Regional policy and tourism: A quasi-natural experiment

China’s Western Development Strategy (WDS) has generated stark differences in policy environments for tourism development. Considering the WDS as a quasi-natural experiment, the paper applied an increasingly important regression discontinuity design method to tourism studies and explored the causal effect of the WDS on tourism by comparing treated and untreated cities proximal to the geographic boundary of the WDS. We prove that the WDS has caused a significantly positive effect on tourism development and is estimated to be up to 6% and vary from 5.9% to 6.7%. The mechanism analysis indicates that the WDS can affect tourism development through infrastructure construction and tax incentives.     

Destinizing Finnmark: Place making through dogsledding

This paper illuminates an emerging dogsledding-tourism nexus in Finnmark through a place perspective and asks how sled dogs and mushers change the place in touristically relevant ways and what is at stake in such processes. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, encounters and interactions that sled dogs and mushers become part of through their performances in place, are analysed. The paper brings tourism and relational geographies together while describing the ecologically, geographically, and historically embeddedness of dogsledding. Contingent touristic creativities and becomings are analysed through a more-than-representational place theoretical perspective that conceptualizes tourism emergences as ‘destinization of place’. The perspective encompasses non-human as well as human accomplices in touristic transformations and illuminates the complex political and ecological entanglements that touristic changes imply.     

Effects of political instability in consolidated destinations: The case of Catalonia (Spain)

Catalonia is one of the most successful tourist regions in Spain. This article analyses the immediate impact that the instability associated to the recent political situation in Catalonia has had on the arrivals and spending of international tourists in the region using the classical Box-Jenkins method (ARIMA) and the more recent Bayesian Structural Time-Series Models. The results obtained indicate that during the final quarter of 2017, political events led to a reduction in the arrivals and spending of tourists in the region, although whether this impact reached statistical significance depends on the estimation method used.     

Assessing the impact of tourist flows on emergency department treatment speed for residents and tourists. The case of Sorrento

Tourism is a fundamental lever of the economic and cultural development of a location. Large tourist flows can negatively impact the provision of public services, such as healthcare. This study aims to investigate emergency department (ED) treatment speed under increased demand caused by tourism. The analysis was conducted on data (covering March–October 2018) collected from the ED of a hospital in Sorrento, a renowned coastal tourist destination in Campania, Italy, by using a two-step strategy. First, we resort to the Kaplan-Meier method to compare treatment in the ED between residents and tourists. Second, through the Cox proportional hazards model, we study the impact of group-specific characteristics on the speed of treatment. The main empirical findings highlight that treatment speed is highly influenced by age and by the languages spoken by tourists. Foreign tourists are best served in off-peak periods, while in the peak arrival period, the healthcare system experiences difficulties, especially for those facing higher language barriers. What emerges is the necessity for a tourism destination to adopt measures to cope with the language heterogeneity of tourists. In a multi-cultural touristic context, healthcare providers and institutions should address the challenge of language barriers by using specialist interpreter services.     

Exploring the traveller underinsurance problem

Recent research has found that, in general, travellers are significantly underinsured when travelling abroad. Travel is a unique market among insurance products as there are factors that exacerbate the uncertainty from the consumers’ perspective, such as variable time periods of being insured, variable forms of coverage and scale, level of knowledge of the risks at the destination and the activities to be undertaken. We view the current state of the travel insurance market as inefficient as consumers are deemed generally misinformed and unaware of the intricacies of the products on offer and, we argue, behave sub-optimally due to behavioural patterns and perceptions regarding travel. In this commentary, we discuss issues that are unique to travel insurance products which may distort consumer perceptions and highlight a research agenda to address these issues and improve efficiency in the market.     

The secondary crisis communication of Occupy Central on Weibo: A response to Denis Tolkach

This is a response to the rejoinder by Tolkach (2018) to Luo and Zhai's (2017) paper (“I will never go to Hong Kong again” How the secondary crisis communication of “Occupy Central” on Weibo shifted to a tourism boycott). The authors recognize Tolkach's suggestion on academic debates but hold different opinions to his arguments. Thus, further clarification is provided to Tolkach's two main concerns: the impact of Occupy Central on Hong Kong tourism and sentiment analysis of censored material. This response emphasizes that Luo and Zhai primarily discussed the secondary crisis communication and public emotions that arose in the Chinese social media over the events in Hong Kong, and not the events themselves. Additionally this rejoinder provides more information on Tourism between mainland China and Hong Kong, the environment of Chinese social media, and academic research progress in mainland China. It also advocates an “empathetic understanding” in cross-cultural academic dialogue.     

Holidays under the hegemony of hyper-connectivity: getting away,but unable to escape?

Holidays have been imagined as occasions of escape and liminal leisure. This conceptualisation requires re-evaluation as a consequence of the widespread adoption of portable communication devices (smartphones) and the use of Web 2.0 interactive platforms (social media). Studies suggest that the gratifications of contact with the ‘other’, and the enjoyment of the licence associated with the liminal condition, are compromised by endemic contact with the domicile. An analysis draws on the work of Heidegger and Althusser, and is supported by insights from Foucault, Arendt and Lacan. It is argued that users are ‘enframed’ and subjected by their devices. This re-imagining is representative of an evolving change in the human condition, of which the compromising of tourism-as-escape is but one manifestation.     

Tourism in Iceland: Persistence and seasonality

This paper analyses tourism in Iceland using fractional integration and taking into account the seasonality and the degree of persistence in the data. Using annual data, the unit root hypothesis cannot be rejected, implying permanency of shocks. However using, monthly data, a break is found at 2009m7 and the orders of integration are in the interval (0, 0,5) suggesting mean reversion. The conclusion is that exogenous shocks impacting inbound tourism do not persist and tend to disappear relatively fast. The key policy implications thereof are reported at the end of the paper, critiquing the classical response to perceived slumps in inbound tourism that include marketing and promotion instead of developing infrastructure in anticipation of resumed growth in inbound tourism.     

Effects of enhanced air connectivity on the Kenyan tourism industry and their likely welfare implications

This paper investigates the links between air connectivity, tourism benefits and welfare. It improves on the common practice in the literature by demonstrating avenues of tourism expansion and their welfare implications using both a partial and a general equilibrium model. The results of the gravity model show that there is a strong connection between air connectivity factors and incoming passengers. Simulation results of tourism expansion brought about by improved connectivity demonstrate that all household groups experience an improvement in their welfare but with lower impact on low-income agricultural households. The study concludes that formulating policies that address the air connectivity gap in Kenya would benefit the tourism sector and all households if co-ordinated with rural development initiatives.     

Validating a theoretical model of citizens’ trust in tourism development

This research establishes the theoretical link between the development of tourism and citizens' trust. The research is grounded in political economy of state intervention in tourism and draws from social exchange theory to build the theoretical model. The latter incorporates variables such as trust, power, knowledge, and benefits and costs of tourism, which are central to any exchange process between social actors. The model distinguishes and proposes a theoretical relationship between domain specific political trust and generic political trust. The former refers to citizens' trust in local government in the specific context of tourism development while the latter refers to citizens' general level of trust in local government. The model is tested using data collected from residents of the metropolitan area of Naples, Italy. Results suggest that residents’ trust in local government in the specific context of tourism strongly influences their general level of trust, suggesting a spill-over effect of political trust. We demonstrated empirically that political trust in the context of tourism and the general trust in an institution are theoretically distinct concepts. The constructs we used to conceptualize tourism development has distinct influence on the two dimensions of political trust.