Emotional entanglements in tourism research

A scarcity of emotional reflexive research accounts exists within the field of tourism studies, whereby the embodied and emotional researcher is epistemologically accepted as intersecting with the entire research process. This paper seeks to address this gap by exploring one researcher’s emotional entanglements with her research project, within the context of return from long term travel. These entanglements are discussed in terms of their effect on the researcher personally (including her ‘unravelling’ of the entanglements through poetry) and their effect on the research process itself, particularly regarding issues of representation, authority, power and balance of voice. A call for putting emotion at the centre of reflexivity follows, with suggestions of potentially relevant emotionally reflexive research questions.     

Towards an Integrated Image-based Typology of Volunteer Tourism Organisations

This paper focuses on volunteer tourism organisations that offer conservation expeditions, where volunteer tourists can assist in scientific research or ecological restoration. It seeks to identify organisational images and suggest how these images affect the expectations of volunteer tourists. Using the promotional material of volunteer tourism organisations, the contents of organisations' mission statements, promotional photographs and volunteer testimonies were analysed. Potential volunteer tourists were also asked to perform a multiple sorting procedure on the organisations' brochures to assess their images of volunteer tourism organisations. From the results, four groups of volunteer tourism organisations were identified and labelled ‘conservation research expeditions’, ‘holiday conservation expeditions’;, ‘adventure conservation expeditions’ and ‘community holiday expeditions’. It is proposed that organisations need to be aware of their perceived images in order to match their volunteers' expectations and needs, manage tourists' expectations and ensure the success of their volunteer tourism expeditions.     

Naturalizing bodies and places: Tourism Media Campaigns and Heterosexualities in Costa Rica and New Zealand

Drawing on feminist, queer and poststructuralist theories of sexuality this article contributes to the field of tourism branding. Research findings on tourism media campaigns-New Zealand’s ‘100% Pure campaign’, and Costa Rica’s ‘No Artificial Ingredients’—illustrate how places and bodies are co-constructed and heterosexualized. We argue that both campaigns employ familiar landscape tropes of ‘nature’, ‘pureness’, ‘wilderness’, and ‘escape’, which discursively construct places and bodies as ‘natural’, ‘exotic’, and ‘romantic’. We draw on ethnographic and interview data to consider the lived experiences of these discourses for tourists and tourism businesses. By paying attention to the sexualized representations made and remade through tourism media campaigns the article challenges hegemonic conceptualizations of sexualities and offers an exciting future research agenda for tourism studies.     

Linking tourism into emergency management structures to enhance disaster risk reduction

Despite increased global interest in the impacts of natural disasters on tourism, little research has occurred into exploring how these are addressed at the destination level. Creating a link between tourism and disaster risk reduction and management is particularly important in places that rely heavily on tourism and, at the same time, are prone to natural hazards. New Zealand is a good example. Hence, in this paper we use the case study of the Northland region to explore how both tourism and disaster management stakeholders perceive the role of tourism in present and future disaster risk management activities. The overall finding is that tourism in Northland is currently poorly considered in existing disaster management planning, and recent natural disasters have identified a range of gaps and concerns within each of the Four Rs (Reduction, Readiness, Response and Recovery). Based on these insights, and building on the current Civil Defence structure, a template for linking tourism into disaster management is proposed and populated. A Tourism Action Plan, adopted by the Northland ‘Tourism Cluster’, provides a guideline for tourism specific initiatives that complement the existing Civil Defence plans, thus adding value to the formal disaster management efforts. Considering the lack of systematic disaster management in tourism reported in the literature, this research should also be of interest to other tourist destinations and their aspirations for long term sustainability.     

Locating Muslimah in the travel and tourism research

Female Muslims have commonly been stereotyped as a subordinate group. However, their tourism participations have evolved through time that recently, it became a niche tourism segment of its own. Through reviewing existing literature, this study provides a comprehensive analysis and interpretation on the phenomenon of female Muslim travel/tourism. Common research domains were: ‘Choice of travel companion(s)’, ‘Issue of gender subordination’, ‘Gendered identity and religious stereotypes’ and ‘Factors facilitating travel’. This study asserted that female Muslims' perceptions and experiences of travel/tourism are majorly impacted by their religious and gendered identities. The literature appraisal also demonstrated scholarship progressions by analyzing and discussing research approaches taken by existing studies. Ultimately, it drew insights on research gaps and future research directions.     

Tourism,mood and affect: Narratives of loss and hope

Beyond looking to emotion and affect for the purpose of understanding better the tourist experience in itself, this article considers what affect produced through tourism might do vis-à-vis our relationship with the world around us. With a particular focus on the production of ‘hopeful mood’, the article discusses the links between affect and tourism narratives of loss and of hope performed in two New Zealand tourism destinations. That both loss and hope narratives are produced in both destinations illustrates not only how tourism narratives are ‘affective’, but also that the affect produced is potentially selective. The implications of these narratives for tourism’s hopeful ‘worldmaking’ capacities are considered, along with suggested further avenues for research on tourism narratives, mood and affect.     

Ramadan: The month of fasting for Muslims,and tourism studies — Mapping the unexplored connection

This study supplies the Islamic worldview to the tourism literature in order to expand the current denotations associated to key words such as ‘travel’, ‘traveler’ and ‘pilgrimage’. It explores the month of fasting for Muslims: Ramadan, and its association to pilgrimage. The findings of the study indicate that Ramadan being the month of interior pilgrimage offers a strong link to the deep rooted connection between pilgrimage and tourism studies and is a promising area of exploration in conjunction with the unmapped link of interior pilgrimage and tourism studies. The study unearths Ramadan seasonality and Ramadan events in the settings of United Arab Emirates where currently during the Ramadan seasonality the interior pilgrims are facilitated by community events that are largely organized by the relevant tourism authorities. The study proposes further areas of research with reference to: interior pilgrimage, Ramadan seasonality and community events.     

Going for gold as a leisure tourism continuum: clustering motivations for gold panning revisit intention

The way in which people use their spare time differs. Leisure activities and tourism are among the most common of these. Gold panning is a rather unusual niche leisure and tourism activity. Despite some differences, leisure and tourism are generally interrelated in many ways, thus gold panning, is a good example of the leisure tourism continuum. In this study, gold panning is considered as a set of leisure activities within the context of tourism. The aim of the paper is to determine the profile of a gold panner based on their motivations. Therefore, respondents are clustered by means of motivation into two homogenous groups defined as ‘nature seekers’ and ‘true gold panners’. The results suggest that the clusters differ significantly with regards to age, education and marital status, but also in terms of the degree of interest in gold and revisit intention. The originality of the research lies in the fact that gold panning as a leisure activity has seldom been explored under the guise of a leisure and tourist context within existing literature, especially through the means of quantitative research.     

自我民族志在旅游研究中应用评析

在后现代主义思潮的影响下,自我民族志在反思传统民族志中诞生。自我民族志凸显了"自我",是一种对研究者亲身经历的文化体验展开反思性描述的质性研究方法,已经引起了国内外旅游学者关注与应用。但这些研究大都仅采用了自我民族志的方法,未对自我民族志的理论与方法展开深入的探讨。该文以此为契机,首先,在理论层面梳理了自我民族志的起源、内涵,重点阐述了自我民族志与旅游研究的逻辑联系,论述了旅游研究对自我民族志的意义。然后,在此基础上,梳理了2000—2019年71篇应用自我民族志的旅游研究论文,重点阐述旅游领域中自我民族志适用的研究情景,结合文献分析各研究情景中方法论的优势,说明方法论局限以及克服局限的策略。最后,结合已有文献阐述自我民族志如何应用于旅游研究,提炼自我民族志在旅游研究中的理论贡献,并进一步讨论旅游研究应用自我民族志的巨大空间以及对自我民族志范式的贡献。     

Environmental-Economic Measures of Tourism Yield

A focus on ‘tourism yield’ is an important aspect of business strategies to maintain and enhance destination competitiveness. Ideally the notion of ‘tourism yield’ should include tourism's environmental and social value to a destination in addition to economic value. This paper attempts to develop measures of economic and environmental yield. It first describes how measures of economic yield may be estimated and presents results for Australian inbound tourism. Environmental yield estimates are then developed for the same visitor markets. A hybrid approach is employed, combining input-output analysis with an onsite audit for tourist accommodation. The relevant environmental impacts include those on energy use, water use, greenhouse gas emissions and ecological footprint. The findings reveal that, for some inbound markets, simultaneous achievement of relatively high economic and environmental goals is not possible, and that economic-environmental tradeoffs may be necessary. The results have implications for all destinations which use notions of ‘tourism yield’ to inform their marketing strategies.     

Lifestyling entrepreneurs’ sociological expressionism

This study explores the tourism host-home relationship investigated through documentary analysis of photographs choreographed through mutual negotiation between hosts and researcher (collaborative auto-driving) and participants’ spoken narratives (photo-elicitation interviews); we identify the significance for tourism product construction. Major findings concern the sociological expressionism of the tourism lifestyle entrepreneur who creates a certain personal brand identity or ‘lifestyling’ through their commercial home presentation; ‘private’, ‘inclusive’ and ‘temporal’ classification categories of hosts’ favourite spaces in the home are identified, based upon the individual spatial management strategies employed. Depictions of favourite spaces emphasised emotional and sensorial dimensions rather than material things present, and were described as spaces of contentment and tranquillity essential for energising hosts in the ongoing production of the commercial home.     

Women’s mountaineering tourism: an empirical investigation of its theoretical constraint dimensions

The purpose of this study is to investigate the perceived constraints on participating in mountaineering tourism faced by women, and to empirically verify the dimensionality of those constraints. Survey responses from 314 female mountaineers were collected and four constraint dimensions were identified using confirmatory factor analysis. Three of these dimensions: ‘intra-personal’, ‘inter-personal’ and ‘structural’ constraints support earlier findings in the extant literature, both in general and in the adventure literature more specifically. The identification of a fourth dimension relating to ‘family’ constraints represents a theoretical contribution to the literature and an additional barrier to women’s participation in mountaineering tourism. In previous studies, ‘family’ constraints have typically been subsumed within ‘inter-personal’ or ‘intra-personal’ constraints, but have emerged as a distinctly separate constraint category for women in relation to this particular tourist activity. The findings also have important implications for adventure tourism management practice.     

Tourism Crises and Marketing Recovery Strategies

SUMMARY

The recent frequency and intensity of crises and disasters affecting the tourism industry has resulted in a growing body of research into their causes, effects and management, as the bibliographies of the ensuing papers catalogue. To date, most papers and collections of research have taken a broad approach, describing the origins of a particular event which triggered a tourism crises, followed by an examination of the differential effects of the crisis on local residents, staff, tourists and tourism organizations or the environment and infrastructure. They have also discussed rescue efforts and the complexity of management tasks in the immediate aftermath of an event, often pointing to the need for preplanning to mitigate the consequences of any future disaster. Other researchers have contributed directly to the academic debate about how to theorise tourism crisis management, often by drawing on the wider crisis management literature.

The present collection of research differs in that it focuses on one phase of the tasks which managers face after the immediate consequences of a crisis have been dealt with. This phase addresses the question of how to rebuild the market for a tourism service or a destination which has experienced a significant catastrophe, and how to learn from the experience in planning for future crisis response strategies. It is suggested in this paper that the challenges are actually more varied and complex than is implied by the suggestion, found in much of the literature, that the task is about ‘restoring normality.’ The chaos and complexity experienced in the aftermath of a crisis raise general issues of how organizations learn and adapt to change.     

The migration of gymnastics coaches from the Former Soviet Union to New Zealand: an actor–network theory perspective

This article uses actor–network theory (ANT) to examine factors that influenced highly skilled gymnastics coaches from the gymnastics stronghold of the Former Soviet Union to migrate to the geographically and culturally distant nation of New Zealand. Our research diverges from the emphasis on the professional sports labour market that has dominated sports migration research and extends upon the network-orientated approaches that have recently been utilised in sport. The article is informed by the stories of 10 migrant gymnastics coaches obtained through qualitative interviews. We demonstrate how the ANT approach helps reveal how multiple micro- and macro-factors assembled together to motivate and facilitate the coaches’ migration. While economic factors can be identified, we draw attention to a unique facet that has received little previous attention in the sports migration literature: the non-human. We show how the coaches’ migration was facilitated by non-humans such as a disease, Skype, leotards and work visas and that these non-humans played a role in enabling or disrupting migration.     

Cruise trouble. A practice-based approach to studying Arctic cruise tourism

Cruise arrivals in the Arctic often take place in small coastal communities. Although there may be economic benefits for these communities, these are often counterbalanced by social and environmental stresses. In this article, we ask how we can tend to Arctic cruise tourism development using Haraway's concept of staying with the trouble. As a way to bridge often polarized views on cruise tourism as either an economic tool or a destructive force, we propose a practice-based research approach to engage with the complexities of cruise tourism. The aim is to foster response-abililty for Arctic cruise communities to live (better) with cruise tourism. We argue that practice-based approaches help researchers ‘stay with the trouble’ as it is rooted in everyday experiences and the materiality of cruise destinations. Also, its flat ontology supports a ‘tinkering’ approach to cruise practices.     

Promoting sustainable tourism in an urban context: Recent developments in Malaga city,Andalusia

The term ‘sustainable tourism’ is rarely used within a specifically urban context yet the concept is as equally applicable to city‐based tourism as it is to rural areas. This paper explores recent attempts to promote sustainable tourism in the city of Malaga, southern Spain and examines the ways in which the activity of tourism is being more closely integrated with other facets of the city's economy and life. Rather than seeing tourism as a ‘separate’ and ‘exotic’ activity, the city authorities are attempting to use tourism in a creative way. It is argued that it is this very integration which constitutes one of the main features of ‘sustainability’ within an urban context. Specific examples of the kinds of strategies being pursued are examined and the paper concludes with a critique of these initiatives from the perspective of the debate on sustainability.     

Actor-network theory and stakeholder collaboration: The case of Cultural Districts

The tourism literature has increasingly recognised the importance of integrating tourism and culture with other value chains. Though the value of such integration is uncontested, it does raise several questions relating to stakeholder collaboration. Despite substantial research in this field, there remain gaps in our knowledge of the micro-dynamics of stakeholder collaborations in building tourism/cultural systems. This paper contributes to this debate by investigating the micro-level interactions among stakeholders during the conceptualisation of a large collaborative project: a Cultural District. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) the research shows that, though rigid sequential planning is not viable, conceptualisation is facilitated by deploying three ANT rules: enrolling actors, fact-building and circulating translations. These rules are used to define a “conditional path” whereby specific actions are activated when controversies emerge.     

Sexual behavior in women's tourist experiences: Motivations,behaviors, and meanings

The research literature has traditionally focused on commercial sex tourism between tourists and locals but virtually ignored sexual behavior among tourists themselves. This exploratory study aspires to fill this gap by creating a taxonomy of non-commercial sex for women who engage in various forms of tourism. The analysis of in-depth interviews with Israeli self-defined heterosexual women reveals that different forms of tourism involve various types of sexual behavior as follows: (1) ‘Practicing Sex’ referring to sex on rest and relaxation vacations; (2) ‘Must Have Sex’ relating to sex on city break vacations; (3) ‘Sexual Adventure’ describing casual sex on backpacking trips; (4) ‘Controlled Sexual Desire’ referring to work related trips and vacations with children. The study findings are discussed in terms of their contribution to the research area of sex in tourism.     

Collective tourism social entrepreneurship: A means for community mobilization and social transformation

Communities depicted by lack of opportunities for development often look to tourism initiatives as a means to combine economic growth and community building. Such activity highlights a nexus between tourism, social entrepreneurship and community development. This nexus has been investigated somewhat in tourism literature, but lacks empirical backing, as well as theoretical refinement. We argue that a collective perspective on social entrepreneurship in the tourism context is needed, and introduce a concept and framework for ‘Collective Tourism Social Entrepreneurship’. We investigate how these principles are utilized by local communities to combat depopulation and deterioration in two Danish destinations, and find that the proposed process can create (social) value even if the expected result is never reached.     

Towards decolonising tourism and hospitality research in the Philippines

In recent years, scholars have focused their attention on demarcating the neocolonial situations that permeate the tourism and hospitality academy. The ‘critical turn’ in tourism studies called for the decolonisation of tourism and hospitality research. In this paper, I explore and challenge the state of tourism and hospitality research in the Philippines, by analysing the works of Filipino tourism and hospitality academics. Through a systematic quantitative literature review, I identify the research themes investigated by Filipino scholars on Philippine tourism and hospitality and examine the methodologies and epistemologies employed in the selected research outputs. The findings indicate that colonial legacies and neocolonial situations are strongly present in Philippine tourism and hospitality knowledge production. To challenge these scenarios, I suggest a decolonial agenda informed by Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino psychology), a native epistemological perspective. This article serves as a contribution to the epistemological decolonisation of tourism knowledge production in Asian contexts.