Search Results (2,778)

The digital transformation of cultural tourism has increased interest in understanding how technological innovation and sustainability influence destination choice among younger travellers. Grounded in the Theory of Planned Behavior, this study examines the relationship between Smart Technologies, Sustainability, and Generation Z’s intention to visit digitally enhanced cultural destinations. Data were collected from 354 Generation Z respondents and analysed using SmartPLS4, complemented by mediation analysis, Importance–Performance Map Analysis, PLSpredict, and the Cross-Validated Predictive Ability Test. The findings reveal that Smart Technologies exert a strong positive effect on Visit Intention (β = 0.575, p < 0.001) and Sustainability (β = 0.437, p < 0.001), while Sustainability also positively influences Visit Intention (β = 0.194, p < 0.001). Sustainability partially mediates the relationship between Smart Technologies and Visit Intention (β = 0.085, p < 0.001). The model explains 46.6% of the variance in Visit Intention, while IPMA identifies Smart Technologies as the most influential managerial priority. The study contributes to smart tourism literature by providing an integrated TPB-based framework linking technology, sustainability, and destination intention. The findings suggest that technological innovation is the primary driver of Visit Intention, while Sustainability plays a complementary role among Generation Z travellers. Full article

Apple maturation involves profound metabolic reconfiguration, yet systematic trade-offs among bioactive, primary, and volatile metabolites remain unclear, particularly under highland cultivation. We examined nine apple cultivars spanning early-, mid-, and late-maturing groups grown under identical high-altitude conditions (1950 m). Early-maturing cultivars exhibited superior antioxidant activity, with Huashuo (HS) achieving the highest ABTS•⁺ radical scavenging (1268.5 μg Trolox/g) and flavonoid (18.9 mg/g) levels. Conversely, late cultivars accumulated significantly more starch (31.5 mg/g in HFS) and total soluble sugars (121.5 mg/g in Ruixue), whereas sucrose peaked in the early Jinyu (94.4 mg/g). PCA and OPLS-DA models robustly separated maturity groups (predictive variance 65.4%). Late-maturing cultivars exhibited reduced volatile abundance, with 338 compounds downregulated versus only 32 upregulated (VIP > 1, p < 0.05). Compounds with high predicted aroma impact (rOAV ≥ 1), including 2,6-nonadienal (Log₂FC = −3.21) and isobutyl isovalerate (−3.55), were severely depleted, while butanoic acid propyl ester (5.01) increased. Flavor mapping suggested a marked loss of “green” and “fruity” notes in late cultivars. Overall, highland-grown apples exhibit a fundamental metabolic trade-off favoring starch accumulation, a trait commonly associated with storability in late-maturing cultivars. These findings suggest candidate volatile biomarkers for breeding programs that warrant further validation and highlight the potential need for postharvest metabolic interventions to preserve the natural aroma of late-maturing apples. Full article

Destinations increasingly shift from promotional branding toward holistic and inclusive identity strategies, where cultural heritage operates as both an anchor of local distinctiveness and a catalyst for creative place-making. This study presents a mixed-methods Triple Bottom Line (TBL) assessment of four Greek cultural heritage institutions, a regional theatre, a municipal gallery, a university-affiliated foundation, and a regional film festival, to examine how governance structures, resource availability, and organisational capacity shape environmental, social, and economic sustainability performance. Through document analysis and semi-structured interviews, the research identifies eleven recurring thematic variables across the TBL dimensions and systematically compares their implementation across distinct governance models. Findings show that social sustainability, particularly accessibility, education, and community engagement, constitutes a structurally universal baseline across all institutions, regardless of governance type or resource level. In contrast, environmental and economic performance diverge sharply according to governance model, building ownership, and access to capital. As cultural institutions function as experiential landmarks within cultural and creative tourism, their inclusive practices enhance community wellbeing while co-producing destination identity as socially responsible and culturally authentic. The study concludes with targeted policy recommendations on reporting standards, capacity building, and structural constraints, offering transferable insights for creative place-making and sustainable destination branding in Greece and other Mediterranean contexts. Full article

Landmark recognition for smart tourism is usually validated on curated benchmark images. In deployment, however, the classifier must handle user-generated photographs whose viewpoint, lighting, resolution, occlusion, and compression differ sharply from curated data. This paper evaluates a previously published multi-threshold enhancement and selective YOLO11n-cls ensemble under this shift, and provides a preliminary zero-shot comparison of three general-purpose multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on the same task. To measure the shift, we build Samarkand v2-SNS, a 300-image out-of-distribution test set of social-media photographs of 12 Samarkand landmarks, disjoint from the training and validation data. Under the shift, four supervised baselines fall by 12.73–22.08 percentage points to 73–80% accuracy, and their in-distribution ranking does not hold. The selective ensemble degrades least (99.24% to 93.00%, −6.24 points) and outperforms the strongest baseline by 13 points. A capacity-matched ablation shows that most of this robustness comes from enhancement diversity, not from generic ensembling. In a preliminary comparison, zero-shot MLLMs (GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.5) reach only 24.81–54.26%, far below deployment needs. The results argue for reporting out-of-distribution accuracy alongside curated benchmarks, and for hybrid systems that pair compact specialised recognisers with MLLM-based interpretation. Full article

Living terraced cultural landscapes (LTCLs) bind together agricultural heritage, ecological function, and local culture. International instruments such as the Guidance and Toolkit for Impact Assessments, Enhancing Our Heritage Toolkit 2.0, and Preparing World Heritage Nominations guide heritage protection, but none integrates all four dimensions, and no LTCL-specific framework exists to diagnose a candidate site before formal nomination. Following PRISMA 2020, this review synthesized 61 peer-reviewed studies from the Web of Science Core Collection (2012–2026; screening Cohen’s κ = 0.82). Keyword co-occurrence mapping in VOSviewer, combined with manual thematic coding, produced six clusters that we consolidated into four analytical dimensions: heritage value, landscape integrity, tourism–heritage balance, and governance and protection. Reading across these dimensions revealed three gaps—no tool integrates all four in an operable form, the balance between tourism and protection lacks an explicit evaluative mechanism, and socioeconomic stressors such as rural labor out-migration fall outside official criteria—together pointing to a fourth, procedural gap: the absence of pre-nomination diagnosis. On this basis we propose IAF-LTCL, a preliminary conceptual framework of four dimensions and 22 elements, designed so that strength in one dimension does not offset weakness in another. The framework is not yet empirically validated; we present it as a structured starting point that heritage managers can use for pre-nomination self-assessment, pending future field validation. Full article

Existing studies on cultural landscape genes in traditional villages have largely focused on the identification of objective elements, while paying insufficient attention to the associations between tourists’ subjective perceptions, Place identity, and Satisfaction. Taking the five nationally recognized traditional villages in Wuxi, China, as case studies, this study constructs an association model linking cultural landscape gene perception, Place identity, and Satisfaction. The model was tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling based on 392 tourist questionnaires. The results indicate that Perceived Environmental Character, Perceived Settlement Morphology, Perceived Architectural Characteristics, and Perceived Cultural Attributes are all significantly and positively associated with both Place identity and Satisfaction. Place identity is also significantly and positively associated with Satisfaction. In terms of the standardized path coefficients, Perceived Settlement Morphology shows a relatively strong association with Place identity (β = 0.285), while Perceived Architectural Characteristics shows a relatively strong association with Satisfaction (β = 0.257). The model explains 41.2% of the variance in Place identity and 54.1% of the variance in Satisfaction. Both the direct paths between the four dimensions of cultural landscape gene perception and Satisfaction and the indirect paths through Place identity are statistically significant, indicating that Place identity plays a partial mediating role. This study extends Cultural Landscape Gene Theory from the identification of objective landscape elements to the levels of tourist perception and tourism evaluation, and reveals that Place identity may constitute a psychological pathway linking cultural landscape perception with Satisfaction. In practice, the perceptibility of village spatial patterns, architectural appearance, environmental characteristics, and cultural content should be comprehensively maintained to enhance tourists’ Place identity and overall experience evaluations. Full article

Tourism is a complex economic activity all over the world shaped by distinct local resources: culture, nature, industrial heritage, urban ambiance, place-based uniqueness, and geographical accessibility. The simultaneous governance and management of economic growth motives, preservation of the cultural heritage base, and respect for nature and ecological quality calls for an evidence-based and multi-faceted policy analysis that seeks to achieve sustainable development among conflicting policy objectives in tourist areas. The present paper seeks to explore the feasibility of a sustainable balance for various heterogeneous cultural heritage areas in Europe (‘urban pilot regions’), with particular attention to sustainable local development characterized by circular economic objectives and an ecological balance strategy based on the principle of stakeholders’ co-creation. The paper addresses the knowledge gap between generic policy aims and site-specific views of actors or visitors. To that end, an extensive survey experiment was administered in the urban regions concerned, in which a wide range of relevant management issues/questions related to environmental preferences and perceptions were posed to stakeholders and visitors. The data were analyzed by means of a novel respondent-oriented multivariate statistical tool, viz. Generalized Q-Analysis, which is suitable for handling big databases with many respondents. The paper shows that the application of Generalized Q-Analysis to common survey data enriches the results from the application of a conventional Q-Analysis. Furthermore, the study also highlights that, based on the views expressed by the surveyed visitors, the tourist areas concerned are quite different from each other in attracting specific classes of visitors. Therefore, functional specialization in the tourist sector seems to be an important anchor point for effective governance of urban tourism, not only in Europe, but also elsewhere in the world. Full article

Historic buildings occupy a sensitive position in contemporary energy and heritage management because they combine building-performance requirements, material-conservation constraints, and dynamic patterns of use. This study maps the broader historic-building literature at the intersection of energy-efficient restoration, building decarbonization, heritage conservation, and sustainable tourism, and interprets the resulting bibliometric structure with particular implications for historic stone places of worship. Records were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection and screened through a PRISMA 2020-aligned protocol, yielding 804 publications. Accordingly, the 804-record corpus represents a broad historic-building and heritage-management evidence base rather than an exhaustive dataset restricted exclusively to stone religious buildings. Performance analysis and science mapping were conducted using Bibliometrix, while bibliographic coupling and longitudinal thematic-evolution analyses were added to examine contemporary research fronts and their temporal continuity. Co-citation analysis identified two partially separated intellectual schools—European conservation microclimate and adaptive reuse management—whereas bibliographic coupling revealed five current research-front communities, including adaptive reuse and sustainability, microclimate-conservation-energy, and an emerging HBIM/digital-documentation front. Thematic evolution showed increasing post-2019 convergence of tourism and management with conservation and cultural-heritage research, but continued separation from technical energy and microclimate streams. The study therefore moves beyond descriptive rankings to identify structural fragmentation and three priority directions: integrated monitoring of visitor loads, energy, and conservation performance; HBIM-supported spatial integration; and stronger cross-national research collaboration. The findings are interpreted as bibliometric evidence and research-agenda signals rather than as causal proof of building or policy performance. Full article

Henan Province is one of China’s most culturally resource-rich regions, yet the spatial organization and driving mechanisms of its high-grade tourism resources remain insufficiently understood. This study investigates the spatial distribution characteristics and influencing factors of 2396 high-grade tourism resource sites across 157 county-level units in Henan Province. An integrated analytical framework combining GIS-based spatial analysis (nearest neighbor index, kernel density estimation, and spatial autocorrelation), geographic detector methods, and a spatial error model is employed to examine the roles of natural, economic, social, and cultural factors. The results indicate that high-grade tourism resources exhibit significant spatial clustering, forming a pronounced core–periphery structure with a dual-center pattern centered on the main urban area of Zhengzhou and Dengfeng. Strong positive spatial autocorrelation is observed, characterized by contiguous hot spots in central and northwestern Henan and cold spots in the eastern plains. The spatial differentiation of high-grade tourism resources is driven by multiple interacting factors, among which topography and material cultural heritage are the primary drivers, while economic development and intangible cultural heritage act as secondary facilitators. These findings provide empirical evidence for understanding inland tourism spatial structures and offer practical insights for heritage-led, cluster-based tourism planning, aimed at promoting sustainable regional development. Full article

Drawing on self-determination theory (SDT) and service-dominant logic (SDL), this study examines how stress-relief-oriented escape, self-fulfillment, and digital information environments are associated with emotion value co-creation among Generation Z cultural heritage tourists. Survey data from 457 adult Generation Z tourists who had visited cultural heritage destinations in Shanxi Province, China, were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. Stress-relief-oriented escape was negatively associated with both self-fulfillment and emotion value co-creation, while self-fulfillment was positively associated with emotion value co-creation and carried a significant indirect association between escape and emotion value co-creation. The moderation results revealed contrasting digital boundary conditions: higher media promotion progressively attenuated the negative escape relationships to statistical non-significance, whereas stronger GenAI personalization was associated with increasingly negative relationships. These findings extend tourism motivation research by positioning stress-relief-oriented escape as a recovery-oriented motivational starting condition whose implications depend on the experiential outcome considered. By integrating SDT and SDL, the study identifies self-fulfillment as a measured psychological pathway connecting motivational orientation with emotion value co-creation and shows that this relationship is conditioned differently by interpretive media and preference-adaptive GenAI environments. The findings offer implications for heritage communication and GenAI-enabled tourism design. Full article

The Historic Centre of Córdoba (Spain), designated a Site of Cultural Interest (BIC) and partially recognised as a ‘World Heritage Site’ by UNESCO, is one of the largest in Europe and, in recent decades, has undergone profound functional, economic and social transformations, which have been accelerated by growing tourist activity. These processes have not yet been analysed systematically, despite the fact that the study of urban processes such as touristification and their implications for certain urban dynamics of gentrification is a highly topical issue. This study aims to determine the extent to which the Historic Centre of Córdoba is undergoing a significant process of touristification and its impact on depopulation, gentrification and other functional and land-use transformations. To this end, a series of demographic, socio-economic, tourism-related and property market indicators have been collected and analysed. The results indicate a recent, intense process of touristification that has exacerbated the critical situation of depopulation and residential abandonment, although no significant process of socio-demographic gentrification has been detected. It is concluded that tourism is neither the sole nor even the main cause of this trend of demographic decline and functional and urban changes; rather, there are multiple historical, socio-economic, urban planning and demographic factors that explain them. This study lays the groundwork for a broader investigation of this urban area, which is of such great significance to the city in terms of heritage, history and identity. Full article

As religious tourism expands across Asia, it remains unclear who benefits from its growth and who is overlooked in policy and industry accounts. Drawing on fieldwork in the temple-towns of Jejuri and Tuljapur in Maharashtra, India, this paper aims to make a timely and original contribution about the significance of informal, family-run and ritual-linked enterprises to the centre of debates on entrepreneurship and inclusive tourism development. The study combines visitor surveys, detailed enterprise mapping and entrepreneur interviews to reveal a dense but precarious local economy which is sustained by religious retail (a term articulated for sale of items related to rituals), street vending and small-scale service provision. These micro-enterprises are culturally central but economically fragile, low-margin and weakly recognised in policy. The paper argues that entrepreneurship is constrained by traditional religious authority, informality, seasonality and limited innovation capacity, while rising visitor numbers are creating opportunities in travel, accommodation and food. It shows that sustainability in temple-towns depends on livelihood durability, socio-cultural continuity, participatory governance and distributional justice. By foregrounding actors often omitted from formal economic analysis, the paper reframes religious tourism as an embedded entrepreneurial ecosystem and calls for policies that strengthen local enterprise capability, resilience and participation. Full article

Systematic assessment of the potential for realizing the value of ecological products in plateau lake basins, together with the identification of differentiated pathways, is essential for addressing structural tensions between ecological protection and regional development and for improving the precision of value-realization practices. Taking the nine major plateau lake basins in Yunnan Province as the study area, this study constructs a comprehensive indicator system covering three dimensions: supply potential, transformation conditions, and market demand. The k-means clustering method is then applied to classify basin types and identify dominant value-realization pathways. The results indicate that: (1) the VPPI ranges from 0.1594 to 0.7679, with the highest value in Dianchi Lake Basin and the lowest in Chenghai Lake Basin; the high-, medium-, and low-potential zones have mean VPPI values of 0.6928, 0.4033, and 0.2106, respectively; (2) four distinct types are identified, namely the regulatory service trading type, cultural tourism empowerment type, characteristic provisioning product premium type, and protection-priority reserve type; and (3) low-potential basins are mainly constrained by weak market demand, with a mean market-demand contribution of only 0.0386. These findings provide quantitative decision support for context-specific pathway design in plateau lake basins. Full article

Landscape Character Assessment (LCA) has struggled with scale mismatches and inadequate treatment of cultural expression when applied to high-density cultural landscapes in Asia. On the Chengdu Plain, Western Sichuan, China, remote sensing shows convergent settlement patterns across case sites, but fieldwork reveals substantial divergences in landscape character. We examined five cases representing different rural development models in the Chengdu metropolitan area. By integrating 10 m Sentinel-2 imagery and with systematic fieldwork (3200 photographs and 42 semi-structured interviews, July–August 2023), we constructed a framework that combines macro-scale spatial analysis with micro-scale field investigation. For macro-level quantification, six landscape pattern indices were adopted: number of patches (NP), patch density (PD), contagion index (CONTAG), aggregation index (AI), Shannon’s diversity index (SHDI), and Shannon’s evenness index (SHEI). The micro-level investigation followed a three-tier scheme (natural environment, settlement space, architectural details) to record vertical ecological communities, spatial expressions of cultural embeddedness, and visual landscape character. Indicator screening employed the KJ method and two rounds of Delphi consultation with ten experts; weights were then determined through the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Macro-level results display a clustered, low-fragmentation pattern (woodland AI = 97.48, water body AI = 99.40), anchored by a stable mosaic of Linpan, farmland, water bodies, and homesteads. Micro-level features include multi-strata vertical communities of trees, shrubs, grasses, and water, along with cultural embeddedness expressed through irrigation systems, farming patterns, and courtyard layouts. The VLEAS (Vernacular Landscape Elements Assessment System) framework encompasses three dimensions (natural, cultural, and visual) and comprises 12 indicators. The cultural dimension receives the highest weight (0.42), followed by natural (0.32) and visual (0.26) dimensions. Comparative analysis shows that the framework differentiates cases with similar macro-scale patterns but divergent micro-features, capturing differences that a purely macro-index benchmark misses, and it also reveals trade-offs among ecological integrity, cultural heritage, and visual quality. Sensitivity analysis displays that case rankings remain stable across four extreme weighting scenarios (cultural, ecological, visual, equal), with only one swap (Xingfu Pastoral Park and Nongke Village) under ecological priority and no rank change greater than one position, confirming that the results are not driven by any specific weight assignment. This approach extends the utility of LCA in high-density rural cultural landscapes and offers a practical tool for differentiated conservation and management, especially in tourism-influenced rural settings on the Chengdu Plain. Transferability to other regions would require recalibration of locally relevant indicators. Full article

As tourism shifts from sightseeing to experience-oriented consumption, understanding how tourist perception differs across heterogeneous destination types and spatial scales remains challenging. Using 23,439 Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) reviews archived for six destinations in Shangrao, China, this study compares mountain-type and rural comprehensive destination products. These are operational dominant-function categories rather than mutually exclusive geomorphological classes. The archive supports fine-grained sentiment, topic, and semantic-network analyses; annual temporal comparisons use the full 23,439-review corpus covering 2019–2025, whereas a separate subset of reviews posted from 1 August 2022 with official IP labels, aggregated into 2022–2024 province–year observations, supports Pooled Ordinary Least Squares (Pooled OLS) estimation. A hybrid lexicon–XLM-RoBERTa workflow, BERTopic, semantic co-occurrence analysis, and Pooled OLS are integrated in a cross-scale framework. Static results reveal shared strengths and weaknesses—high scenery and overall-experience evaluations but low price evaluations—alongside type-specific structures: mountain reviews concentrate on natural scenery, climbing effort, and accessibility, whereas rural reviews span village landscapes, cultural activities, accommodation, and nighttime experiences. Temporally, mountain demand retains a stable scenic core while accessibility concerns become more salient; rural demand shifts from traditional agricultural landscapes toward nighttime performances and other experience-oriented products. Cross-scale regressions identify destination- and dimension-specific correlates rather than causal drivers: urbanization is positively associated with several rural evaluations, while ecological contrast, climatic difference, and competing scenic resources are associated with more critical assessments in selected dimensions. The findings show that perception differences arise from the interaction of destination product structures and origin-region contexts, supporting differentiated accessibility management for mountain destinations and balanced product innovation, service improvement, and commercialization control for rural destinations. Full article