Search results

Tourism, today, has not only emerged as the engine of growth but also become the largest and the fastest growing sector in the Caribbean. For this reason the industry is now viewed as one of the leading instruments of development in the region. Given the importance of the industry, it is incumbent on governments to orient tourism growth towards meeting the socioeconomic needs and environmental requirements of the region. To meet these objectives, however, regional governments are required to play a greater role in directing and shaping the future development of the industry. This paper strongly argues in favour of a greater role in the industry, both through direct and indirect market intervention, by governments of the region.

The purpose of this paper is to explore security management in the hospitality sector of Jamaica.

The paper is based on a combination of available documentary sources and in‐depth interviews conducted with key players in the fields of law enforcement, security management and hospitality in Jamaica.

Jamaica's image as a tourism destination has been severely damaged by reports of its high murder rates. With the exception of tourism harassment however, visitors to the island are largely unaffected by crime. This outcome is not accidental; rather it is the result of a social consensus combined with a well‐articulated, comprehensive, long‐term crime management strategy involving multiple stakeholders ranging from the level of government to the individual hospitality establishment. Despite these positives however, the paper expresses serious doubts about the sustainability of the existing tourism and hospitality model.

The study is qualitative in nature and focuses on the hospitality sector in the major commercial centre and one of the major resort centres. Both have been characterised by high levels of criminal violence in the last decade. As such the results may offer important insights into crime management and tourism development but cannot be generalised.

The paper carries significant implications for policy in that it analyses the challenges of security management in a tourism destination marked by severe and complex and social contradictions.

Despite the enormity of the public discourse on the impact of crime on tourism, there has been little scholarly analysis of the challenges of security management in an environment marked simultaneously by extreme tourism dependence and extreme levels of criminal violence.

The 2003 Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Trends (WHATT) roundtable discussion, held at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, focused on the issues affecting the development of tourism in the Caribbean. Fourteen industry practitioners and academics from the hospitality and tourism sector discussed the definitions of “sustainable tourism development” and debated the key development issues in Caribbean tourism and related education and research needs. The meeting agreed that there was a lack of research and intellectual focus on Caribbean tourism, although many Caribbean governments are in clear need of policy guidance. The meeting therefore identified a few achievable action points with the aim of addressing this problem.

FIVE years ago a score or so of Work Study enthusiasts met in Holland to consider the desirability of creating an organic link between their national bodies. The following year, slightly increased in numbers, they gathered in Germany to create what is now the European Work Study Federation. Since then, through an annual Congress in Stockholm, London and Zurich, it has established itself as an international body.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the information about haze, a term used in China to describe the air pollution problem, is portrayed on Chinese social media by different types of organizations using the theoretical framework of the health belief model (HBM).

A content analysis was conducted based on the 756 posts retrieved from Sina Weibo, the top microbloging platform in China, following the simple random sampling method. χ2 analysis was conducted to examine the relationships across the three types of organizations (governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, and corporations) and the use of the HBM concepts (perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, perceived benefits, perceived barriers, self-efficacy, and cues to action) in terms of haze and its threat to health.

The results of this study indicated that corporations posted more Weibo messages categorized as perceived benefit and most of these posts are related to their products, while governmental organizations posted fewer Weibo messages categorized as perceived severity.

This study provides health decision makers and media consumers with knowledge about how to use social media more effectively in terms of haze-related issues.

Given the severity of air pollution and the influential role microblogging takes, the study aims to fill the gap in the limited literature on haze information dissemination on social media in China. In addition, this study aims to shed theoretical light on HBM as applied to a non-westernized context.