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The purpose of this study is to investigate the direct impact of shopping experience of tourists on their satisfaction with shopping, while perceived crowding is used as a moderator in this relationship.

The proposed conceptual model was tested by an empirical study where the data were collected from 411 German tourists, visiting Kaleiçi, Antalya-Turkey.

The study results revealed that tourist shopping experience (consisting of education, esthetic, entertainment and escapism dimensions) significantly determines satisfaction with shopping. Moreover, crowding perception has a two-dimensional structure, as human and spatial crowding. Human crowding, which reflects high human density, is found to negatively moderate the effect of shopping experience on satisfaction, where spatial crowding, which is related to high space density, does not influence this relationship.

This study exceptionally shows that crowding perceptions of German tourists in shopping are affected by both human and spatial crowding. In addition, the moderating role of perceived crowding is clarified in the relationship between shopping experience and satisfaction.

The aim of this paper is to critically review the contribution made by this theme issue in responding to the strategic question: “How can the tourism industry respond to the global challenges arising from climate change and environmental degradation?”

A critical content analysis of the papers selected for the theme issue was undertaken to learn from the best practices globally. This enabled the theme editors to reflect on the rationale for the theme issue question, the starting-point and the editorial process.

This summary paper highlights the most significant outcomes from the theme issue in terms of the contributions to knowledge and/or professional practice. It also summarizes the implications for management action and applied research arising from the outcomes and best practices based on case studies in Malaysia, Canada and New Zealand. As the main objective of the theme issue was to obtain a general overview of the relationship between tourism and climate change, five general review papers were included to strengthen the research framework.

This paper outlines the challenges and new approaches in dealing with the issue of climate change. Given the economic, social and environmental significance of tourism, coverage of the climate change issue as it relates to tourism is, yet, limited. Given this scenario, the theme issue has contributed to the body of knowledge in this important field.

This paper explores the extent to which the cases presented and the review of various climate change concepts can provide guidance. The approaches and issues discussed in this theme issue could be replicated and applied in countries that are beginning to focus on climate change issues.

By conducting a longitudinal study, this study aims to investigate how the role of hotel attributes in destination competitiveness changed through the stages of pre-, amid and recovery from the crisis.

First, the latent Dirichlet allocation method was used to identify hotel attributes from 15,137 online reviews, and then a sentiment analysis was performed to determine tourist satisfaction with the subject attributes. Second, separate asymmetric impact competitor analyses were conducted for the three stages of the crisis, and their results were compared with understand how the role of the hotel attributes changed throughout the crisis.

The results revealed that the impacts of hotel attributes on tourist satisfaction and destination competitiveness differed significantly at each stage of the crisis.

This research expands the existing literature by offering valuable insights by elucidating the changing characteristics of hotel attributes at each crisis stage. The results extend the body of knowledge in destination management by providing evidence on the validity of asymmetric impact competitor analysis.

To fully understand the impact of a crisis (e.g. COVID-19) on destination competitiveness with a focus on the hotel sector, this research conducted a longitudinal study that covers three stages of the crisis (i.e. pre-, amid and post-crisis). Moreover, unlike previous studies, this research considers the asymmetric relationships between service attributes and overall tourist satisfaction, as well as competitors’ information.

This paper aims to assess receptiveness for Tourism and Hospitality as a career path among students in the Tourism Department of Sultan Qaboos University (College of Arts and Social Sciences), located in the Sultanate of Oman. The following objectives were identified to achieve this aim: assess respondents’ perceptions of tourism and hospitality employment; respondents’ tourism and hospitality employment commitment factors; and respondents’ perceptions of tourism and hospitality jobs.

A self-administered questionnaire was used to gather data and measure respondents’ perceptions of the subject under investigation. Survey questions were developed from the literature reviewed which provided the framework for the questionnaire. The questionnaire comprises four different question categories: general information; students’ general perception of tourism and hospitality employment; and tourism and hospitality employment commitment factors; students’ perceptions of tourism and hospitality jobs. Data were tested for normality of distribution; then, means were used for data description and ranking; thereafter, the independent-samples t-test and analysis of variance were conducted to test for significance between groups of respondents; the level of significance used was p ≤ 0.05.

The paper revealed that nearly 41 per cent of the students will continue working in tourism and hospitality for some time. For them, working in the industry is a step on the way, but is not a career path. Only 21.6 per cent are willing to consider tourism and hospitality as their long-term chosen career path. Tourism and hospitality students’ perceptions of the industry tend to be negatively affected as they progress in their study plan. Commitment to employment in Tourism and Hospitality is shaped by four major interrelated factor categories: industry, personality, education and society. The Omani tourism and hospitality industry was not able to project an image that could generate interest among Omanis. Consequently, very few graduates join the Tourism and Hospitality job market, leading to shortages in Omani workers in the industry. The major drawback of such trend is the inability to achieve the Omanization planned figures.

The findings are intended to assist tourism and hospitality educators, employers and policymakers better understand students’ future employment intentions.

At the core of understanding the practice of marketing sustainable tourism lies an appreciation not only of the evolution of the concept of sustainability, but also of the co-productive process between consumer and producer. This chapter establishes a conceptual overview on sustainable tourism and its alternative terms (ecotourism, responsible tourism, soft tourism, ethical tourism). Its origins stem from the pivotal works of the Brundtland Report. The author considers the complex structures that interact with the tourism industry, such as the social, environmental and economic impacts of tourism in vulnerable or sensitive climates. For example, in Central Thailand, cities such as Bangkok have experienced rapid urbanisation as well as burgeoning tourism. This has resulted in high levels of air pollution from traffic congestion and manufacturing, while escalation in the tourism industry places burdens on waste management systems. Further strains on waste management in both the Eastern and Southern regions, particularly along the coastlines, which suffer from high levels of coastal litter, are attributed to the rising tourism industry – a process other popular destinations have undergone, such as Costa Rica. Examination of cases such as Thailand will elicit further discussion of public awareness of the impacts of the tourism industry in vulnerable climates. Lastly, the chapter will look at cases of demotion or de-marketing of tourism in certain regions in order to limit the number of visitors, such as that of the Blue Mountains National Park in Australia. In addition to the case studies reviewed in this chapter, there is a practice exercise in developing an environmental performance index, based on existing data on country-specific environmental performance.

This study aims to predict customer churn in resort hotels by calculating the churn probability of repeat customers for future stays in the same hotel brand.

Based on the recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) paradigm, random forest and logistic regression supervised machine learning algorithms were used to predict churn behavior. The model with superior performance was used to detect potential churners and generate a priority matrix.

The random forest algorithm showed a higher prediction performance with an 80% accuracy rate. The most important variables were RFM-based, followed by hotel sector-specific variables such as market, season, accompaniers and booker. Some managerial strategies were proposed to retain future churners, clustered as “hesitant,” “economy,” “alternative seeker,” and “opportunity chaser” customer groups.

This study contributes to the theoretical understanding of customer behavior in the hospitality industry and provides valuable insight for hotel practitioners by demonstrating the methods that facilitate the identification of potential churners and their characteristics.

Most customer retention studies in hospitality either concentrate on the antecedents of retention or customers’ revisit intentions using traditional methods. Taking a unique place within the literature, this study conducts churn prediction analysis for repeat hotel customers by opening a new area for inquiry in hospitality studies.

This paper aims to explore work interfering with family (WIF) and family interfering with work (FIW) as the mediators linking psychological resilience to happiness.

Data gathered from tour guides in Türkiye were used to test the aforesaid associations. In this paper, partial least squares structural equation modeling was performed to gauge the direct links and mediating impacts of WIF and FIW simultaneously in the link between psychological resilience and happiness.

Psychological resilience exerts a dual influence on WIF and FIW. Simply put, psychologically resilient tour guides balance their work demands with those of the family or vice versa and exhibit low levels of WIF and FIW. As hypothesized, WIF and FIW are the two mediating mechanisms relating psychological resilience to happiness.

It is important to create a family-supportive atmosphere where tour guides can avail themselves of family-friendly practices (i.e. family leave, flexible work schedules, breaks to be spent with family members after long tours and convenient working hours). Psychologically resilient tour guides, with the abovementioned practices, would experience alleviated conflicts between work and family roles and would therefore have heightened happiness.

Although the extant literature has presented plenty of empirical studies about the predictors and outcomes of WIF and FIW, evidence about the links of personal resources as third variables to WIF and FIW simultaneously is still scanty. In addition, there is no evidence linking personal resources such as psychological resilience to nonwork outcomes such as happiness through the mediating roles of WIF and FIW. This paper fills in these voids by gauging the links given above using data collected from tour guides, a population that has been subjected to limited inquiry in the WIF and FIW literature.

This chapter evaluates the extent to which sustainable principles have been included on the destination recovery plans implemented by British Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) in response to COVID-19 and their subsequent quarantines during the period 2020–2021. The aim of the chapter is to explore if this pause in activities created by the COVID-19 crisis was used by UK DMOs as an opportunity to develop sustainable destination management plans, or alternatively, led them to prioritise financial income as the key driver in their recovery. The chapter also identifies the goals, motivations, performance indicators and strategies applied by those DMOs which developed post-COVID tourism destination recovery plans, with particular focus on those which have decided to include sustainability elements in their plans. The chapter concludes by developing a set of principles that other DMOs could apply when intending to develop sustainable management plans for their destinations in response to future major operational disruptions.

The purpose of this paper is to critically review and synthesize the scale development practices in hospitality and tourism and propose updated guidelines applicable for both reflective and composite scales.

Using a critical review of a sample of scale development papers published in six top-tier tourism and hospitality journals, the current guidelines' weaknesses and strengths and their applications are identified. Updated procedures are proposed to overcome these weaknesses.

This review showed several issues in applying existing guidelines, including incomplete and unclear data collection processes, inconsistent data analysis processes including validity/reliability assessment and lack of criteria to identify and assess composite scales. As such, this paper proposes updated guidelines by incorporating the confirmatory composite analysis to assess composite scales.

This paper offers unique theoretical and methodological contributions to scale development literature, by identifying the shortcomings of current practices of scale development and propose guidelines for both reflective and composite scales. The current scale development procedures cannot be applied for composite scales, and so the results of composite scale development using the current procedures are questionable. The updated guidelines by the current study improve new scales' accuracy, reliability and validity.

This study aims to assess the relationships between cultural travel motivation, two dimensions of authenticity and satisfaction of domestic tourists visiting Sirince in Turkey. Given the structure of the model, authenticity is two latent variables, indirectly affecting satisfaction.

The research takes a predictive and explanatory approach rather than theory confirmation. Partial least squares (PLS) algorithm was used to assess the multiple mediation. The data were collected from 391 domestic visitors through a self-administered questionnaire.

The research highlights that two dimensions of authenticity have a statistically mediating influences on the relationship between cultural travel motivation and satisfaction. Furthermore, while cultural travel motivation is the most important predictor of satisfaction, object-based authenticity has emerged as an antecedent variable that deserves to be given the highest importance. Finally, first time visitors and repeaters did not differ across all relationships in the model.

The fact that the data were collected only from Sirince can be considered as geographical limitations of the study. Another limitation is that due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the data were obtained only from domestic tourists visiting Sirince.

The study on the multiple mediating roles of authenticity in the relationship between motivation factor alongside satisfaction revealed a variety of application opportunities, particularly for destinations attempting to position themselves as authentic. Accordingly, authenticity concept gains significance in tourism industry more often because unique experiences at the visited destinations can satisfy the individuals in search of their self-identity.

Furthermore, transformation of authentic places into tourism destinations develops cultural values in line with expectations of tourists. However, this transforms domestic cultural factors into commercial products by eroding their significance in the eye of local residents. This invites artificiality by drifting apart from originality of cultural elements. Each element serves as part of authenticity is indeed away from authentic experience even though it is regarded as an authentic experience from tourists’ perspective because it diverts from its reality. Establishing balance between tourists’ travel motivations and their expectation from authentic destination is substantially important to satisfy their sensational and sentimental expectations. In addition to the ones mentioned above, managers should take an active role in promotion and focus on sponsorship activities to highlight the authenticity of Sirince; begin reconstruction works by considering the original architecture specific to the region; and pay attention to the compatibility of the new architectural texture with the destination character. As stated in the study of Genc and Gulertekin Genc (2021), special attention should be paid to the harmony between the architectural texture and the destination feature. Finally, considering that authenticity has a mediating role between cultural travel motivation and satisfaction, authentic values should be highlighted in promotional videos.

There has been very little research into the role of the dimensions of authenticity in mediating the relationship between cultural motivation and satisfaction. Unlike previous studies on authenticity and tourism, this research attempted to examine the relationship between cultural travel motivation and satisfaction by involving two dimensions of authenticity into the model.