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Negative issues in the world have increased in recent years. The continuing COVID-19 pandemic has forced the global tourism industry to take precautions against these disasters to be ready to respond. Given tourism's vulnerability to environmental and social changes, the pandemic has dramatically impacted tourism worldwide. Tourism enterprises have developed various strategies and approaches to eliminate vulnerabilities that negatively affect their structures. This chapter tries to measure and recover plans implemented by various countries to increase the tourism industry's resilience in the face of crises and disasters.

This chapter examines the notion that contemporary tourists prefer luxury experiences rather than luxury products by testing the opinions and attitudes of middle-class tourists as a critical target for global luxury tourism through the lens of experience-oriented accommodation. Notions from the study were used in conceptualising a spectrum to describe the shades of grey within luxury tourism. A Japanese temple lodging known as ‘shukubo’ in Koyasan, an experience-based accommodation, was used as a case to investigate the preferences of two groups of middle-class Thai tourists: non-pilgrims and pilgrims. The results, which revealed positive opinions and attitudes towards the programme, confirm that both groups were satisfied with the luxury tourism experience programme. However, non-pilgrims, described as psychocentric tourists (represented in black at the left end of the spectrum), tended to embed them with luxury materials, such as the accommodation's facilities and amenities. Conversely, pilgrims, identified as allocentric travellers (represented in white at the right end of the spectrum), were inclined to define ‘simplicity’ as a luxury. They were also interested in learning experiences at both ‘off-the-beaten-track’ and famous branded destinations. The differences found in such an example as described above conceptualised tourists' personalities regarding luxury tourism within three shades of grey: dark grey, grey and light grey, depending on the intensity of their interests in material concerns or learning experiences. Findings from this study are general; however, it presents an original concept developed from demographic and psychographic factors to broaden the understanding of luxury tourism, which is undergoing a paradigm shift.

The search for luxurious hospitality experiences increasingly coincides with the imperative to mitigate negative impacts in the pursuit of greater sustainability. This is a task often understood as being complex particularly in the context of luxury hospitality which often resonates with conspicuous consumption. This chapter uses a case study approach to analyze the complex relationship between luxury tourism and sustainability. The study focuses on the development of “luxury” from a materialistic perspective toward an experience economy and relates this to the concept of sustainability and agreements relevant to the tourism industry. The environmental impact of luxury hospitality is then discussed. The case study on properties in Costa Rica, South Africa, the Maldives, Vietnam, and French Polynesia focuses on philosophy, facilities, energy and waste consumption, food and beverage, conservational and educational activities, and alignment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). The focus is on the properties and shows limitations in that it is not applicable to the whole tourist journey and experience. All properties understand luxury as based on experiences and involvement in nature. Measures to mitigate environmental impact and foster conservational and educational activities are mainstream practices. Comparing the cases with academic literature on luxury, sustainability, ecotourism, and environmental policies underline that sustainability-driven luxury hospitality shows valuable steps toward a more sustainable product but is ultimately faced with the dilemma of taking into consideration and ultimately mitigating the impacts of the entire travel value chain.

This chapter explores the issues in estimating the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the tourism industry and related activities in Australia. A production-based approach is employed and its rationale is explained. The scope of tourism consists of the economic activities of tourism-characteristic and tourism-connected sectors as defined in the Australian Tourism Satellite Account (TSA). The GHG emissions have been estimated for 2003–04, the latest year for which detailed industry GHG emissions data are available in a form suitable for this type of estimate. Tourism's GHG emissions are compared with other industries in the Australian economy. The policy implications of the results are discussed. It should be possible to adopt a broadly similar method for any destination with a TSA, enabling tourism stakeholders to play an informed role in assessing appropriate climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies for their destination.

The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami had a deep and long-term impact on communities along Thailand’s Andaman Coast. In this chapter, the authors examine how three communities of indigenous, formerly seafaring people (chao leh) have been affected by post-tsunami tourism developments. Taking Devine and Ojeda’s (2017) concept of ‘violent tourism geographies’ as a theoretical lens, the authors analyse various practices of dispossession, including enclosure, extraction, erasure, commodification, destructive creation and neo-colonialism. The findings of this chapter suggest that all three communities found themselves subjected to radical transformations of their socioeconomic and cultural environment, yet in distinctive ways and with varying degrees of agency.