Editorial

Citation

Yeoman, I.S. (2017), "Editorial", Journal of Tourism Futures, Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 3-3. https://doi.org/10.1108/JTF-12-2016-0058

Uncertainty avoidance

The last 12 month’s has seen unprecedented change in the geopolitical and economic environment whether it is BREXIT or the election of Donald Trump as President of the USA. Stemming from the global financial crisis, the resentment of the liberal elite and further division of income polarization. Democracy has spoken and change is occurring thus bringing in a new format of political leader. However, the world has always had turmoil, change and uncertainty.

All of the euphoria about Donald Trump and BREXIT is societies' uncertainty avoidance in how it tolerates and manages uncertainty and ambiguity. The average individual is now faced with a series of situations that the world has not faced. The phenomena of change is complex and dense that “worry” has become the norm. Everyone is talking about this uncertainty. We try and rationalize the unknowns, some fear those unknowns, untruths emerge everywhere, social media drives conspiracy theories and the voice of calm is lost.

The European Union (EU) was an environment of order in a world of high amounts of uncertainty. The British (and other Europeans) now fear what will happen next. Those regulations and controls of order are all about to be left behind. A door has being opened to those that loved the EU to a world of unknowns.

The management of unknowns is scenario planning. Here we take those uncertainties and make sense of them through scenarios and futures stories. We engage with stakeholders examining complexity, we discuss causal relationships using systems thinking models to determine consequences and impact and we provide a framework for decision making, policy responses and strategy.

In this issue of the Journal of Tourism Futures a range of viewpoint papers discuss the changing geopolitical situations and possible consequences for tourism. The issue of sustainability is addressed from a management and society perspective, along with a research paper examining the social-ecological relationships of tourism and coastal areas.

We never speak about porn. we know it is there, we know what it is but we cannot discuss it. However, one of the realms of academic research is to research those issues and ideas we want to avoid, hence the publication of Ping Pong in Phuket and untangling the issues from a future tourism perspective.

Other articles include an examination of hotel strategies beyond segmentation models as the hotel industry is part of the hospitality field, therefore it is always about people not numbers. This is a journal about the future, but moving toward the future sometimes means looking to the past. Hence the paper on the history of revenue management and understanding the milestones of changes grouped around technological innovation. The last paper of this issue discusses a world of too much technology and hence the phenomena of digital amnesia.

Whatever the future maybe the Journal of Tourism Futures will not avoid the issue. We are here to clarify the uncertainty, inform about developments and contribute to our academic and practitioner understanding of the field of tourism futures.