Search Results (19)

This study aims to explore how historical attractions in old urban areas effectively contribute to tourism development. In particular, the accessibility and convenience of transport are analyzed using Spatial Syntax. Previous collaborative projects with local community colleges were assessed to obtain recognized spatial boundaries of old districts. The historic buildings and their points of interest were determined by the Hsinchu City Council. Modern cities’ grid patterns and straight roads connect various scenic spots. Using the spots, spatial syntactic analyses were conducted in this study. The impact of spatial features on the assessment was found indirect and dependent on the road network of the Old Town. A social responsibility program was also developed to investigate the rise and fall of cities in the development process. Full article

American college towns tend to be very economically dependent on the college they host. If enrollment is high, the town thrives. However, when enrollment is low, the town faces socio-economic difficulties, including increased unemployment and struggling businesses. Furthermore, the seasonal presence of students poses an additional challenge. This study investigates tourism as a potential solution to diversify college towns’ sources of revenue based on community willingness and town assets. Data were collected via interviews with 50 community members from three different groups within the town. While environmental tourism shows great potential for community self-development, the Calgary model of competitiveness highlights the need for significant efforts to establish the required support systems. Full article

With the widespread establishment of universities and technical colleges in Taiwan, having a university degree is no longer a privilege of the few. However, it has also led to the emergence of many socially inexperienced people with higher education degrees who need more workplace competitiveness. Therefore, students’ employability is a topic worth exploring. Equally, the number of students in hospitality-related departments is still very high in the current conditions, while the employment situation in the tourism and hospitality industry is relatively challenging and unstable, making students’ employability even more critical. This study examines the relationship between self-efficacy, creativity, employability, and personality traits in the hospitality and tourism industry. Descriptive statistics and factor analysis confirm the previous research findings. In addition, testing of the scale reliability and validity is needed. A structural equation modeling (SEM) approach and mediation analysis are adopted to test the research hypotheses and explore gender differences. The study aims to understand how individual characteristics contribute to career success and identify any unique challenges or advantages based on gender. The research results show that personality traits can affect and influence employability in terms of self-efficacy. Furthermore, personality traits can affect self-efficacy, and self-efficacy can enhance creativity and improve employability. Full article

The scientific management and protection of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) cannot be separated from continuous innovation and the public’s active participation. The evolution of the value of local cultural heritage can help prevent the loss of valuable cultural identity and cultural heritage. This study is divided into two stages. In the first stage, the innovative practice of heritage education in colleges and universities is explored through the case studies of “She costumes culture” and “Quanzhou traditional embroidery skills”. In the second stage, a questionnaire survey on creative products and activities of technical, intangible cultural heritage is conducted. SPSS and AMOS are used for statistical analysis of the questionnaire results, and a total of 26 indicators are obtained, as well as six dimensions: heritage education, the local value of heritage, cultural participation, cultural identity, cultural and tourism integration, and cultural reflection. Among these are a covariant relationship between cultural tourism integration and heritage education, which shows that they play an equally significant role. Sustainable ICH education requires the government and local communities to make corresponding adjustments upon clarifying their own roles and functions in preserving cultural heritage. Ultimately, practical innovation in ICH requires more citizens to change their inherited cultural values. In particular, inheritors achieve sustainable protection of ICH through self-management. Full article

The rapid development of tourism has put forward new requirements for the training of tourism talents. This study conducted a cross-regional questionnaire survey on tourism management undergraduate students from 28 tourism colleges in seven regions of China. PLS method was used to explore the relevant influencing factors of students’ learning gain. The study concluded that: (1) Students’ gain in professional knowledge reserve, learning ability, innovation ability, teamwork ability and social ethics have a significantly positive impact on students’ employment situation. (2) Internship and employment guidance plays an important role in the influence of college investment on students’ learning gain. (3) Student engagement plays an important mediating role in the relationship between teaching factors (such as learning curriculum and teachers’ teaching quality) and students’ learning gain. (4) The college’s learning guidance and advice collection can effectively improve students’ learning gain, but the impact of the college’s environmental facilities on the sense of acquisition of tourism management students is not significant. This paper provides important implications for the improvement of talent mechanism of tourism education. Full article

The Saudi Arabian government has promoted the tourism industry as a way to achieve the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 by diversifying the economy and reducing overdependence on the oil sector. To align with this, several universities in Saudi Arabia have started providing tourism education. Accordingly, several academic programs and university incubators were launched to prepare workers and entrepreneurs for the industry. This study examines the role of support given by university incubators—embedded in networking support, financial support, and training support—in enhancing entrepreneurship intention among tourism graduates. Furthermore, the study examines the mediating role of personal attitude in the aforementioned relationship. Data were collected from a sample of 750 senior students at tourism and hospitality management colleges in Saudi Arabian public universities. All of the research participants have had access to these incubators. Using structural equation modeling, the study shows that the personal attitude of graduates partially mediates the impact of networking support as a dimension of university incubator support and entrepreneurship intention. However, the personal attitude of graduates was found to fully mediate the relationships between financial and training support and entrepreneurship. Future research implications and limitations are elaborated. Full article

As sustainable behaviors that contribute to the development of human society, prosocial behaviors are an important part of the moral cultivation of college students and have attracted the growing attention of higher education in recent years. It has been indicated by previous studies that transformative tourism experiences can have a profound impact on individual prosocial behaviors. Therefore, how transformative tourism experiences play a role in strengthening college students’ prosocial behaviors has become a topic worthy of note. Based on the self-determination theory, the awe prototype theory, and the transformative tourism research, this study constructed a mechanism model of the transformative tourism experiences affecting college students’ prosocial behaviors. Four hundred and fifty-four valid questionnaires were collected through questionnaire surveys, with the structural equation model and bootstrap analysis method used for the empirical test. The results showed that transformative tourism experiences became one of the important ways to strengthen college students’ prosocial behaviors and that the multiple chain intermediary effects of awe and social connectedness between transformative tourism experiences and the college students’ prosocial behaviors were significant. This study provided a new way to cultivate college students’ prosocial behaviors and promote the sustainable development of human society, and it provided a theoretical basis for the social education function played by research tourism in higher education. Full article

In recent years, tourist destinations around the world have witnessed an exponential growth in the number of Chinese tourists. With a view of understanding the consequences of their shopping activity in terms of behavioral response, this study inspects Chinese college students traveling overseas by analyzing 180 questionnaires. The reasoned action theory is applied to examine the impact of a number of factors influencing shopping behavior. The inquiry at hand makes use of methods, including factor analysis, regression analysis, and moderation analysis, to explore the relationship among perceived service quality, perceived value and shopping behavioral intention of tourists. The results show, inter alia, that service quality is a relevant dimension influencing the likelihood of tourists to share their shopping experience with friends and relatives, encouraging them to shop in the same destination, and to continue to shop in the same destination themselves in the future, regardless of the costs of visiting. Therefore, improving service quality may increase college students’ consumption during travel as well as their word of mouth after returning home. The outcomes of this study may contribute to the existing tourism economics and management scholarship and the tourism industry. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected all sectors including educational institutions transitioning from face-to-face to hybrid and virtual classes. Partial or full closure of tourism businesses has impacted college students’ jobs within the college and/or outside in the business sector. For a tourism dependent economy such as Maine’s, the impacts of COVID-19 have been severe, including lost job opportunities for students. Several studies have researched the impacts of COVID-19 on the physical, psychological, social, and mental health status of college students; however, few have addressed the impacts on college students’ jobs. Thus, the purpose of this study is to understand how students at the University of Southern Maine (USM) have been impacted in their jobs by COVID-19 and to consider what stakeholders can do to support and rebuild the workforce. A quantitative survey was distributed to all USM undergraduate students (completed by 160) between 26 April through 6 May 2021. The study found that pre-COVID, 44% of student employment was in non-tourism, 25% in tourism, and 16% in USM work study, while 15% were unemployed. At the time of the survey, those proportions had shifted to 42% in non-tourism, 22% in tourism, 14% in USM work study, and 22% not employed with a significant increase in the non-employed student category. The study found that, initially, COVID-19 had impacted student employment in terms of changed responsibilities, reduced hours, job layoffs/losses, increased hours, and voluntary job loss. Students’ current jobs (during the survey) were impacted in the form of changed responsibilities/jobs/locations and industries, including decreased hours. During the pandemic, students valued industry support such as enhanced cleaning/safety, flexible hours/time off, work from home, as well as academic support in terms of flexibility, emotional support, industry updates, and networking opportunities. The study recommends that stakeholders develop collaborative comprehensive emergency management plans (CEMPs) to mitigate disruptions such as COVID-19 and be prepared for future disasters of this nature. Full article

State-owned forest resources occupy an important position in China, and the development of their paid use will help to improve the economic benefits of these resources. For this study, 451 journal documents involving the paid use of state-owned forest resources in the CNKI database of China from 2008 to 2021 were selected as samples. Combining qualitative reviews with quantitative analysis, statistical analysis software was used as an analytical tool. The knowledge maps can be visualized by cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling (MDS), and co-occurrence network analysis. The change laws of this research in the time dimension were obtained using developing trend analysis. The results are as follows: 1. The number of research documents on the paid use of state-owned forest resources is increasing. 2. The core authors account for 29.27%; the research impact is relatively scattered. 3. Research institutions are primarily colleges and universities. 4. The support of provincially funded projects accounts for the highest proportion. 5. There is a relatively stable number of journals in this research field. Forestry Economy, Green Science and Technology and China Forestry Economy are the top three journals in terms of citation impact. 6. The existing research topics mainly focus on the development status of paid use, forest tourism and forest health, and the under-forestry economy (under-forestry planting, breeding, and product processing). 7. The intermediary centralities of state-owned forest farms and under-forestry economy are the highest, followed by forest tourism and forest experience, etc. With time and the promulgation of policies, the research focus in this field has gradually shifted from forest assets and forestry economics to ecotourism and forest health, and research on forest carbon sequestration is a technical branch worthy of attention in the future. Full article

The long-lasting pandemic has disrupted face–to–face education and has forced higher education institutions to adopt digital learning management systems, albeit many public universities in developing counties could not properly undertake this shift and adopted either free interactive platforms (e.g., zoom) or social network applications (SNAs) (e.g., Facebook and WhatsApp) due to their limited resources and infrastructure. Despite that the COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the value of e-learning, some concerns were raised about the quality of learning outcomes and academic performance of students, using these SNAs for learning, compared to traditional face–to–face education. Therefore, examining the impact of SNAs as an e-learning platform on the academic performance students is inevitable, notwithstanding that this has not been sufficiently examined by researchers amid COVID-19. For this purpose, an online questionnaire was distributed to students via research teams’ personal networks, i.e., university lecturers at various public universities in Egypt. They were asked to distribute the survey link with their undergraduates via email or WhatsApp. A total of 600 valid questionnaires was obtained from students in nine public colleges that deliver tourism and hotel management courses in Egypt and adopted SNAs for e-learning at least one semester amid COVID-19. Unlike the results of previous arguments and research, the results of the structural equation modelling using AMOS showed a positive, significant impact of SNAs as e-learning platforms on students’ academic performance. The results have several implications for higher education policymakers, educators, and scholars, especially in relation to the future of use social media applications in higher education, particularly in developing countries’ contexts. Full article

International consensus has been reached for the 2030 Agenda, and governments have adopted measures for the gradual implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this implementation, education plays a crucial role. Recently, the extent to which Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has become the norm in national curricula, teacher education, and student assessment has been a focus of extensive research. The present study introduces the geography curriculum and the reform of the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) in China in the 2000s. A global indicator framework for SDGs is used to analyze sustainable development (SD) content and characteristics in NCEE geography papers. Findings reveal that SD accounts for an average of 71% of score points among the 24 sets of papers. Sustainable agriculture, terrestrial ecosystems, settlements, and water are well reflected in questions, especially water-related ecosystems, resilient agricultural practices, transportation system, tourism, desertification, and degraded land and soil. Sustainable development questions have the characteristics of setting open questions, paying attention to question situation, being close to real life, being moderately difficult, paying attention to regional SD and human-nature relationship, and diversifying question-setting patterns. According to the analysis of papers, SD plays an important role in geography education. Full article

The aim is to develop a profile of Albania’s hotels based on a critical analysis of the attitude of foreign tourists visiting the country. COVID-19 negatively affected the Albanian tourism sector because 2,657,818 foreign citizens visited Albania in 2020, which is 41.49% less than in 2019. To investigate the potential of Albanian tourists, this study employs a quantitative analysis and a Regression Model. The results demonstrate that the tourist is a rational decision-maker and our findings indicate that there are differences in expectations and perceptions among respondents. These differences are not significantly correlated with the respondents’ gender, but in terms of education level, the differences are significant for empathy, where the respondents with a college degree have a higher level of expectations than respondents that have higher education. Our findings highlight the practical implications of research for managers of hotels because they have to take into account that tourists are very sensitive to the level of understanding of their specific needs by hotel staff. Recently, more than before pandemic COVID-19, the relationship between expectations and perceptions of tourists visiting Albania is strongly influenced by tangible elements of the touristic package. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic has created the opportunity to conduct a huge experiment with online classes in the university setting. The objectives of this study are (1) to provide obvious insight into determining factors driving greater intention of students to use online learning systems based on an integrated technology acceptance model (TAM) and theory of planned behavior (TPB), and (2) to provide the moderating role of innovativeness as a key factor. An online survey was conducted with 216 university students taking hospitality and tourism studies in Busan, Korea. The results of the study are as follows. First, perceived ease of use affects perceived usefulness, perceived usefulness affects attitude, whereas perceived ease of use does not directly affect attitude. Second, attitude and subjective norms positively influence behavioral intention, while perceived behavioral control does not. Third, user innovativeness plays a moderating role in the relationship between subjective norms and behavioral intention. As part of the lessons learned from COVID-19, it is meaningful to provide insightful implications to academia, specifically to the college of hospitality and tourism. Full article

Sustainable tourism development (STD) serves as a founding and guiding concept that can be applied to all forms of tourism, whereas community-based tourism (CBT) has been largely practiced as an alternative form of tourism development. Past research has suggested critical theoretical and practical omissions in both STD and CBT related to issues of community well-being, justice, ethics, and equity. With an objective of bridging these gaps, this research developed an integrated framework of sustainable community-based tourism (SCBT) based on a comprehensive literature review, which identified that there was a significant under-representation of key elements such as justice, ethics, and equity in the domain of governance both in the STD and CBT literatures. The qualitative research mixed emergent data with theory driven data and conducted semi-structured interviews with 40 diverse tourism stakeholders in the twin cities of Bryan–College Station (BCS) in Texas. Results revealed that tourism helped to promote cultural preservation and community pride and promoted the sense of mutual respect and understanding among visitors and stakeholders. However, some ethnic minorities felt they were not receiving full benefits of tourism. The study concluded that a more proactive, inclusive, ethic of care oriented tourism governance to help ensure sustainable tourism development is needed. Full article