Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in home-stay arrangements in Ghana’s cultural city, Kumasi, and further assess NGO intermediation of home-stay from home-stay operators’ and international volunteer tourists’ perspectives.

A mixture of quantitative and qualitative approaches is used to target three main stakeholders of volunteer tourism including international volunteer tourists, home-stay operators, and local NGOs.

There are seven major roles played by volunteer NGOs in the home-stay arrangement. However, from operators’ perspective, NGOs may hinder the economic viability of home-stay through inadequate/low payment.

The study highlights the unexplored brokerage role of NGOs in volunteer tourism in home-stay intermediation and its implications for sustainable tourism.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the motives and the socio‐economic profile of bed and breakfast (B&B) and vacation home owners in the tourism industry.

The first part of the paper provides a literature review of types of entrepreneurship as described in tourism and leisure research. The second part presents a survey which was carried out in 2006 in the Austrian province of Vorarlberg to assess owner‐managers' perception of entrepreneurial activities (n=246).

The data do reveal the motives which drive these owners or entrepreneurs and highlight why vacation homes are going to be a growing field of accommodation in the tourism industry. The findings show that the B&B business model can be interpreted as a market entrance model, while owner‐managers change towards vacation homes after approximately five years of firm existence.

It is argued that some stakeholder groups within an enterprise, such as young trainees or apprentices, might have deeper insights into entrepreneurial processes and leadership skills. However, more research is needed to analyse the supply side of vacation homes and B&Bs because the owner‐manager is still a neglected area of tourism research. The study is limited by its focus on one specific region, the province of Vorarlberg in Western Austria, a region of rural and Alpine nature.

A decrease in B&B firms can be forecast for Western Austria. Owner‐managers should be aware of recent tourism developments and need to investigate how and to what extent value might be added to or subtracted from their businesses. For tourism policy is it of the utmost importance to learn more about owner‐managers' motivations to run their businesses and to maintain a certain quality of the vacation home supply.

This chapter examines the application of exploratory sequential mixed methods design in the context of small accommodation enterprises (i.e., home-stay). This study, therefore, discusses the exploratory sequential mixed methods of data collection and analysis and provides practical illustrations based on a study of small tourism enterprise sustainability practices in Ghana. The findings demonstrate that mixed methods overcome the weaknesses of a mono-method and offer an in-depth understanding of tourism and hospitality phenomena. In addition to providing a practical guide to emerging tourism scholars, the current study highlights the ability of mixed methods to develop emerging practitioners' skills in both qualitative and quantitative data. In conclusion, the exploratory sequential mixed methods design offers pragmatic data collection techniques that are non-existent in mono-methods. Accordingly, it is recommended for exploring research questions when there is limited information and high flexibility is needed.

The paper aims to analyse the issues and challenges in implementing and adopting the sharing economy concept in tourism. More specifically, the paper intends to identify critical factors for seeking possible pathways for achieving sustainable development of the Indian tourism industry.

This research work has adopted the triangulation approach involving a twofold study concerning the perspectives of both service providers and customers. To cull deeper insight, an inductive content analysis was carried out to identify the critical factors influencing sharing economy in tourism and establish them as key research areas for further study.

The study identified seven critical influencing factors, namely, affordability, consciousness, cultural involvement, status quo biasness, socio-environmental responsiveness, regulatory supervision and technological drivers concerning sharing economy in tourism.

This study will expand the existing literature by exploring the critical factors relevant to the practice of sharing economy in the tourism industry. It will aid both marketers and policymakers to bridge the gap between what sharing economy concept demands, what consumers perceive and how service providers practise in reality. The present study limits its scope to qualitative analysis and geographical boundary within India. Further research with empirical study may be extended in future, with the research agendas presented in this paper.

The novelty of the study lies in the identification of both intrinsic and extrinsic factors affecting the implementation of sharing economy in tourism. To delve deeper into the ground reality, this qualitative study corroborates the perspectives of both the demand and supply side, which is a unique effort by itself.

Purpose: This chapter provides an overview of the results so far within the Stay Home, Stay Safe research project in the Netherlands. The project started in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and is aimed at examining short- and long-term consequences of restrictions taken to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus on domestic violence (DV). Restrictions may have resulted in social isolation and familial stress, which in turn may have led to an increase in DV. The main research question is whether, and if so which types of, DV increased during periods of COVID-19 restrictions.

Methodology/approach: This project used national data on DV before (2019) and during the different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2022), from different sources (i.e., official registered reports, advices as well as file data of DV agencies). Trends in the prevalence, nature, and the role of reporters of DV before the pandemic are compared to trends during the pandemic.

Findings: Trends of DV registrations show no differences in the prevalence before and during different phases of the pandemic. The number of advice requests at the reporting agencies seem to have increased. However, this finding cannot be unambiguously subscribed to pandemic-specific circumstances, because this upward trend already consistently started in 2019. A shift was observed from professional reporters toward relatively more non-professional reporters, mostly neighbors.

Originality/Value: In contrast to previously published research, the current project uses data from multiple sources and examines information not only on trends in prevalence of DV records, but also on the type of reporter, and the nature of the violence.

Discusses the dilemmas faced by both host and visitor in “home stay” arrangements. Where there are great cultural and/or economic discrepancies the problems can be more difficult to deal with.

The tourism sector of the state of Kerala in India is highly vulnerable and has been extensively impacted by the global pandemic disaster. This paper aims to analyze the impact of COVID-19 (Corona virus pandemic) on houseboat operators and homestay managers.

This paper indicates a multi-stakeholder assessment method to examine various pandemic disaster facets through a structured discussion with different destination stakeholders. This study examines qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews from homestay owners, houseboat operators and government designators in Kerala. This study proposes a conceptual community resilience competency framework that could facilitate speedy crisis management responses. In this study, the sample comprises of nine respondents who play a pivotal role in the travel business, comprising the public sector, private sector, NGO's and community leaders.

The qualitative findings identify India’s and the state of Kerala's roles in handling crisis management scenarios over internal strategies and strategy formulation. The results indicate that the supplementary industry practitioners explore tactical and strategic management initiatives to sustain their businesses. The dynamics of stakeholder engagement adopted by the state is given prominence.

This study suggests mechanisms to re-establish the brand image and the possible strategies and suggestions that could help in the survival of the Kerala tourism industry in the post-disaster period. The “new normal” has been substantiated in the study by incorporating strategies and precautionary methods adopted by the homestay and houseboat operators so as to address the guests' safety concerns.

Initiating a practical model for embedding transformative learning in education that will promote sustainable development is a challenge for higher education. Siam University decided to assign a task force with the mission to work with communities in order to propose guidelines of learning for sustainability (LfS) based on real-life experiences. Selected communities which have agreed to be the community living labs for teaching and learning activities of the university were chosen based on the Bray and Thomas’ Cube Model. There are differences in sizes (number of members), locations (urban, suburban), and histories (old settlement with long history and rich culture and the newly settlement communities consisting of migrated members). Community-based participatory research (CBPR) was applied in the study. The initial model was developed from the synthesis of experiential work with communities in sustainability-related projects. After revision, the “Learning for Sustainability Action Model” was proposed. Success factors in implementing the model were also suggested.

A dynamic model of the evolution of health for those over the age of 50 is embedded in a structural, econometric model of retirement and saving. Effects of smoking, obesity, alcohol consumption, depression, and other proclivities on medical conditions are analyzed, including hypertension, diabetes, cancer, lung disease, heart problems, stroke, psychiatric problems, and arthritis. Compared to a population in good health, the current health of the population reduces retirement age by about one year. Including detailed health dynamics in a retirement model does not influence estimates of the marginal effects of economic incentives on retirement.