Impacts of Thailand’s tourism tax cut: A CGE analysis

This study examines Thailand’s tourism tax cut policy aimed to alleviate negative impacts arising from the 2011 flood on the tourism industry and economy. The proposed TRAVELTHAI model, a medium-scale dynamic computable general equilibrium model, serves as a powerful analytical tool for effective policy decision making. Direct-tourism industries benefit the most from the industry specific tax policy, deemed a suitable short-run policy in response to the flood. Tax cuts on inbound tourism improves the terms of trade and marginally stimulates Thailand’s GDP. It is recommended that the development of fiscal policies should be more inclusive, in order to achieve better national impacts in the long run.     

New Zealand’s transformed adventure: from hero myth to accessible tourism experience

Sir Edmund Hillary’s first ascent of Mt Everest in 1953 provided New Zealand with a global adventure representation. His image aligned to a mythologised pioneering cultural identity. Although the privileged masculine, white, class and imperialist features of this cultural myth have been critiqued, adventure remains a positively valued social tenet in New Zealand. Since 1953 socially recognised ‘adventure-makers’ have sustained traditional adventure practices and narratives. In the 1990s, however, bungy jumping became the prominent representation of New Zealand adventure. This challenged traditional understandings, providing an avenue to explore the contested social space and features underpinning understandings of adventure. Guided by Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of social life, the paper examines the practices and stories of 12 New Zealand ‘adventure-makers’ with sustained distinction. The interpretation draws on discursive data from newspapers, magazines, websites, biographies, auto-biographies and research interviews. The rule-changing social distinction afforded bungy jumping is not a rupture of New Zealand’s adventure habitus. It does, however, highlight a collective self-deception in negotiation of the understandings of adventure in relation to the features of ‘misadventure’, ‘exclusivity’ and the ‘extraordinary’. The bungy jumping leap innovatively transforms the danger, myth and extraordinary into a recognisable, individually inclusive experience of adventure.     

Seasonality and cycles in tourism demand—redux

Analyzing tourism demand cycles is of strong interest to researchers and forecasters. However, often the preponderance of seasonality encumbers the derivation of cycles that are free of seasonal patterns. Using recent advances in time-series econometrics, we offer a solution. We employ two methods that produce cycles that are robust to seasonal properties of the data; cycles from seasonally adjusted and unadjusted data are virtually indistinguishable.     

Pro-environmental behaviours of visitors to Thailand’s national parks and factors discriminating the behaviours

ABSTRACT

The objectives of this study were to classify types of pro-environmental behaviours (PEBs) and to investigate factors discriminating PEBs of visitors to national parks in Thailand. The questionnaire was used to collect data from 800 Thai visitors. Data was analysed using factor analysis and discriminant analysis. The findings demonstrated that PEBs were classified into three groups. Perceived controllability represented the key variable discriminating the PEBs of visitors. The recommendations for provoking PEBs are 1) improving basic facilities to encourage PEBs of visitors, and 2) creating effective interpretive messages, which address the beneficial consequences when action is taken with appropriate behaviour.     

Thailand wine tourism: a dream or a reality?

Conventionally, wine tourism is mainly popular in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Europe regions. Interestingly, Thailand, despite being a young wine-producing country, has emerged as a potential wine tourism provider within the Southeast Asia regions. This research aimed to evaluate the competitiveness of Thailand wine tourism’s within its regional growth. Porter’s Four Diamond Model was used as a tool to assess this industry competitiveness. Three wineries in Thailand were visited and qualitative approaches comprising interview and observation were utilized as the means of data collection. Triangulation was used to analyze the reliability of the data gathered. The finding showed that wine tourism in Thailand was still an infant industry as most tourists and tourism operators were still not aware of the product offered. However, the wineries themselves had already owned the competency to serve the market.     

The summer of the Spirits: Spiritual tourism to America’s foremost village of spirit mediums

The historic Spiritualist village of Lily Dale, New York, is a popular summer tourist destination in America, attracting approximately 20,000 visitors per year. This research argues that many of these visitors are “spiritual seekers”. Spiritual seeking is an important movement in the west. To date, however, there has been insufficient attention paid to the specific places in which this spiritual questing is undertaken. This research uses the concept of spiritual tourism to understand the summer journey to this part of America. Drawing on a range of ethnographic data, it finds that affective destinations play an irreducible part of many people's spiritual lives; it may only be through travel to dedicated places that seekers’ aspirations can be fully realized.     

Politics and tourism promotion: Hong Kong’s myth making

By using “crisis of identity” as background, this study analyses how post-colonial Hong Kong relies on myths that are grounded in its complex, centuries-old socio-cultural political heritage to convey through tourism an identity different and separate from that of China. This qualitative inquiry, which relies on both online and printed promotional documents reinforced by primary data collected through in-depth interviews, proposes an explanation of the symbolic representation of tourism through four sequential myths. The article concludes that Hong Kong exploits its colonial past to create an identity that enhances its “local Chineseness” with a Western flavor and positions the territory to assume an increasingly hybrid identity to avoid being just another Chinese city.     

A framework for analyzing intergovernmental collaboration – The case of ASEAN tourism

Intergovernmental collaboration in tourism among ASEAN nations has received little attention in the literature despite the significant economic contribution that tourism makes in the region. This paper helps to improve our understanding of the phenomenon by providing an overview of the progress made since 2002, and exploring the factors that facilitated and hindered progress. It was found that many of the suggested measures in the action plan, 'Roadmap for Integration of Tourism Sector’, were either not implemented at all or are overdue, although relatively significant progress was made in travel facilitation and human resources development. The authors suggest that current theories of collaboration do not adequately explain the patterns of ASEAN tourism. The paper seeks to expand the boundaries of theory by presenting a framework of collaboration which dissects the facilitators and inhibitors along three dimensions: stakeholders, resources, and processes and mechanisms. Recommendations to expedite and strengthen the collaboration are then formulated.     

Opportunity or threat? Finnish hunters’ attitudes to hunting tourism

This article examines elements of the social sustainability of hunting tourism development by scrutinising Finnish hunters’ opinions on three possible scenarios related to hunting tourism: the threat of an exclusion of local hunters, the threat of rising rents of hunting land and the threat to Finnish hunting customs and practice due to increasing numbers of foreign hunting tourists. Hunters’ positions on these three issues are mapped and the determinants of their attitudes are analysed using unique national survey data on Finnish hunters and their attitudes (N= 1193). The results show a clear ambivalence to hunting tourism among hunters. While a majority of hunters tend to view hunting tourism as a threat, a large minority relate to it more positively. These attitudinal patterns can be explained only partly by socioeconomic factors, whereas factors pertaining to hunting experience and hunting profile play a somewhat more prominent role in understanding the legitimacy that hunting tourism enjoys in the eyes of hunters in Finland. Age, rural residence and participation in wildlife management are also found important for some issues. The ambiguities revealed could pose major problems for social sustainability and hunting tourism management and development.     

The dynamics of tourism’s carbon footprint in Beijing,China

Abstract

Beijing is an important hub for global tourism, but the extent of tourism’s contribution to Beijing’s carbon footprint remains unclear. We integrated an environmentally extended multiregional input–output model and the tourism satellite account in a study to estimate the dynamics of Beijing’s tourism-related carbon footprint in the post-financial crisis period. Our findings indicate that from 2007 to 2012, whereas the carbon footprint of inbound tourists in Beijing steadily decreased, that of domestic tourists increased. The composition of carbon footprints for the consumption activities of inbound and domestic tourists differed substantially. We also traced the spatial distribution of carbon sources associated with tourism consumption in Beijing. In light of our findings, we offer recommendations to target the adoption of low-carbon consumption patterns by domestic tourists, and energy optimization of service suppliers by increasing energy use efficiency and the renewable energy ratio. In addition, we recommend that public and government should seek to lower energy costs and reduce carbon emissions throughout the life cycle of commodities. We conclude that the government and tourism authorities should actively promote carbon and wider environmental awareness, and that producers must seek to improve the efficiency of their energy use by reducing carbon emissions at source.     

Africa’s outbound tourism: An Almost Ideal Demand System perspective

While African outbound tourism represents 3% of international tourism, the continent is experiencing high economic growth rates, contributing to a fast-growing middle-class and a large potential market for international travel. This article analyses African outbound travel to all other continents from an Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) perspective. Both static and dynamic AIDS are estimated and the resulting elasticities indicate that: (i) African tourism to all continents is a normal good, although Africa and Oceania can be considered luxury destinations; (ii) Asia and North America are the most price elastic destinations, and price increases in these continents will lead to substitution to Europe and Africa; (iii) there is persistence in African arrivals to North and South America.     

The matter of pride: positioning one’s self in tourism inquiry

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a broader investigation of pride within tourism contexts, presenting it as an important concept for the enhancement of interpersonal understanding and cross-cultural empathy in tourism research and education, and also as a valuable emotion for teachers, students, and researchers to explore within themselves. Pride is applied here in the consideration of why certain research topics may be overlooked within tourism studies, and as an illustration of the benefits of utilizing qualitative, constructivist research and pedagogical approaches that incorporate methodologies of reflexivity and subjectivity. Through this exploration of pride, the author promotes interdisciplinary approaches of inquiry, with a focus on the utility of philosophy for students and scholars alike, toward deepening understandings of both self and other.