Search Results (4,873)

Rural cultural tourism has become an important pathway for rural revitalization in underdeveloped regions, yet its spatial organization and driving mechanisms remain insufficiently understood. This study investigates the spatial patterns, functional typology, and driving mechanisms—understood as statistically significant spatial associations—of 300 policy-designated rural cultural tourism villages in Gansu Province, China, using an integrated geospatial analytical framework incorporating the Average Nearest Neighbor Index, Kernel Density Estimation (KDE), the Lorenz Curve, Global Moran’s I, and the Geo-detector model. The results reveal a significant clustered distribution characterized by a pronounced “high-density southeast–low-density northwest” pattern. Five functional village types exhibit distinct spatial concentration characteristics associated with differences in resource endowments and development orientations. Geo-detector analysis identifies transportation accessibility, economic development, and topographic conditions as the factors most strongly associated with spatial heterogeneity. Interaction effects among natural, socioeconomic, and policy variables are also detectable. These findings advance the understanding of the spatial organization of rural cultural tourism and demonstrate the value of GIS-based spatial analysis for supporting evidence-based rural revitalization planning and sustainable territorial development in ecologically fragile regions. Full article

Urban cycling is increasingly recognised as a key component of sustainable urban mobility, yet many medium-sized cities lack integrated analytical tools to support evidence-based cycling infrastructure planning. This study proposes a GIS-based decision-support framework integrating a relative cycling impedance (Bike Cost) model, GIS-based network analysis, Origin–Destination (OD) Cost Matrix analysis, frequency-based corridor identification, and sensitivity analysis to evaluate cycling accessibility and prioritise cycling investments. The framework was applied to the central district of Burdur, Türkiye, using neighbourhood centres as origins and primary schools, middle schools, high schools, the university, parks, and tourism destinations as six destination categories. The results reveal that Burdur’s compact urban structure provides relatively high cycling accessibility within the urban core. In contrast, peripheral neighbourhoods experience lower accessibility because of fragmented network connectivity and higher cycling impedance. Spatial comparison with the existing cycling infrastructure revealed that the identified high-priority corridors do not overlap with the current cycling network, highlighting a clear mismatch between existing infrastructure and the corridors of greatest strategic importance. Sensitivity analysis confirmed that the priority corridors remained highly stable under alternative Bike Cost weighting scenarios, demonstrating the robustness of the proposed framework. These findings indicate that improving network continuity and connectivity is as important as expanding cycling infrastructure. The proposed framework provides a transferable and reproducible methodology for supporting evidence-based cycling infrastructure planning and sustainable urban mobility in medium-sized cities. Full article

Regeneration is increasingly emerging as a guiding paradigm for socio-ecological challenges, urging tourism research beyond conventional sustainability toward systemic, transformative perspectives. This study examines how the Regenerative Lens proposed by Buckton et al., combined with the Three Horizons framework, can be operationalized to diagnose tourism dynamics and identify regenerative pathways in the Sierra del Rincón Biosphere Reserve (Madrid, Spain). Using a participatory action research design, data were generated through 12 group sessions, 23 in-depth interviews, participant observation, an open online survey, and engagement in local tourism planning. The analysis first structured local narratives into present challenges, desired futures, and transition pathways, then read them through five regenerative qualities: ecological worldview, mutuality, diversity, agency, and reflexivity. All five are present, but unevenly. Diversity is a consolidated asset; reflexivity and ecological worldview are emerging yet largely discursive; and mutuality and agency are the weakest links, constrained by a governance deficit across the reserve’s six municipalities. In rural destinations rich in ecological and cultural capital, the decisive constraint on regeneration is thus relational, not material. The study also demonstrates the value of combining participatory foresight with the Regenerative Lens to examine tourism as a subsystem of wider territorial transformation. Full article

Justice has received more and more attention in the management of tourist destinations, but its function in cultural heritage situations is still insufficiently investigated. This research investigates the supportive attitudes of the residents towards the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH)-related festivals by using an integrated framework including the perceived justice, festival identity and perceived economic benefits. A quantitative study was conducted based on 552 returned valid questionnaires. After reliability and validity tests, structural equation modeling, bootstrap mediation analysis, and multi-group structural equation modeling were employed to test the research hypotheses. The results indicate that all three aspects of the perceived justice have a positive effect on the festival identity of the residents, which consequently enhances their support for the development of the festival. These findings broaden the justice-based views in tourism research and offer useful suggestions for promoting fair and community-supported festival tourism development. Full article

Air transport improves accessibility and can make travel more affordable, but it also increases environmental burdens and pressure on tourism destinations, dimensions that are still often examined separately. This study develops the Air Transport Sustainability Tension Score, a framework for individual routes that identifies where mobility benefits and sustainability burdens coexist across European air connections. The analysis covers 11,065 directed routes and integrates accessibility, relative affordability derived from expected fares, environmental burden, and destination tourism pressure. Accessibility and relative affordability form the benefit dimension, while environmental activity and tourism pressure form the burden dimension. Their harmonic aggregation limits compensation and assigns high scores when both dimensions remain elevated. Relative affordability was derived from expected fares generated for each route through five-fold cross-validation with Ridge regression, Random Forest, CatBoost, and XGBoost. Each prediction therefore came from a model that excluded the corresponding observation during training. Among the evaluated fixed model configurations, XGBoost performed best, achieving a mean absolute price error of EUR 28.58 and an $R^2$ of 0.6871 on the logarithmic price scale. TreeSHAP was then used to interpret the model predictions. The environmental activity proxy correlated strongly with the strict CO₂ score derived from fleet information on 3622 routes. Across the sensitivity analyses, the broad route ordering remained comparatively stable, although exact membership in the upper decile was more sensitive to methodological choices. The primary upper decile contained 1107 routes. Monte Carlo weight variation retained 580 routes and the complete specification multiverse retained 506, with 421 supported by both procedures. Two route archetypes revealed distinct empirical profiles involving strong connectivity and environmental activity or greater tourism pressure at destinations. The framework provides an interpretable basis for differentiated air transport and destination management without automatically classifying routes as sustainable or unsustainable. Full article

Green innovations represent an important factor in the sustainable development and competitiveness of gastronomic tourism destinations. This study aims to examine the relationship between green innovations and the perceived sustainable competitiveness of gastronomic tourism destinations, while analyzing the mediating role of perceived gastronomic authenticity. The research was conducted on a sample of 245 stakeholders involved in the organization and implementation of five major gastronomic festivals in Serbia. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire, and the proposed conceptual model was tested using the PLS-SEM method. The results indicate that green innovations are positively associated with perceived gastronomic authenticity and the perceived sustainable competitiveness of destinations. Furthermore, perceived gastronomic authenticity is positively associated with perceived sustainable competitiveness and mediates the relationship between green innovations and the perceived sustainable competitiveness of destinations. The findings suggest that the implementation of sustainable practices and the preservation of gastronomic authenticity are associated with stronger long-term sustainability and competitiveness of gastronomic tourism destinations, providing useful guidance for event organizers and tourism policymakers. Full article

The protected island of Chrysi, a Natura 2000 site that hosts one of the Mediterranean’s most significant populations of Juniperus spp. dune forests, stands as a critical case study in the conflict between mass tourism and ecosystem survival. For decades, this fragile environment has been subjected to escalating, largely unregulated tourism pressure, culminating in over 151,000 visitors in 2019, resulting in demonstrable environmental degradation and threatening its long-term viability. This study was undertaken to address this critical conflict by establishing a scientifically robust foundation for sustainable management. The primary objectives were (a) to identify if abiotic stress parameters affected the dune forest degradation; (b) conduct a comprehensive assessment of the island’s tourism carrying capacity, defining the maximum number of daily visitors the ecosystem can support without sustaining irreversible damage; and (c) to support the formulation of a detailed, actionable Protection and Supervision Plan to enforce these limits and guide conservation efforts. The methodology employed a multifaceted approach, integrating analyses of long-term visitor data, a synthesis of baseline ecological and climate data, and a social survey to gauge visitors’ perceptions of environmental conditions and their acceptance of management interventions. The study successfully calculated the carrying capacity based on designated visitable zones and trails. Crucially, social surveys indicated a high level of visitor awareness of the environmental problems and strong support for implementing restrictive measures to protect the island. Based on these integrated findings, this study’s principal recommendation is the immediate and permanent implementation of the proposed management framework, centred on strict adherence to the scientifically determined daily visitor limit. This framework is essential to halt ongoing degradation and ensure the long-term conservation of the Chrysi Island ecosystems, and it recommends a potential model for sustainable island tourism management in the Mediterranean and worldwide. Full article

This study examines the determinants of post-crisis tourism performance by comparing 207 Romanian tourist destinations in 2023, the first post-pandemic year, with their pre-pandemic performance in 2019. Grounded in Destination Competitiveness and Attractiveness Models, this study employs a negative binomial regression to analyse how recent investment projects, the expansion of accommodation capacity, and historical, pre-pandemic destination performance influence current tourist demand. Our results indicate that strong pre-pandemic tourism performance and strategic investments in tourist destinations are significant predictors of increased overnight stays, highlighting the role of pre-existing competitiveness in post-crisis tourism recovery. Accommodation capacity’s impact is more complex, as an expanding lodging supply raises overnight stays overall, but its effect differs sharply between regions. Ten additional accommodation establishments correspond to an estimated 34.9% increase in the north-east against 3.2% in the south-east region, and this contrast is statistically significant. Returns to capacity expansion, therefore, vary by an order of magnitude within a single country, challenging the assumption of a universal tourism development model and indicating that such returns depend on whether unmet demand exists locally. The findings support place-based, sustainable and resilience-oriented tourism policies that address regional disparities and direct investment where it can generate sustainable demand. Full article

Assessing sustainability in ecotourism destinations remains challenging due to the multidimensional interactions among environmental, socio-cultural, educational, and managerial factors. Existing assessment approaches often focus on isolated sustainability aspects and lack a systematic procedure for identifying, validating, and quantitatively evaluating sustainability indicators. To address this gap, the framework sequentially applies the Ecotourism Opportunity Spectrum (ECOS) model for indicator identification, Delphi for expert validation, and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) for statistical verification before Sustainability Index development in AlUla, Saudi Arabia. The results collected 25 Ecotourism sustainability indicators grouped into five dimensions: nature, environmental education/protection, sustainability, socio-cultural benefits, and tourist satisfaction from the literature. A two-round Delphi process involving 110 experts achieved more than 80% expert agreement across all indicators, while CFA confirmed the reliability and validity of the proposed framework. A Sustainability Index was subsequently developed, resulting in an overall Sustainability Index score of 52.40 on the normalized 0–100 scale. The findings highlight the strengths of environmental education and protection while identifying opportunities for improvement in sustainability and nature-related dimensions. This study develops and validates a systematic sustainability assessment framework for AlUla, Saudi Arabia, as the empirical study context, providing policymakers, tourism planners, and destination managers with a practical tool for evaluating and monitoring sustainable ecotourism performance. Although developed and tested in AlUla, the methodological process may provide a basis for assessment in other ecotourism destinations, subject to context-specific indicator adaptation and local validation. Full article

This paper examines the relationship between perceived event quality and visitor loyalty in the context of a river-based sport tourism event. This study examines visitors at the Danube Regatta in Negotin, a small-scale sport-tourism event integrated into the international Danube International Regatta. Drawing on event quality and experience economy frameworks, the study analyses the effects of four dimensions of perceived quality-organizational arrangements, program and atmosphere, environmental care, and infrastructure on visitors’ loyalty, operationalized through revisit intention and recommendation. The authors collected data through an on-site survey of 217 event visitors during the 2025 edition of the event. The analysis employed descriptive statistics, Spearman’s correlation, multiple linear regression, and cluster analysis (K-means). The results show that program and atmosphere represent the strongest predictors of visitor loyalty (β = 0.734, p < 0.001), confirming the dominant role of experiential elements. Organizational arrangements (β = 0.196, p < 0.01) and infrastructure (β = 0.203, p < 0.01) also exert statistically significant positive effects, suggesting their role as supporting conditions rather than primary drivers of loyalty. In contrast, perceived environmental care has a statistically significant negative effect (β = −0.240, p < 0.01), indicating a potentially complex sustainability-related relationship whereby perceived shortcomings in environmental practices reduce loyalty intentions. Cluster analysis identified four distinct visitor segments, highlighting heterogeneous visitor behavior motives and behavioral patterns among event participants. The findings add to the existing literature by providing empirical support for a multidimensional event quality–visitor loyalty framework in the context of small-scale river-based sport events. The study highlights the primacy of experiential components while emphasizing the need for more visible and effective environmental management practices in nature-based events. Full article

Amid global warming, mountain forests increasingly serve as summer climate shelters, yet the behavioral logic of forest sojourning extends beyond mere heat avoidance. This study employs a grounded theory approach, based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 30 summer forest sojourners in Lingchuan County, China, to construct a theoretical model of the “dual-pathway driving mechanism for psychophysical state transition.” The findings reveal three interconnected dimensions. First, forest sojourning is associated with two intertwined motivational pathways—heat avoidance (damage aversion) and wellness pursuit (benefit seeking)—forming a nested structure where heat avoidance is the surface layer and wellness pursuit the underlying driver, with participants retrospectively describing a perceived shift in motivational salience as their sojourn deepened. Second, psychophysical restoration is perceived by participants as emerging from a synergy of environmental perception, activity experience, and companionship interaction, as a conceptual heuristic formula formally expressed as Restorative Effect ≈ Environmental Perception × Activity Experience × Companionship Interaction. Third, the core value of forest sojourning lies in enabling a fundamental existential state transition from “fast-paced survival” to “slow-living being,” which becomes internalized as value identification with pristine ecology and opposition to over-commercialization, crystallizing into normative expectations for destination development. This model extends push-pull theory in wellness tourism, advances restorative mechanisms research within Attention Restoration Theory, and redirects tourism value inquiry from experience evaluation toward existential states, providing theoretical foundations for the sustainable planning of forest wellness destinations. Full article

This study quantitatively analyzed the dynamic changes in the evaluation scores of ecological carrying capacity (ECC_it) and per capita ecological footprint (ef) across six counties in the Qinghai Lake Ecological Functional Zone from 2000 to 2024. A coupling coordination prediction model and cluster analysis were employed to classify the six counties within the Qinghai Lake Ecological Functional Zone and to identify appropriate industrial development pathways. In addition, a system dynamics approach was used to verify the rationality of the county clustering and industrial pathway selection and to predict the dynamic changes in ecological carrying capacity (ECC_it), per capita ecological footprint (ef), and their coupling coordination degree (CCDM) for each county through 2035. The results indicate that: (1) Significant differences existed in the ecological carrying capacity evaluation scores (ECC_it) among the counties in the Qinghai Lake Ecological Functional Zone. The average score was the highest in Huangyuan County (56.81), the next was in Gonghe County (51.73), and the lowest was in Wulan County (34.76) from 2000 to 2024. (2) There are significant differences in the per capita ecological footprint (ef) within the Qinghai Lake Ecological Functional Zone. From 2000 to 2024, the lowest average value was in Gonghe County (0.53), and the highest was in Huangyuan County (1.55), which indicates a clear mismatch between ecological carrying capacity and ecological footprint. (3) The coupling coordination between ecological carrying capacity and ecological footprint remained relatively low across all six counties during 2000–2024. Among them, the D value of Haiyan County was the lowest (0.64), while that of Gonghe County was the highest (0.86). (4) The six counties were divided into Key conservation zones (Gangcha County, Gonghe County, Tianjun County, Wulan County), a General conservation-oriented development zone (Haiyan County), and a Transfer-development zone (Huangyuan County). This study provides policy suggestions and practical guidance for the sustainable development of industrial zoning in the Qinghai Lake Ecological Functional Zone: Key conservation zones should strengthen the matching of ecological investment and industrial structure, the General conservation-oriented development zone urgently needs to establish a fiscal mechanism that uses tourism revenue to support ecology, and the Transfer-development zone must seek a dynamic balance between industrial increment and emission reduction technologies. Full article

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is among the most lethal cancers worldwide, with limited treatment options and a high prevalence of oncogenic KRAS mutations. Piper betle contains numerous bioactive phytochemicals with reported anticancer activities, although its activity against pancreatic cancer remains incompletely characterized. This study evaluated the phytochemical composition of P. betle leaf extracts and the cell viability effects of ethanolic extracts against human KRAS G12D-mutant pancreatic cancer cell lines (PANC-1, AsPC-1, Panc 02.03, Panc 04.03, Panc 08.13 and Panc 10.05). Phytochemical screening, total phenolic content (TPC), total flavonoid content (TFC) and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analyses were performed to characterize the extracts. The ethanolic extracts exhibited higher extraction yield (17.26%), TPC (395.94 ± 0.010 mg GAE/g) and TFC (121.28 ± 0.009 mg QE/g) than aqueous extracts. GC-MS analysis tentatively identified phenylpropanoid compounds, including chavicol, chavibetol, and eugenol. Based on these findings, the ethanolic extract was selected for biological evaluation. Treatment significantly reduced cell viability in a concentration-dependent manner across all pancreatic cancer cell lines, with estimated IC₅₀ values ranging from 21.54 to 54.91 µg/mL. These findings suggest that ethanolic P. betle leaf extract possesses promising biological activity and support further studies to identify its active constituents and elucidate their mechanisms of action. Full article

This study evaluates how digital transformation can reshape communication effectiveness in the context of cultural tourism through the restructuring of the technology value chain role. Through the support of technology, cultural values are reinforced and conveyed authentically and engagingly to enhance personal and social experiences, thereby improving communication effectiveness. Through multiple surveys with 393 participants, 380 responses were collected, ultimately yielding 368 valid responses in Da Nang, Vietnam, of which domestic tourists accounted for the majority at 54.6%, with the remainder being international tourists. Data analysis was performed using Microsoft Excel, SPSS, and AMOS, with hypotheses tested. The results show a positive but uneven impact of digital transformation on the quality of digital cultural content (greatest impact), digital engagement (second highest), and digital cultural experience. These results challenge some assumptions that role-playing experiences are the central strategy in creating digital value. It also shows that digital technology effectively supports the quality of media content while enhancing the inherent role of digital media in sharing, interaction, and personal immersion. Furthermore, perceived risks weaken the power of digital transformation on personal digital experiences but do not impact content quality. This result reflects the digital trust paradox, demonstrating both the effectiveness in increasing value for both customers and businesses, and the cautious attitude of tourists towards the potential risks from digital platforms. The distinct role of travel purpose in shaping travel behavior also reflects the contextual nature of the study. This research expands on implications beyond purely technology-accepting models by reflecting how technological infrastructure drives the creation of social value in terms of meaning and cultural tourism experiences. In practical terms, destination managers need to evaluate digital transformation as a strategic tool in creating human-centered content, fostering social–emotional connection and experiences to enhance sustainable destination communication effectiveness. Full article