Sustainable Mi'kmaw cultural tourism development in Nova Scotia,Canada: examining cultural tourist and Mi'kmaw perspectives

This study assessed tourists' motivations and satisfaction in participating in authentic Mi'kmaw tourism activities in Nova Scotia, Canada, as well as the ideas, perceptions and components of sustainable cultural tourism development from the Mi'kmaw perspective. To solicit the tourists' perspective, surveys were administered to tourists visiting the existing Mi'kmaw cultural tourism sites in Nova Scotia, while the Mi'kmaw perspective was obtained through key informant interviews. The results of the survey suggest that tourists visiting the Mi'kmaw cultural tourism sites were highly educated and deeply interested in learning about culture and participating in authentic cultural experiences. Tourists were also highly satisfied with their experience and were interested in participating in aboriginal tourism again. Findings regarding the Mi'kmaw perspective indicate a focus on cultural tourism's ability to educate both tourists and the Mi'kmaw people on the Mi'kmaw culture as well as provide economic opportunities for Mi'kmaw communities. Of greater importance to the Mi'kmaw people is the preservation and protection of the Mi'kmaw culture. Conclusions drawn from the research include recommendations for the future success and sustainability of the Mi'kmaw cultural tourism sector. This study's findings may also inform other Canadian aboriginal communities seeking to develop robust and sustainable cultural tourism in their own settings.     

An investigation of the influence of heritage tourism on local people's sense of place: the Macau youth's experience

With Macau making inroads into heritage tourism, Macau people are given a push to rediscover the city's heritage values. This renewed sense of appreciation has afforded locals across all levels of society a new perspective of their homeland. As such, with heritage tourism continuing to blossom in a heritage-minded society, inhabitants' sense of place (SOP) may be affected accordingly. Although tourism research literature does not lack timely discussions of Macau's heritage tourism, no studies to date have effectively explored the influence of heritage tourism on Macau people's SOP. Owing to this, the present study aims to investigate the influence of heritage tourism on SOP among young people in Macau.     

A Case Study: Enhancing Laos' Tourism Sector Performance Through Destination Human Resource Development

Tourism in the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Laos) is a relatively new phenomenon that commenced in earnest in the late 1990s. A decade later, the country's tourism portfolio is dominated by regional visitors originating from neighbouring China, Thailand and Vietnam who generally tend to come in large numbers, are relatively low spenders and register short average length of stays. In order to reap the fiscal benefits of tourism and sustain the nation's fragile cultural and ecological makeup, the Government of Laos is being challenged to establish ways to shift the balance of its tourism demand to more profitable and lower impact market segments. A human resource development strategy published by the Lao National Tourism Administration in collaboration with Luxembourg Development Cooperation suggests that a sustained investment in people will improve tourism sector service quality, which in turn will result in increased industry profitability. This paper explores the existing human resource environment in Laos' tourism sector and outlines the required actions by various stakeholders to achieve improved sector performance and stewardship of the country's fragile culture and environment.     

Gender and sustainable tourism: reflections on theory and practice

Despite the rich and diverse tradition of research on the gender dimensions of tourism, such studies have had little impact on transforming unequal gendered power relations in the sector itself. In this paper, we are concerned with why this is the case and what steps might be taken to redress this situation. The paper argues that the challenges inherent in gender mainstreaming processes within public policies worldwide are replicated and – to some extent – exacerbated in the tourism sector. We contend that, despite its substantive insight into the sector, the impact of such literature has been minimal. We further suggest that this is, in part, due to the sustainable tourism paradigm's resistance to incorporating gender equality and gender analysis as core principles. In order to develop these arguments, we reflect on our experiences as specialist consultants in gender and sustainable tourism, drawing out some of the key tensions of integrating gender into sustainable tourism projects. In conclusion, we argue that there is substantive work to be done for gender to be integrated into the theory and practice of sustainable tourism, offering recommendations as to how this process might be improved.     

Heritage Buildings and Tourism: An Experiential View

There has been a lack of attention in previous heritage tourism studies to the experiential relationship between heritage buildings and tourism. The aim of this paper is to explore the experiences gained by international tourists from heritage buildings in a particular region of New Zealand: Hawke's Bay. Specifically, the paper seeks insight into the specific attributes of heritage buildings that influenced the experiences of international tourists in the region. An increased understanding of the experiential relationship between heritage buildings and tourism is essential in strengthening support for preservation, for product development and promotion. Fifty semi-structured, and 66 photograph-supported, interviews conducted with international tourists visiting Hawke's Bay elicited three key experiential themes that emerged from respondents' narratives. These are ‘visual appeal’, ‘personal reflections’ and ‘engaging experiences’. Specifically, it was found that a tourism townscape is not a passive space. Heritage buildings render the townscape an experiential space filled with emotion, mindfulness, engagement and personal meaning. The paper concludes that this finding has important implications for destination promotion and product development and stresses the need for future research into the relationship between heritage buildings and tourism.     

Tourism strategies and climate change: rhetoric at both strategic and grassroots levels about growth and sustainable development in Finland

This paper explores how global issues such as climate change are taken into account in tourism strategy texts and contrasts these findings with how the issue is seen at the grassroots level by local businesses. We analyse how both levels approach adaptation to climate change. Using Boltanski and Thévenot's six common “worlds” of justification model for debates on public issues, we analyse the rhetoric of national, regional, and local tourism strategies in Finland and then explore how the rhetoric is employed by interviewing 42 local tourism actors. The strategy analysis shows that strategic documents do not simply describe situations but are active in creating and shaping future development, and how different kinds of “orders of worth” are used, to establish acceptable “universal truths” to shape through consensus how tourism actors think about the sector's future. Results show that at a strategic level, climate change issues are dealt with in an abstract manner, concentrating on the viewpoints of markets and industry, while ecological justification is lacking, and lacks urgency. Operational instructions are not provided for the entrepreneurs. The actors’ interviews show that structural changes in the sector are demanded but both tourism growth and nature's survival are taken for granted.     

Past,Present, and Future of Tourism Education

SUMMARY

Tourism education in Korea, mandated by the Higher Education Act, has evolved rapidly in response to the tourism industry's growth and labor demands for the last four decades. As tourism education has matured and become increasingly recognized as a legitimate academic field of study, the Korean tourism education has attempted to generate future quality workforce and to establish the status of tourism as a prominent research oriented discipline. The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the Korean tourism industry and tourism education over the past four decades and to suggest future directions for Korean education in the 21st century. By improving current curricula according to today's fast changing tourism business environment and cooperating with the tourism industry with the aid of the government on policies and regulations, Korean tourism education will continue to contribute to the Korean tourism industry as a legitimate partner.     

Agroecological tourism: bridging conservation,food security and tourism goals to enhance smallholders’ livelihoods on South Pentecost,Vanuatu

Smallholder farmers continue to make up the largest proportion of the world's disadvantaged. Rural smallholders in the South Pacific are particularly vulnerable to climate change, underinvestment and growing competition for land and resources. Strengthening synergies between agriculture and tourism through avenues such as agritourism has been widely discussed; however, very little research has approached these concepts from a sustainability perspective. This case study of rural Ni-Vanuatu smallholders uses the Agroecology and Sustainable Rural Livelihoods Framework (ASRLF) to explore tourism's potential contribution to improved conservation and food security outcomes. Data collection combined participatory methods such as “storian sessions” with analysis of secondary data.

The findings highlight minimal current opportunities for rural Ni-Vanuatu smallholders to gain significantly from the tourism sector in Vanuatu. The shift from traditional gardening systems to cash cropping monocultures is also conflicting with tourism and conservation goals. This paper puts forward agroecological tourism as a strategy for integrating positive conservation, food security and livelihood outcomes for rural smallholders. It defines agroecological tourism as having a primary focus on the interpretation of sustainable traditional agroecosystems which exhibit cultural and heritage significance. Agroecological tourism has potential to support traditional practices, enhance the preservation of cultural knowledge and promote sustainable farming practices.     

Females' perspectives on tourism's impact and their employment in the sector: The case of Petra,Jordan.

This study aims to explore the trend towards gender equality in the tourism sector of the Petra region, Jordan. To do so, a mixed methods design including a questionnaire and in-depth interviews was employed for female residents of rural and urban areas in the region. The results show that women do not have favourable view of tourism's economic impacts and that several barriers exist to their employment in the tourism sector. The findings' implications and future studies are addressed.     

Considering Tobler's first law of geography in a tourism context

Despite potential benefits from applying Tobler's law in a tourism context, the law has been used sparingly within the tourism literature. This study seeks to expand the use of Tobler's law in tourism research by examining the relationship between tourists' distance travelled to a destination and the perceived degree of emotional closeness such visitors have with community residents. In doing so, visitor data from three uniquely distinct Texas destinations were analyzed. Results suggest that visitors to the destinations not only differed in their average travel distances, but also the perceived levels of emotional solidarity with residents. Results supported Tobler's law in a tourism context, whereby results indicated that the further an individual travelled to a destination, the less they agreed with feeling close to destination residents. Implications and future research direction opportunities are offered at the close of the work.     

Current issues in tourism: Mitigating climate change in sustainable tourism research

This paper adopts a problematising review approach to examine the extent of mitigating climate change research in the sustainable tourism literature. As climate change has developed into an existential global environmental crisis and while tourism's emissions are still increasing, one would expect it to be at the heart of sustainable tourism research. However, from a corpus of 2573 journal articles featuring ‘sustainable tourism’ in their title, abstract, or keywords, only 6.5% covered climate change mitigation. Our critical content analysis of 35 of the most influential papers found that the current methods, scope and traditions of tourism research hamper effective and in-depth research into climate change. Transport, the greatest contributor to tourism's emissions, was mostly overlooked, and weak definitions of sustainability were common. Tight system boundaries, lack of common definitions and incomplete data within tourism studies appear to hamper assessing ways to mitigate tourism's contribution to climate change.     

A review of the IPCC Fifth Assessment and implications for tourism sector climate resilience and decarbonization

The Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013–2014 was the most comprehensive analysis of anthropogenic climate change, its impacts, and potential responses. It concluded that climate change is “unequivocal” and human activities are the dominant cause. Avoidance of “dangerous” climate change will require sustained substantial reductions of emissions by mid-century and that net emissions decrease to zero before 2100. This paper describes, reviews and explains the place of tourism in AR5 and AR5's relevance for tourism's future, including impacts, adaptation, vulnerabilities, and mitigation. Tourism's position in AR5 has strengthened, particularly with respect to the recognition of transboundary impacts, the sector's contribution to climate change and its mitigation requirements. Major regional knowledge gaps persist. A lack of understanding of the integrated impacts of climate change and the effectiveness of adaptation strategies potentially hinders the development of resilient tourism operations and destinations. Uncertainties regarding tourist response to climate change impacts and mitigation policy impede predictions of tourism demand. The implications of different decarbonization pathways for the future of international tourism represent a key knowledge gap. The limited response of key tourism organizations to AR5 contributes to the risks climate change poses to the sector.     

Reviving tourism industry post-COVID-19: A resilience-based framework

The COVID-19 pandemic struck the tourism industry severely. Based on the review of 35 papers that studied the tourism industry in the wake of the pandemic, we propose a resilience-based framework for reviving the global tourism industry post-COVID-19. Our framework outlines four prominent factors for building resilience in the industry: government response, technology innovation, local belongingness, and consumer and employee confidence. We argue that using such inclusive resilience; the tourism industry may transform into a new global economic order characterized by sustainable tourism, society's well-being, climate action, and the involvement of local communities. We also offer directions for future research in the area.     

Could virtual reality effectively market slow travel in a heritage destination?

A recent trend in tourism research involves the application of high technology in marketing practices such as virtual reality (VR), cell phone apps, and new media. Among these, VR is the most novel. In 2016, Discovery Travel created TRVLR, which includes all seven continents. Even earlier, specific tourist destinations were providing VR content about their respective locales. These venues expose potential tourists to tourist locations by immersing them in a visceral, 360-degree storytelling setting. However, while VR has gradually grown in popularity in the tourism industry, the marketing effects have been infrequently studied by academia. This research asked participants to view a VR presentation of a famous 700-year-old Chinese painting, and investigated viewers' nostalgia and ST travel intentions. Information was collected from 308 samples at certain popular tourist destinations around Fuzhou in the Fujian Province of China, and Taipei and Taoyuan in Taiwan. Structural equation modeling was then used to analyze the collected data and test the hypotheses. The findings indicate that VR is a very useful tool for encouraging respondents to travel to Jinan in a slower and more intensely observational manner, significantly arousing their sense of nostalgia and leading to a strong intention to ST to Jinan. This research provides important insights into how this new technology might function as a tool for marketing Jinan, a tier-two but historically important destination in China. The implications of these findings are important to understanding the associations for potential tourists among VR use, destination marketing, and travel intention, particularly when the object city is relatively unknown.     

Human-robot interaction: Conceptualising trust in frontline teams through LEGO® Serious Play®

Due to fast-paced developments in the technological sphere, we witness robots becoming commonplace in hospitality. While research has focused on technical and functional aspects of robots, the ways in which robots could become effective members of human service teams are less understood. By taking a human-robot interaction (HRI) lens, this study investigates the impact of integrating non-human service providers into human teams with a focus on trust. A qualitative focus group approach with the LEGO® Serious Play® method is employed to open novel avenues in tourism research, and to build, visualise and distil what human-robot interaction in hospitality frontline teams could look like. The study's contribution is a conceptual framework that reveals three dominant factors of trust and their sub-dimensions necessary for successful future human-robot interaction in frontline teams in tourism, hospitality and the wider service sector.     

Designing interpretive audio tours to enhance meaningful learning transfer at a historic site

The purpose of this research was to examine transfer of meaningful learning in a free-choice learning setting. Specifically, this research looked at the effect of interpretive message design on visitors' ability to transfer leaning from a heritage tourism site. This was an important perspective to gain, since learning transfer has not been explored in a free-choice learning environment but is an important learning outcome for heritage site visitors. Interpretive messages are common tools used to enhance learning at heritage sites and can be manipulated to enhance learning transfer. This Canadian case study offers preliminary insight into interpretive techniques useful for enhancing transfer and provides insight into future research that could improve our understanding of meaningful learning at tourism destinations. The theoretical and practical implications of this research will be examined and an overview of future research stemming from this study will be provided.     

If you dig it, they will come!: Archaeology heritage sites and tourism development in Belize, Central America

Tapping into a growing global tourism market, in recent years the Government of Belize has been marketing and promoting tourism as its primary economic sector. The latest efforts have included the cruise ship sector and marketing Mayan cultural history for tourism. Three phases of Mayan excavation can be identified: (1) pre-mid-1990s when sites were scientific exercises with tourism following; (2) the 1990s to present with the archaeological digs such as at Caracol fostering tourism development as the project is undertaken; and, (3) future sites yet to be excavated. This paper explores the positive and negative impacts of developing Mayan sites for tourism in Belize. The results are based on a survey of face-to-face interviews conducted with tourists based in San Ignacio, a community in west-central Belize. San Ignacio is adjacent to the Cahal Pech archaeological site and within a short drive of the Xunantunich and Caracol sites. Caracol is only partially excavated with temporary infrastructure providing access to tourists. In fact, the income generated from this access pays for continued excavations. The findings indicate that while there are obvious educational and economic benefits for such development, there are also concerns about how much is too much.     

Romanian tourism in the post-communist period

This paper examines tourism development in post-communist Romania. It first examines tourism trends between 1989 and 1997. International arrivals are faltering, due to political/economic instability since 1989, the legacy of a decaying tourism infrastructure, and poor standards of service. Post-communist economic restructuring has significantly depressed domestic tourism, with the accommodation sector also declining. This leads to a discussion on tourism restructuring, particularly the privatization of accommodation, the introduction and regulation of standards for it, and the training/education of tourism personnel. Next, future prospects are considered, specially rural, heritage and cultural tourism. The paper concludes that, despite Romania's considerable tourism potential, the immediate future prospects are not encouraging.     

Climate change in Northern Sweden: intra-regional perceptions of vulnerability among winter-oriented tourism businesses

Climate change is a potential threat to society and business. Although research has noted that the tourism sector may be robust on the macro scale, significant losses at local levels have been suggested. This paper examines Upper Norrland, in Northern Sweden, by measuring the perceptions of winter-oriented tourism entrepreneurs. Their perceptions of potential threats from climate change are assessed, including how entrepreneurs view the future, in terms of climate change impacts and sustainability of the region as a winter-tourism destination. A quantitative survey of entrepreneurs (n = 63) gave responses along geographical and operator dimensions to reveal local differences within the Upper Norrland region, showing the coastland to be perceived as more exposed to change than inland areas. Venue-based businesses see climate change as a higher priority than activity-based, potentially mobile, businesses, regardless of their location. The general perception among businesses is that climate change will not drastically impact the tourism sector over the next 10 years. A basic model for mapping local differences is outlined to stimulate further study of the under-researched intra-regional nuances in climate change and tourism research. A case is made for regional planners to use this tool and to educate local businesses on adaptation techniques.