Search results

This research aims to model the existing system of destination competitiveness, identifies leverage points and develop revised model to achieve sustainable competitiveness.

System dynamics is used as method of modeling destination competitiveness. Structure of model utilizes 9-factor model as reference. Leverage points are identified using system archetypes. Revised model is built with resource-based view (RBV). Case study was conducted in Samosir, Toba Lake. Data used are secondary data and results of in-depth interviews.

There are 3 sub-systemic characteristics (archetypes) that hinder competitiveness. They are limit to growth quality gap, fix that fails infrastructure and promotion, tragedy of common lake pollution. Destination was unable to meet tourist expectations. Tourists spending decreased, demand size was small. Industries are unable to increase capabilities. Professionals, entrepreneurs, local workers, supporting industries are less interested in entering industry. Government policies do not match with destination's needs. Lake as main attraction is getting polluted. To achieve sustainable competitiveness, destination must utilize their valuable, rare and inimitable (VRI) resources and capabilities to design unique experiences for tourists, hence sustainable.

Government policy should be shifted to prioritizing development of valuable, rare, inimitable and well-organized resources and capabilities of destination, to produce unique tourist experience and achieve sustainable competitiveness.

Methods and findings, combining system dynamics, system archetype, 9-factor model and RBV to achieve sustainable competitiveness is novel and can enrich tourism sustainable competitiveness theory/concept.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of tourists’ sociodemographic characteristics on their perception of destination personality and emotional experience on the example of the city break tourism destination.

To examine this relationship, survey research was conducted on a sample of 203 national and international tourists who visited Novi Sad, the second-largest city in Serbia.

Research results confirmed the role of travelers’ sociodemographic variables in shaping their emotional experience and destination personality perception. The findings pointed out significant divergences in the perception of emotional experience in the case of respondents’ education level, previous visits to the city and travel companion. On the other hand, the analysis showed that repeat visitors significantly differed from first-time visitors regarding destination personality perception. In addition, differences in both destination personality and emotional experience assessment were found between national and international city break travelers.

The current study is first to focus on the role of travelers’ sociodemographic variables in simultaneous modeling of their perception of destination personality and emotional experience within the city break destination context. Besides, results revealed some new influencing factors of both destination personality and emotional experience perception, thus contributing to the existing tourism literature. In addition, this paper offers useful practical implications for city break marketers to adapt promotional activities, more effectively present the desired brand personality of the city to different sociodemographic categories of tourists and sustain repeat tourists’ perception of Positive surprise.

This chapter looks at similarities between the experience economy and Disneyization, with specific focus placed on theming as a means of enhancing the visitor’s experience. Sophisticated tourists have brought with them the need for research to explain their behavior and place more emphasis on experiences. The Addo Elephant National Park, South Africa, is presented as a case study that uses interpretation as a tool for theming.

This chapter is approached from a marketing perspective on visitor attractions. Several issues and guidelines related to theming are presented to highlight several aspects which visitor attraction managers need to consider when seeking to use theming to enhance or create a visitor experience.

What was evident from the literature is that the theme is the most important aspect in all models (i.e., the experience economy, Disneyization, and interpretation). The theme should be planned meticulously as the theme refers to several aspects not only in the experience itself, but also in the experience cycle. It is therefore a quite complex tool to use that should not be taken lightly in order to benefit fully from the advantages it offers.

The value of this chapter lies in the fact that several models and their similarities were presented with an underpinning tool called theming. As not much research have been done on theming, the guidelines presented by all the models have been considered in a systematic manner that would assist visitor attraction managers in forming a better understanding of the use of the tool and issues related to it. With this said, there are several aspects highlighted in the chapter which necessitate more research in order to assist managers effectively in designing effective themes.

Having Middle Eastern tourism industry as the context, this study aims to examine the impact of the four main dimensions within service innovation (i.e. product, process, organizational and marketing innovations) on tourist satisfaction; subsequently, towards the development of destination loyalty. Realized that religiosity prevails as an important social force that shapes individual behaviours, this study, hence, placed further assessment upon its moderating role, specifically in the relationships between tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty.

With adopting the approach of self-structured questionnaire, 214 usable responses had been collected for this study. Obtained data was then analyzed by conducting exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and multiple linear regression analysis through the usage of structural equation modelling.

Analysis of obtained data has revealed all the investigated dimensions within service innovation as active predictors to tourist satisfaction, with the exception of product innovation, while having marketing innovation being of highest significance. In turn, tourist satisfaction is found to greatly influence the formation of destination loyalty. Findings then provide notable indication on religiosity as a moderating factor to the proposed relationships within the investigated framework, between service innovation and tourist satisfaction, as well as tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty.

This study, thus, revealed the level of religiosity, particularly from the standpoint of Islamic perspectives, in playing a critical role towards predicting capability of service innovation on tourist satisfaction, and further, destination loyalty. Contributions hereby lie on theoretical and pragmatic insights concerning aspects of service and Islamic marketing within today’s tourism front.

Nature plays an important role in tourism experiences with more people seeking leisure activities in outdoor settings. Tourism management can facilitate a reduction of impacts and enhancement of experiences but requires sensitivity to individual markets to be effective. This chapter investigate stakeholders’ perspectives for managing Chinese tourism to Wet Tropics. Specifically, it aims to determine overall thoughts as well as individual attitudes toward different futures. Guided by the concept of saturation of ideas in qualitative data, 18 in-depth interviews were conducted with stakeholders in north Queensland. Findings indicate that they are optimistic toward all futures but have different plans for and concerns about individual tourism markets.

This study aims to model tourist activities in a network and explore the properties of the network. Such network enables the author to explain and quantify how tourist activities are connected in determining tourist consumption as well as the organization of destination supply.

The author developed a network formation mechanism to create edges between nodes based on the joint probability of a pair of activities undertaken by tourists at a destination. By adjusting network sparsity, the author created an ensemble of four topologically similar networks for empirical testing. The author used tourist activity data of Hong Kong inbound tourists to test the network model.

The author found a robust hub–periphery topological structure of the tourist activity network. In addition, the network is featured by high clustering, short diameter and positive correlations between four node centralities, namely, degree, closeness, betweenness and eigenvector centralities. The author also generated the k-cores of the networks to further unravel the structure of hub nodes. The author found that the k-cores are dominated by tourist activities related to shopping or sightseeing, suggesting the high complementarity of these activities.

This study provides a different lens through which tourist consumption can be understood from a macroscopic angle by examining network topology and from a microscopic angle by examining node centralities.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study attempting to model tourist activity and consumption in a network and explore the properties of the network. Not only has this study provided a new real-world network for network research, but it has also suggested an innovative modeling approach for tourist behavior research.

The purpose of this study is to document how a traditional residential neighborhood, Ihwa village in Seoul, South Korea, is transformed into a tourist attraction and demonstrate the complexity of the overtourism phenomenon and the multifaceted conflicts among stakeholders that emerged in the course of urban transformation. Particularly, the study explores how tourism growth, urban transformation and overtourism are intertwined with each other and how the role of social media and media contributed to tourism growth and the transformation of an urban neighborhood.

The study conducted text analytics (a big data analysis) using personal blogs and news articles. Our data for text analytics was defined to retrieve all news articles and blogs existent in the NAVER portal, the largest Korean portal and search engine, for the period between January 1, 2006, and December 31, 2018. The data was collected using a web crawling program, TEXTOM version 3.0.

Text analysis of blog entries and news articles suggests that each medium has its unique role and domain to play. While the news media contributed to the initial surge of interest in Ihwa village, genuine growth of tourism in Ihwa village seems to be attributed to social media. Texts that appeared in blogs strongly indicated that people used their blogs to share their trip experiences, which can be subsequently assumed that blogs had an influential role in promoting a small place like Ihwa mural village, while news articles tended to highlight negative or unusual events occurred in Ihwa village. The study also addressed the multifaceted nature of the conflicts that were inherent in the issue of urban regeneration and how those conflicts were developed and manifested in the process of touristification and overtourism in Ihwa village. As touristification can manifest in various forms in different places, the case of Ihwa village demonstrates a unique development of touristification; private tourism companies or tourism agencies did not initiate or intend to cause tourism gentrification. Rather, touristification is a byproduct of urban revitalization through public art and is a result of interplay between the local government’s interest, social media and new tourist demand.

Text analytics using big data have rarely been attempted to understand the role of social media in relation to tourism growth and touristification of an urban tourism place. This study advances the literature by applying big data analysis to user-generated content in blogs. The study also contributes to the deeper understanding of a different developmental pattern of touristification in an urban tourism place as well as the complexity of the overtourism phenomenon and the multifaceted conflicts among stakeholders.

With its capabilities for business mapping, geospatial analysis and its contribution to decision making, geographic information system (GIS) seems to be a valuable tool especially applicable in the discipline tourism geography. The capabilities of geospatial analysis for tourist consumer research at destinations will be exemplified by the case of German low-cost carrier passengers (LCCP) on Majorca island, Spain, one of the worlds' leading coastal mass holiday destinations with an annual visitor demand of around 10 million arrivals. The survey puts together primary and secondary research to profile LCCP groups located in different tourism spaces around the island. The approach as well as results shall motivate stakeholders in the tourism industry, especially destinations, to enlarge their marketing and management issues towards geospatial analysis.

This paper demonstrates how the tour operating industry must take responsibility of the sustainability of its suppliers as part of the quality expected by tourists, in order to remain competitive.

Case studies resulting from telephone surveys, interviews and document searches. The theoretical approach is that of using sustainable supply chain management both as a method of corporate social responsibility and a strategy for industry survival.

Price wars have forced mass tourism operators to small margins, while ignoring the growing special interest market. Sustainability is now part of quality expectations and the industry as a whole has to reinvent itself to meet changing demands, while also embedding corporate social responsibility in a way that makes business sense.

The challenge is transferring experience to less sophisticated and mature markets, where at present there is little evidence of demand for sustainable products.

Industry wide standards are necessary as the lever for change in those industries where short return on investment eco‐savings will not be possible, and where the future of a whole industry relies on joint action.

The paper makes a contribution to the limited knowledge of sustainable supply chain management in the service sector. Most research emphasizes environmental issues in manufacturing.

The experience economy is characterized by the consumers’ search for emotions and memorable experiences through consumption. While the experience economy has a fundamental effect on tourists’ decision-making and their consumer behavior, only a limited number of past studies have examined the relations between the experience economy and destination marketing campaigns. To extend the scope of the existing knowledge, this paper aims to explore the use of experience marketing in destination marketing campaigns.

The study conducts a qualitative case study analysis of six national tourism marketing campaigns, i.e. it examines the use of experience marketing in tourism campaigns and the use of the strategic experiential module as an analysis framework for destination marketing campaigns.

The findings reveal an influence of experience marketing on the examined marketing campaigns as destinations highlight the motifs of memorable experiences, engaging people’s senses and creating meaning. In accordance with the strategic experiential module, the campaigns analyzed shift the marketing focal point from the characteristics of the destination to the tourists’ experiences of sensing, feeling, thinking, acting and relating.

The conclusions of the study contribute both to scholars and practitioners, extending the present knowledge of the link between experience marketing and tourism marketing, illustrating the effect of experience marketing on destination marketing and shedding new light on the role of the experience economy and experience marketing in tourism marketing campaigns.