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The purpose of this paper is to examine the attractiveness of a global tourism destination when the country of that destination and the country that provides the source market are in a situation of political and economic conflict. In this study, the USA is the vacation destination, and Russia is the tourism generating region.

In May 2015, 18 Russian tourists from a large regional urban center participated in qualitative semi-structured interviews. The interviews took place in the situational context of strained bilateral relations between the USA and Russia over events in Ukraine, Crimea, and Donbass, as well as economic sanctions that had been in effect for almost a year at the time of the interviews.

Respondents expressed substantial interest in vacationing in the USA despite their strong disagreement with USA international policies. While domestic tourism offerings were evaluated as inferior to those of other international destinations, patriotic sentiments with respect to domestic tourism were registered.

Brand USA is still very attractive to the potential tourists, especially such components as major cities, entertainment, oceans, beaches and resorts, as well as the vastness of its national parks. The absence of information with respect to travel to USA was noticed by all respondents.

The study is conducted in a situation of ongoing conflict between the two countries and explores how the feelings of animosity toward the USA influence the desire of Russian tourists to vacation in the USA.

Independent travelers are those vacationers who have booked only a minimum of their transportation and accommodation arrangements prior to departure on the vacation. Independent travel is an important and growing sector of worldwide tourism. Choice of vacation itinerary for the independent vacation represents a complex series of decisions regarding purchase of multiple leisure and tourism services. This chapter builds and tests a model of independent traveler decision-making for choice of vacation itinerary. The research undertaken employs a two-phase, inductive–deductive case study design. In the deductive phase, the researcher interviewed 20 travel parties vacationing in New Zealand for the first time. The researcher interviewed respondents at both the beginning and the end of their New Zealand vacations. The study compares pre-vacation research and plans, and actual vacation behaviors, on a case-by-case basis. The study examines case study narratives and quantitative measures of crucial variables. The study tests two competing models of independent traveler decision-making, using a pattern-matching procedure. This embedded research design results in high multi-source, multi-method validity for the supported model. The model of the Independent Vacation as Evolving Itinerary suggests that much of the vacation itinerary experienced in independent travel is indeed unplanned, and that a desire to experience the unplanned is a key hedonic motive for independent travel. Rather than following a fixed itinerary, the itinerary of an independent vacation evolves as the vacation proceeds. The independent traveler takes advantage of serendipitous opportunities to experience a number of locations, attractions and activities that they had neither actively researched nor planned.

Online calendar services (OCS) are primarily used for temporal orientation and reminding. Nonetheless, calendar work may also entail generic activities such as scheduling, tracking, archive and recall and retrieval which are not adequately supported by available systems. The purpose of the paper is to explore how online calendaring may be re-configured and re-aligned to alleviate these shortcomings, thus servicing accountability in team work and flexibility in organizational routines.

Following a design science research methodology, the authors review “justifiable failures” or deliberate non-use of OCS and establish the rationale for, design and evaluate a digital service that configures calendaring as an ecology of separate digital materials supporting file-, photo- and video-sharing services, online argumentation, project/task management and social bookmarking. The new service is a digital composite of materials that incrementally co-adapt and co-evolve to serve primary and secondary work-oriented activities. The authors assess the value of the digital composite in two empirical settings and discuss intrinsic features that create new possibilities for action.

The authors present the rationale, design, implementation and evaluation of a new digital composite calendaring service which is deployed in two empirical settings, namely group vacation planning and collective information management. Each case features different re-configurations of calendaring to serve human intentions. In vacation planning, the digital composite of the calendar operates as a mashup allowing peers to negotiate, schedule and track vacation options and archive, recall or retrieve digital memories of vacations. In the case of collective information management, the digital composite is further augmented so as to re-align performative and ostensive aspects of routines in a regional organic farming partnership.

Digital composites rely on the interdependent operation of different bounded systems and services to establish configured ecologies of (previously) separate digital artifacts. The practical implications of digital composites are that they can appropriate performative capacities which are already established and embedded across different settings. As a result, they enact complex digital assemblages which can re-align not only daily activities but also organizational routines. On the other hand, digital composites remain in flux, since their state, at any moment in time, is partly determined (even temporarily) by the state of their constituent parts.

Calendaring as presented in this paper defines a genre of digital artifacts that promote flexible and accountable collaborative work while exploiting material agency and resources distributed across digital settings. As such, it establishes a kind of meta-material that invokes collective social agency, thus re-aligning performative and ostensive aspects of organizational routines.

Upon the changes that have taken place in the tourist sector since the 7 990s, the SMTEs and the destinations where they operate are called to reflect on the opportunity to redefine the strategic and organizational assets that have distinguished them until now in order to respond to new needs and desires coming from a more segmented demand side. This paper presents the results of a research project conducted in the Dolomites, the most important alpine area in terms of numbers of tourists, representative of a community tourist destination and where the tourists do not defer to intermediaries to organize the vacation (do‐it‐yourself tourists). The Dolomites are now in the “mature” phase of the development life cycle and as such need a new approach to the market in order to maintain loyalty among current visitors and to gain loyalty in new tourist segments. The research was done in the summer 2001 and winter 2001–2002 by administering 5,000 online questionnaires to a representative sampling of “do‐it‐yourself” tourists. The objective was to study the decision‐making and behavioural models of do‐it‐yourself tourists and to build profiles of tourists who choose this destination. From these profiles it is possible to identify strategies that the SMTEs and the alpine destination as a whole could undertake to achieve the goals described above. The research highlights the importance for SMTEs to overcome the entrepreneurial spontaneity and to adopt an informed and planned business strategy. In this scenario the Regional Tourist Boards emerge as important actors that can play a key role in meta‐management.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities and the growth prospects of medical tourism in Greece, while particularly focusing on the dialysis process. Patients with end-stage renal failure have the right to any treatment deemed necessary during their journey to another city or country away from the place where their treatment normally takes place.

The survey has been conducted among 193 kidney disease patients that underwent extra-renal dialysis in two public and three private artificial kidney units in Thessaloniki. The study population consists of patients with end-stage chronic renal failure (CRF) that undergo dialysis. For the purpose of this study, quantitative research was carried out via a structured and anonymous questionnaire. The design and structure of the study were based upon questionnaires from two relevant questionnaires. The questionnaires were modified appropriately to respond to the subject in question. Finally, for the analysis of the data, the SPSS software has been used.

One of the most obvious results is that patients on dialysis treatment have limited both the frequency and the duration of their vacation. The 8.3% of patients that did not use to travel increased to 37.8%, whereas only 22.3% continue to travel 2–4 times a year. Patients that keep on going on vacation frequently claim that a break from the daily routine improves their quality of life. Most of the participants (up to 36.3%) claim they feel healthier, while 34.2% stated they experience a normal life when they escape their everyday life and travel far from home. The 69.9% claim that Greece has the potentials to be a popular medical tourism destination. However, a well-structured and government-financed assistance programme is absent. The processing of data has revealed a positive correlation between age and tourism behaviour. Additionally, according to the research results, younger patients tend to be better informed regarding medical tourism in comparison with older ones.

Considering the patients to be potential travellers facilitates the development, realization and promotion of medical tourism.

This study attempts to investigate, for the first time, the tourism behaviour of chronic kidney disease patients. The study highlights a sensitive issue, patients’ right to treatment without geographical or distance-related obstacles.

Information‐search for vacation decision‐making can occur in two different contexts: an individual one, in which one forms one's preferences, and a social one in response to discussions with partners and family members. This paper focuses on the latter.

By means of a longitudinal study the research investigates the main topics of discussion in couples, and the information sources couples use in their discussion. Furthermore, the research investigates whether the information sources used depend on the nature of the sub‐decision – search‐determined or experience‐determined – the couples discuss.

The research finds that there is considerable discussion between partners and that the amount of discussion varies in relation to the type of sub‐decision. During these discussions, the use of different information sources is widespread. More generally, the study confirms the overall importance of the social context: information sources used in the social context are different from sources used in the individual context. The research does not confirm the expected relationship between the nature of a sub‐decision and the type of information source used. As the decision process proceeds over time, the role of objective information sources increases in discussions.

Compared with the classical individual approach to researching tourist information search, the social context of information‐searching needs other market research data, to provide insight into the topics of discussion. Tourism marketing messages in a social decision context should be directed to significant others, as these messages are likely to be used as important information sources during the joint vacation decision process in couples. In this respect, the use of electronic word‐of‐mouth offers new opportunities for vacation marketing.

A new perspective on information search: the relevance of social contexts.

Hotels offer a product of strategic interest to tour operators as far as it determines the cost of a package vacation to a great extent, while it also significantly influences the degree of satisfaction of the tourists who purchase such packages. That, together with the increasingly competitive rivalry among German tour operators, suggests how important it is for the tour operators to exercise some control over the hotel companies they deal with. This study identifies the aspects over which German tour operators exercise control in their relationships with hotel companies they do business with, including the mechanisms or tools used to exercise control.

This paper introduces the seven empirical studies on vacation decision making in this special issue of IJCTHR. The paper compares the findings of these seven studies to traditional models of vacation decision making, and highlights a number of new perspectives for research into vacation decision making.

Five themes appear in these contemporary studies of vacation decision making: the multifaceted nature of the vacation; joint decision making by members of the household; impact of the type of vacation trip on the decision making process; the role of the internet in vacation decision making; and the role of socio‐psychological variables in vacation decision making.

The paper provides recommendations for future research in vacation decision making, in light of contemporary changes in the travel and tourism industry.

The value of this paper lies in its review of traditional approaches to researching vacation decision making, and advice provided for future research on the topic.

Travels and vacations organised by a large number of people to certain destinations in certain periods cause some negative impacts on the destinations in question. The concept of overtourism, which has become a current issue especially with the anti-tourism demonstrations in certain destinations such as Venice, Barcelona and Dubrovnik as a result of the increasing tourism carrying capacity, has been drawing attention in recent years regarding the sustainability in the destinations. Popular destinations that are affected by overtourism try to develop some strategies in order to minimise the negative impacts of overtourism. One of these strategies is the demarketing strategy that is developed by the destination stakeholders towards the target group. In this chapter of the book, the significance of the concept of demarketing in terms of struggle against overtourism was revealed and how demarketing strategies applied to the marketing mix and different strategies were approached in tourism studies was discussed in detail by addressing the current literature. In addition, suggestions were proposed to the popular destinations that feel the negative impacts of overtourism and will be affected by overtourism also in the future concerning creating their own demarketing strategies and destination planning.

Proposes domain‐specific market segmentation as a promising approach as compared with segmentation based on general or on brand‐specific variables. Treats product differentiation and positioning as the counterpart of market segmentation. The link between market segmentation, on the one hand, and product differentiation, on the other hand, is the product benefit. The product benefit is the interaction of the product and the consumer.