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The reflections in this chapter explore the genesis of tourism geography in the Netherlands and Belgium marked by political and linguistic constraints, plus historical, political, and cultural factors, as well as the footprints of some pioneers. The dual language use of French and Dutch/Flemish has often been offered as an excuse for the low profile of the region’s universities in international knowledge networks. However, thanks to the involvement in thematic networks and a growing pressure for researchers to publish internationally in peer-reviewed journals, the research landscape in tourism has definitely changed. Geographical and spatial approaches to tourism have led to a colorful research landscape today.

This chapter aims to familiarize the reader with some of the important aspects of tourism geography in the German-speaking countries. It starts with a primarily historical-genetic perspective on tourism development and the theoretical traditions associated with them. The second section describes the structure of the discipline, with a focus on the institutionalization of the field in the universities including their research specialization. The chapter maintains that tourism geography plays a marginal role compared with other subdisciplines of geography, though this is reflected primarily in its institutionalization and less so in the research undertaken. The last section deals with the current challenges and future prospects in German-speaking geographies of tourism from a problem-centered perspective.

For the islands of the Caribbean, tourism is more than an industry to be managed. Significantly, it is a socioeconomic phenomenon that if managed effectively can address some of the challenges facing the region. Tourism higher education plays a critical role in preparing graduates to shape an improved Caribbean tourism society and in performing research. Over the years, its tourism education has been framed by “Western models” that have not taken sufficient account of the Caribbean reality. The focus of this chapter is to define Caribbean education and to propose a tourism higher education strategy for the implementation in part of this education.

The concept of bleisure is a tourism term that has emerged recently and has become popular. Participation of employees, especially managers and people in business who go on business trips, in leisure activities during their full-time business trips has revealed the bleisure trend. Although bleisure has emerged as a term in recent years, it has been seen that people combine vacations and business trips in previous years.

Considering the research on bleisure tourism, it is thought that bleisure tourism can be helpful to increase employee productivity. The fact that individuals who go on business trips very often are away from their family or friends can create a social deformation. However, people who go on business trips within the scope of bleisure tourism sometimes can take their close friends or family members with them. This provides extra motivation for bleisure tourists and increases work efficiency. However, it is beneficial to plan bleisure tourism. Excessive entertainment or shopping can lead to distraction, being late for work and being over budget on a business trip. For this reason, bleisure should be planned jointly with tourism agencies and companies.

Bleisure tourism will benefit business travellers, travel companies, hotels, restaurants, other tourism businesses and local people. For this reason, it is necessary to focus on studies related to bleisure tourism, a new tourism trend.

This chapter analyzes the importance and performance of values in tourism higher education and business as seen by the alumni of the European Master in Tourism Management. The students were exposed to the values-based education framework proposed by the Tourism Educational Future Initiative. This chapter empirically tests the relevance of its model for an ideal and real industry, and for the corresponding world of tourism education. Using importance performance analysis, results identify gaps between the importance and performance in the values. The findings have implications for the future development and implementation of experimental values-based education.

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.

Previous work has conceptually explored the value of the humanities for tourism education and has considered the pressures that likely serve as barriers to its greater inclusion in curricula. This chapter moves the debate from the conceptual level to the ground, reporting the results of a survey of tourism educators with regard to the role of the humanities in the programs in which they teach. The study explores the prevalence of the humanities as primary and supporting course content at the undergraduate and graduate levels, sheds light on barriers faculty members identify for incorporating more humanities content into their curricula, and offers examples of creative ways some educators are currently engaging with such content.

Inquiry learning points is based on questions and requires students to work independently to solve problems. Instructors are facilitators of learning, not people who give right answers and instructions to learners. Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences Porvoo campus in Finland is a new concept for learning. The lecturers have changed from traditional ones to coaches aiming at new competences with new tools to enhance learning. Their own implementation of inquiry learning has been assessed by themselves with an ongoing self-assessment process as a part of the normal tasks of instructional teams. Self-assessment is a part of action research that aims to develop an organization and the work in it.