is based on a published three-dimensional Mountain Destination Innovation Model (MDIM) which claims that tourism development depends on a destination's innovation levels, and is subject to different conditions in a variety of important destination environments (using that term in its broadest sense), including sociocultural, natural, political, legal and technological. The authors comparatively analyzed Austrian, Slovenian and Swiss mountain destinations, which are located in small countries in the Alpine region, and that makes their environments, innovation levels and stages of development relatively easy to compare. The analysis used 88 managers’ replies to a 72 element questionnaire employing both objective and subjective measures about performance with regard to MDIM dimensions. The findings confirm differences in the stages of tourism development, in innovation levels, as well as in the supporting role of their corresponding wider environments. Swiss and Austrian mountain destinations outperformed Slovenian in almost all respects, but not in protection and quality of the natural environment or in inherited sociocultural attractiveness, where significant differences were not determined. The findings could help development and tourism policy authorities to improve the factors that determine sustainable tourism destination development.     

The evolution of coastal tourism destinations: a path plasticity perspective on tourism urbanisation

Evolutionary and relational approaches to economic development are gaining ground in geography as a discipline, although in the subfield of tourism geography, their potential is only just becoming recognised. This article focuses on the evolution of mature tourism destinations, taking the path dependency concept forward from the notion of path creation into the new domain of path plasticity. Drawing on the notion of cultural political economy, we examine how tourism destinations can break with path dependency routines incrementally and move steadily towards different future paths, which may recast tourism in a different light in the overall “urban” context of the destination. Using a case study of a Mediterranean coastal destination on Catalonia's Costa Daurada, we explore the inter-tangled tourism and urban development processes in relation to the socio-spatial dimensions of urban change. The article argues for a wider range of social and cultural criteria in the analysis of tourism evolution – advocating the use of path plasticity and a cultural political economy approach – to offer an alternative perspective on shifting tourism situations, reflecting the inherently “urbanising” nature of tourism development in the traditional coastal resort context. It adds to the growing literature on governance and strategy-making in sustainable tourism.     

Yearly,monthly and weekly seasonality of tourism demand: A decomposition analysis

Annual seasonal variations in tourism demand have been a central theme in literature. However, annual seasonality is not the only time-based inequality in tourism flows that has important implications on policy-making decisions at destinations. Within the context of tourism, this study aims to make an in-depth analysis of intra-monthly and intra-weekly tourism demand using the entropy and relative redundancy measures as alternative seasonality indicators to the Gini coefficient in order to provide new tools to manage tourism and propose new action policies at these frequencies. In comparison with the Gini coefficient, the entropy measure is simpler to compute and it is easily decomposable. Using the case study of air arrivals and departures to and from the Balearic Islands, results show the appropriateness of entropy and relative redundancy as seasonal indicators but also as a new information tools for tourism seasonality analysis.     

How to evaluate the effects of climate change on tourism

The aim of this study is to assess the most relevant quantitative approaches to evaluating the effects of climate change on tourism. In recent years, numerous empirical studies have conducted evaluations of this kind, based on different methodologies and perspectives. This review shows that the effects of climate change can first be assessed through changes in physical conditions essential to tourism; secondly, by using climate indexes to measure the attractiveness of tourist destinations; and, thirdly, by modelling tourism demand with the inclusion of climate determinants. The review suggests that, although some methodologies are in the early stages of development, different approaches result in a similar map of those areas mainly affected by the problem.     

Rukai indigenous tourism: Representations,cultural identity and Q method

In tourism, cultural representations of indigenous destinations are problematic. They are essential to the promotion of tourism, making destinations understandable and desirable to visitors. But they are also blamed for upsetting the cultural equilibrium of smaller destinations. However, in practice, the origin, mechanism and effects of touristic representations are not easy to identify. In this study, the problem of representations and resident cultural identity in indigenous tourism is explored. In consideration of the generative nature of representations and the contingency of subjectivities toward them, this study is context-specific, focusing on a small but significant community in southern Taiwan where indigenous tourism is a dominant industry and social issue. Q method, a technique designed for the systematic study of subjectivity in terms of opinions, beliefs, and attitudes is employed, eliciting responses from a P set (sample) of 30 participants. Subjectivities were elicited using photographs of one cultural representation, the indigenous Rukai standing stones. It was found that representations must be learned but can be ignored, and that in this community tourism is not the only socio-economic power that drives the feedback loop between representations and subjectivity. For tourism management, implications are that representations can be highly effective tools for destination promotion when informed by the diverse and highly individualized subjectivities of its residents and the production of quality local products.     

Different tourists to different destinations. Evidence from spatial interaction models

Given the importance of tourism as a catalyst for local economic growth, the identification of tourist flows determinants is also important. This paper reports results from an econometric study of tourism flows for the 107 Italian provinces based on origin–destination (OD) spatial interaction models. In addition to distance, the set of explanatory variables includes both pull and push characteristics to assess their relative roles in determining the attractiveness of the provinces to tourists. Hence measures are incorporated for income, density, accessibility, and natural, cultural and recreational attractions. The main results indicate the importance of spatial dependency induced by neighbouring provinces as both origins of, and destinations for trips, a factor commonly overlooked by previous contributions relying on the gravity specification. Inter-neighbouring interactive effects are thus important, and most explanatory variables exhibit the expected effect, with distance and population density showing a negative impact on tourists' decisions when choosing a specific destination, while income, accessibility and attractions are crucial determinants of tourism flows.     

The effect of tourism activity on housing affordability

Although researchers have confirmed the impact of tourism on housing prices in many destinations affected with overtourism, they do not consider housing affordability in relation to the population's income levels. This study explores the relationship between tourism activity and housing affordability, using a sample of Croatian municipalities. Specifically, the study investigates how tourist accommodation, concentration, seasonality and overall vulnerability to tourism influence housing affordability in this emerging tourism-driven European country. The results obtained reveal tourism intensification's deteriorating effect on local residents' abilities to afford housing. The findings indicate a particularly strong tourism seasonality impact, suggesting the presence of common negative externalities, such as employment fluctuations, difficulties in maintaining economic status, and revenue instabilities, in localities prone to seasonal tourism fluctuations.     

Simulating emerging coastal tourism vulnerabilities: an agent-based modelling approach

Coastal tourism destinations face a range of climate-related changes. Prevailing challenges include understanding emerging changes and future uncertainties. A dynamic vulnerability approach is a promising way to analyse emerging socio-ecological vulnerabilities. This research presents an innovative coupling of the human-environment system in the agent-based model Coasting, and is applied to Curaçao's coastal tourism. We observe how operator numbers and environmental attractiveness, proxies for socio-ecological vulnerabilities, change over time. Global sensitivity analysis highlights the main interacting factors behind socio-ecological vulnerabilities. Scenario discovery explores the main drivers contributing to undesirable vulnerabilities. The model's findings provide key insights on which factors tourism destinations need to focus on to prevent socio-ecological vulnerabilities.     

Seasonality in tourist flows: Decomposing and testing changes in seasonal concentration

This paper shows that changes in timing and magnitude of seasonality in tourist flows can be measured by decomposing the change in the Gini index, a widely used index of seasonal concentration, into two components. One of them tracks the change in the pattern of seasonal fluctuations and the second captures the change in their magnitude. To assess whether changes in the seasonal pattern and magnitude are significant, a technique for testing hypotheses concerning the two components is developed. We examine changes in the seasonal concentration of tourist arrivals in six tourist destinations in the Veneto Region, one of the most tourism-oriented regions in Europe, from 2006 to 2016. The magnitude of seasonality significantly decreased in some destinations with a diversified tourism product, such as Euganean Spas and Lake Garda. The seasonal pattern remained substantially stable for all destinations except Venice, where a non-negligible shift in the seasonal pattern occurred.     

Developing creativity in tourist experiences: A solution to the serial reproduction of culture?

As culture is increasingly utilised as a means of social and economic development, the cultural tourism market is being flooded with new attractions, cultural routes and heritage centres. However, many consumers, tired of encountering the serial reproduction of culture in different destinations are searching for alternatives. The rise of skilled consumption, the importance of identity formation and the acquisition of cultural capital in (post)modern society point towards the use of creativity as an alternative to conventional cultural tourism. This paper considers the development of creative spaces, creative spectacles and creative tourism from the perspective of supply and demand. The need for creativity in developing new products and how to address the challenge of serial reproduction are discussed, and examples of creative tourism projects are examined and contrasted to traditional models of cultural tourism.     

The impact of tourism in the Caribbean: A methodological study

Hills, Theo L. and Lundgren, Jan, “The Impact of Tourism in the Caribbean—A Methodological Study,” Annals of Tourism Research, Vol.IV, No.5, May/September 1977, pp. 248–267. The paper examines some economic, cultural and ecological problems arising from the impact of tourism in the Caribbean. Special attention is given to the nature and mechanism of the international tourist system and to the possibility of predicting saturation of tourist destinations by means of an irritation index. Types of data reflecting “space” as a resource are related to many types of tourist data, including a “seasonality index”.     

Temporary population estimates of mass tourism destinations: The case of Benidorm

Benidorm (Spain) is a large-scale tourism destination on the Mediterranean coast, and its temporary population can be divided into users of regulated tourist accommodation and unregistered visitors, as occurs in other destinations. The number of these different types of unregistered temporary inhabitants should be estimated separately to gauge more accurate population figures in tourist destinations which are subject to seasonality. Indicators such as drinking water consumption or solid waste generation are used to estimate the number of unregistered visitors. The results reveal that the average total population of Benidorm at least doubles the registered resident population. Additionally, a population density index has been calculated to assess urban sustainability. The methodology adopted can be applied to other case studies in order to estimate total populations, which is vital for the adequate provision of public services.