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The purpose of this paper is to reveal those attributes of owners and managers that influence knowledge flows between owners and managers in a tourism destination network. The research question relates to whether homogeneity and/or heterogeneity attributes of the owners and managers are associated with the flow of information within a knowledge network.

Owners and managers of tourism and hospitality businesses in the Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch conurbation were surveyed regarding their receipt of information from each other. Social network analysis (SNA) was applied to understand how job position, type of business, gender and education attributes influence the information flows within a knowledge network.

It was revealed that the ties or flows of information were influenced through the heterogeneity of the type of education attribute of a business owner or manager. Other attributes such as type of business, job position or gender were not associated with the receipt of information.

The contribution of the paper relates to increasing the understanding of an underlying attribute that influences information flows between owners and managers of tourism and hospitality businesses within a tourism destination.

The paper contributes to the understanding of a heterogeneous attribute that influences the flow of information within a tourism destination network.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the information flows, in terms of content and process, underpinning the sharing of knowledge by managers and owners. Such an examination reveals similarities and differences that will influence the generation and dissemination of knowledge used in tourism business operations and contribute to innovation.

This paper examines information flows within the theoretical and methodological framework of social network analysis. The findings were derived from a quantitative study of tourism managers and owners of a tourism hub in South-West England.

The main finding was that network structure characteristics determine the flow of information within owners’ and managers’ social networks. The owners of smaller businesses received information from several sources and, therefore, had fewer structural constraints and reported larger structural holes. In comparison, the managers had more brokerage opportunities to disseminate the information within their social networks.

This paper highlights knowledge sharing between tourism business managers and owners in an open network structure. First, an open network structure builds innovation through the provision of nonredundant information. This is determined through the effective size of structural holes and the dissemination of information through brokerage roles. Second, the knowledge capability of a destination is built up through the social networking of managers and owners. The generation and dissemination of knowledge in a tourism destination are facilitated by the social networking activities of managers and owners.

Managers and owners of tourism businesses require knowledge through information to assist with innovative business practices. The practical implication of this is that the social networks of managers and owners have different network characteristics, and that these differences result in consequences for the innovation of business practices. Another practical implication relates to the importance of managers in knowledge dissemination based on having several brokerage roles in the tourism destination.

These findings are important because an understanding of social networks and the flow of information is one of the keys to determining the influences on knowledge sharing within tourism destination knowledge networks of owners or managers and their potential contributions to innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature and implications of knowledge advanced through service employees’ innovative behaviour and leading to initiating innovation within the hotel service subsector.

A case study research method was applied to achieve the research objectives, which investigated two hotel properties resembling two personal–interactive service systems. In total, 52 semi-structured interviews were conducted along with other qualitative research methods, including the direct observation of employees, review of management archives/literature and the assessment of “micro cases”.

The research outcome highlights the role of knowledge as supplementary to the interlinked process of idea generation and development. A novel classification of two types of knowledge is revealed as pre-encounter and encounter-dependent knowledge, implicating four patterns of service employees’ innovative behaviour.

This paper recommends practical measures to nurture service employees’ innovative behaviour, leading to innovation.

This study contributes to service innovation research by providing an in-depth assessment at the micro level, overlooked to date, of the nature of knowledge and the service employees’ role in initiating innovation within the hotel service subsector.

This paper gathers tourism digital footprint from online travel platforms, choosing social network analysis method to learn the structure of destination networks and to probe into the features of tourist flow network structure and flow characteristics in Guilin of China.

The digital footprint of tourists can be applied to study the behaviors and laws of digital footprint. This research contributes to improving the understanding of demand-driven network relationships among tourist attractions in a destination.

(1) Yulong River, Yangshuo West Street, Longji Terraced Fields, Silver Rock and Four Lakes are the divergent and agglomerative centers of tourist flow, which are the top tourist attractions for transiting tourists. (2) The core-periphery structure of the network is clearly stratified. More specifically, the core nodes in the network are prominent and the core area of the network has weak interaction with the peripheral area. (3) There are eight cohesive subgroups in the network structure, which contains certain differences in the radiation effects.

This research aims at exploring the spatial network structure characteristics of tourism flows in Guilin by analyzing the online footprints of tourists. It takes a good try to analyze the application of network footprint with the research of tourism flow characteristics, and also provides a theoretical reference for the design of tourist routes and the cooperative marketing among various attractions.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the state of academic research on innovation in tourism. The authors present a systematic review of the literature, different research approaches and perspectives on tourism innovation; offer a synthesis of our findings and provide a discussion and proposals for future research.

Existing studies on innovation in hospitality and tourism (included in the Web of Knowledge database) were reviewed, and their limitations were identified. A procedure used in previous studies (Crossan and Apaydin, 2010; Tranfield et al., 2003; Becheikh et al., 2006) was applied. Moreover, aiming to reveal theoretical foundations of tourism innovation research and identify their structure, a bibliometric analysis was performed.

This paper identifies 152 published papers that represent the major efforts in expanding the body of research on innovation in hospitality and tourism. The importance of innovation for business and regional competitiveness and success has been recognised by both researchers and practitioners. In the papers included in the sample of this paper, the authors identified a general consensus that much remains to be done in the development of the theory of innovation in tourism. Through bibliometric analysis, nine co-citation networks, or clusters, were retrieved by applying co-citation relations among the most cited authors. The examination of these nine clusters revealed some dominant themes that characterise the field.

The authors used three databases: Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. While these databases may not include all relevant research, the authors, nonetheless, believe that by using a rigorous procedure in reviewing the literature systematically, they were able to reduce the probability of neglecting any information that would critically change the content of the present paper.

The aim of this paper was to bring together the prior research with presently existing models that may be used in further research. For the continuation of the research, the authors propose additional studies with the aim of theory development. By introducing new theoretical ideas and theoretical models, more qualitative and inductive research would help to stimulate further work. As stated above, researchers could go further by undertaking quantitative methods to empirically verify the theoretically proposed models.

Since the last review (Hjalager, 2010) of past studies in tourism innovation, mostly focusing on studies up to 2009, tourism innovation research has grown noticeably in terms of diverse topics. In this paper’s database, the year with the most publications was 2012 with 48 papers, followed by 2014 with 42 (by 19 September), 2010 and 2011 with 41 and 2009 with 29. To the authors’ knowledge, no updated reviews focusing on innovation in tourism have been published recently. This study, consisting of a systematic review of academic literature, includes analyses of the international context, the methodology used, the points of view, the level of analysis (micro-level, macro-level and general level) and the type of innovation discussed in the paper. Moreover, the authors did not find any studies that used bibliometric analysis to identify the structure of the theoretical foundation of research in the area of innovation in tourism.

The purpose of this paper is to examine, from the perspective of different theoretical approaches, the relationship that exists between different ontological supports of knowledge and knowledge itself (the way it is created and its characteristics).

The paper proposes two different types of knowledge (knowledge of concrete situations and abstract knowledge) and two approaches (the constructivist view and the cognitive view) and provides a general classification of the different knowledge types. Second, it examines the underlying ontological support‐knowledge creation, characteristics or types of knowledge relationship in different approaches. Finally, conclusions are drawn that show how the conception of ontological support conditions the way in which knowledge is conceived.

The results of the paper consist of making explicit the ontological support‐knowledge creation, characteristics or types of knowledge relationship in different approaches; and enabling understanding of the fact that the ideas one has about knowledge (how it is created or what its characteristics are) come from one's beliefs about the supports in, or in interaction with, which it is created.

The implications for the different approaches to knowledge theory are important. The study proposes a change with regard to how one considers the ontological supports of knowledge. The limitation of the paper lies in the fact that this proposal needs to be presented in a more extensive format, through a series of different papers and analyses.

The originality of the paper stems from the fact that it focuses on the ontological supports of knowledge and highlights the idea that the conception of these supports leads to a particular way of conceiving knowledge.