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This research is to identify how user-generated contents (UGC) affect a pre-trip decision on the booking of a guesthouse among international travelers. Online surveys are conducted among social network users who have booked an ecolodge in the past year. A snowball sampling is used, which posts a questionnaire link in social networks including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram in addition to travel blogs. This study indicates a positive relationship between UGC and lodging selection. UGC is considered as a significant predictor of booking an environmentally friendly guesthouse. Among the UGCs, travelers' review is the most important one influencing guesthouse selection. Future studies may focus on other IT potentials such as “Gamification” or other types of content such as “Podcasts” or “live videos” to engage independent travelers.

The blessing of the sharing economy is that the benefits of development would largely remain locally; this is also a curse because the costs of development too would do the same. While the sharing economy is touted as a creative disruptor, not much is known about their impacts. This chapter examines the role of shared economy actors in the hospitality industry, particularly guesthouses, in tourism recovery. It presents a micro-case study of guest sentiments on guesthouses in the Maldives. Based on an analysis of 17,576 comments, a total of eight factors emerged including: perceived value for money, local culture, hospitality, services, activities, rooms, food and beverage, and island environment. These reviews are useful to understand the factors appealing to visitors to the guesthouses and could become key inputs to the island's tourism recovery strategy.

This chapter studies the link between urban planning and health. Access to safe drinking water is already a very serious issue for large urban populations in fast-growing economies such as India. Water availability is further being impacted by climate change, leading to the drastically increased spread of water-related diseases.

Leh Town, which is located in an ecologically vulnerable semi-arid region of the Himalayas in Ladakh, has been considered for this study because it is undergoing large-scale transformation due to rapid growth in its tourism industry. In 2012–2013 our interdisciplinary group comprising researchers from Germany and India conducted field surveys, including geographic information system-based (GIS) mapping of point sources of water pollution, questionnaire surveys of 200 households and 70 hotels and guesthouses and semi-structured interviews. We also reviewed secondary medical data.

We found that diarrhoeal incidence has increased in the local population in Leh in the past decade, which may be linked to water pollution: Further, we found that rapidly increasing water consumption coupled with a lack of adequate water and sanitation infrastructure is causing serious water pollution.

Further, data is needed for causal connections between water pollution and health impacts to be conclusively drawn.

This study discusses the use of GIS to support a call for the need for more integrated urban planning and decision-making that holistically addresses water and health challenges in Leh and advocates the development of a decentralized or hybrid sanitation system to support water resources conservation as a central dimension of an integrated health management approach.

GIS is also a very useful platform for supporting participatory urban planning in Leh.

With such an integrated urban planning approach, Leh would be a lighthouse example for other towns in the region.

The accommodation of the Australian Tourism industry and contributes around $2.9 billion to the tourism gross value employs 18% of all tourism employees annually. Despite this important economic contribution, there is a general lack of information on the investment trends in this sector. This paper highlights the past investment trends and factors that have affected those investment decisions during the last three decades, and provides the estimates of the future investment. Forecast shows that over the next 10 years around 52,800 new rooms will be required to meet the expected tourism demand by 2013 and around $5.3 billion new investment will be required to construct those extra facilities. The historical patterns of investment in the sector suggest that this expected requirement for new investment is readily achievable.

More than 30 legal recyclables were proclaimed by Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) in Taiwan of those producers and importers are liable for paying a Resource Recycling Fee (RRF). The Resource Recycling Management Fund determines both the tariff of RRF and the subsidy rate for recycling activities based on a predetermined pricing formula and collects the revenue to finance its collection and disposal. While contemplating on whether to proclaim waste mattress as a legal recyclable, EPA is facing several critical challenges, particularly the lack of data required for setting a tariff–subsidy mix. In this chapter we critically review the formula and propose an innovative pricing rule. Also, we develop a science-based approach to demonstrate how a tariff–subsidy mix could be determined under the circumstance of data deficiency. By doing so, we avoid not only the difficulty in solving the nonhomogeneous and nonautonomous first-order difference equation that governs the stock accumulation of waste mattress but also the distributed lag model of multiperiods linking quantity of mattress discarded and the quantity of new mattress sold. Such an approach could be applied to the durables for recycling pricing particularly when relevant data are limited.

Entrepreneurship is a politically charged discourse. It has positive aspects but also destabilises societal, economic and political power relations, and leads to various categories of inclusion and exclusion. Despite the Western governmental grand narrative that portrays a vision of society whereby the entrepreneurial values such as resourcefulness, risk-taking, self-efficacy, autonomy and confidence can be appropriated by everyone, regardless of their background and profile, entrepreneurship does not often elevate and liberate marginalised people who are in subordinate positions. Presupposed assumptions of entrepreneurship should be challenged when pursuing the lines of critical inquiry as advocated in this chapter. Entrepreneurship is not only a socio-economic process but also functions as a political ideology, which can be instrumental in reproducing and reinforcing conservative assumptions and actions and hence shape public policy and public perception in ways that serve conservative political or capitalist ends, as evident in the case of social enterprise and entrepreneurship in the UK. Therefore, policy implications of the intersection of diversity and entrepreneurship are fundamentally important.