This paper seeks to highlight underlying issues of the tourism system that have led to tourism extremes of too much or too little tourism. Five phases are recognized that reflect different ways of dealing with too much tourism over time, after which the impact of a sudden lack of tourism is investigated in light of future renewal processes. This discussion highlights the remarkable capacity of the tourism industry to adjust to rapidly changing circumstances and crises, even when these cause anguish to individuals and within societies at large. The paper thus seeks to contextualize the current discussions regarding the transformation of tourism post COVID-19. It highlights the complexity of changing a tourism that multiple stakeholders depend on or have grown accustomed to. To come to a more balanced tourism, it is necessary to not only come up with alternative visions and strategies, but also to engage with the political economy nature of tourism development. A future research agenda should therefore also discuss facets of entangled power, social exclusion, inequalities and class differences to come to new reference points of what actually constitutes a more inclusive tourism success.
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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.
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In spite of renewed attention for practices in tourism studies, the analysis of practices is often isolated from theories of practice. This theoretical paper identifies the main strands of practice theory and their relevance and application to tourism research, and develops a new approach to applying practice theory in the study of tourism participation. We propose a conceptual model of tourism practices based on the work of Collins (2004), which emphasises the role of rituals in generating emotional responses. This integrated approach can focus on individuals interacting in groups, as well as explaining why people join and leave specific practices. Charting the shifting of individuals between practices could help to illuminate the dynamics and complexity of tourism systems.
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The aim of this QSR 2022 on tourism is to make an attempt to assess available information about the tourism industry from three countries and various sources and present it in a comprehensive manner. We, thereby, describe common features of regional tourism structures, as well as differences, and we present some of the identified data incompatibilities (sections 2.2 and 2.3). The recommendations in section 3 present avenues along which data collection and monitoring can be improved, inspired by a set of key forces driving change intourism that stakeholders should be prepared for (section 2.4).
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In a matter of weeks last year, discussions regarding tourism in cities changed from how to deal with overtourism to how to deal with ‘no tourism’. Shortly thereafter, a great number of posts on LinkedIn, websites, and blogs highlighted how the tourism crisis that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic could help reinvent tourism, into something more equal, inclusive, and sustainable. And so, online – at leastin mypersonalonlinebubble – there seemedtobe a real momentum for proper, transformative changes in (urban) tourism. How can we rebuild urban tourism in a sustainable and resilient way?
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Traveling to places associated with death is not a new phenomenon. People have long been drawn, purposefully or otherwise, towards sites, attractions, and events linked in one way or another with death, suffering, violence, or disaster. War-related attractions, though diverse, are a subset of the totality of tourist sites associated with death and suffering. This article aims to assess how "dark" tourism may play a role in leveraging tourism in Palestine, which has largely relied on pilgrimage tourism in the past. This article investigates the potential for developing this form of tourism, since Palestine has been undergoing death, suffering, violence, or disaster through political tension and instability since 1948 and arguably for a generation earlier, but has not yet developed a strategy for tourism development that considers this type of tourism.
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The debate on tourism in cities, both academically and in practice, has for a long time taken place in relative isolation from urban studies. Tourism is mostly addressed as an external agent and economic force that puts pressure on cities rather than as an interdependent part of city systems. The recent debate on city touristification and excessive dependence on the visitor economy, as well as the associated processes of exclusion, and displacement of local city users, serves to highlight how tourism is an integral part of urban developments. A wider urban perspective is needed to understand the processes underlying the tourism phenomena and more transdisciplinary perspectives are required to analyze the urban (tourism) practices. The current article seeks to contribute to such a perspective through a discussion of the literature on urban and tourism studies, and related fields such as gentrification, mobilities, and touristification. Based on this, theoretical reflections are provided regarding a more integral perspective to tourism and urban development in order to engage with a transversal urban tourism research agenda.
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This article investigates possible pathways of habitus change by informal tourism entrepreneurs in Thailand. Bourdieu's concept of habitus is depicted as a person's understanding of the world. Do people adapt their worldview in response to only external stimuli? Through ethnographic fieldwork including participant observations and active semi-structured interviews with 53 participants, this paper identifies a classification of four modes of habitus adaptation: (1) Understanding and appreciating the field and its conditions, (2) Challenging core beliefs systems, (3) Applying a practical sense to ‘objective possibilities’, and, (4) Challenging non-reflective dispositions. We argue that charting the modes of habitus adaptation could help policymakers understand the change processes of informal entrepreneurs in the tourism sector and their willingness to change.
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Epistemological relativism in tourism studies has been conceivably paralyzed by the concept of a, or, the "paradigm." In this review article, Platenkamp metaphorically identifies these paradigms with the islands that Odysseus visited (all those centuries ago) during his well-recorded journey to Ithaca. In this context, therefore, Ithaca is changed (by Platenkamp) from being just an idyllic Greek homeland into a contemporary, hybridized world like-in our time-of the multilayered network society in Africa of the capital of Ghana, Kumasi. The basic question for Platenkamp, then, is that of how tourism studies researchers can (or ought?) leave their safe islands (i.e., their paradigms) and organize their own paradigm dialog (after Guba) with others around them on their uncertain and risky voyage to Kumasi. In an attempt to clarify this vital kind of dialog, Platenkamp introduces Said's principles of reception and resistance, but also focuses on the distinction between different modes of "knowledge production" that have been introduced into the social sciences since the 1990s. In this light, to Platenkamp, the uncertainty of this ongoing/unending epistemological quest remains crucial: to him, all (almost all?) believers in a, or any, paradigm within tourism studies are unhealthily "overimmunized" by the tall claims and the perhaps undersuspected strategies of the particular "paradigm" they follow. (Abstract by the Reviews Editor).
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