Search Results (2,027)

Traditional Miao villages in southwest China are being reshaped by rural modernization, tourism development, and changing everyday practices, creating a need for architectural interventions that accommodate contemporary functions without reducing local culture to decorative motifs. This study examines Jiubai Village in Guizhou Province through the lens of vernacular reinterpretation and develops a design-driven pathway linking the identification of vernacular spatial elements, interpretation of socio-spatial meanings, refinement of design principles, and translation into contemporary architecture. The research combines documentary study, repeated field surveys, morphological and typological analysis, oral-history interviews, informal discussions, and architectural design experimentation. The results reveal a multi-scalar socio-spatial system linking topographic and material adaptation with village-scale collective spaces, ritual practices, and household-scale gathering around the huotang. They also show uneven modernization and the persistence of cultural and spatial values despite functional change. The proposed design intervention translates these relationships through an open collective ground floor, a reinterpreted huotang, terrain-responsive form, timber expression, and layered contemporary functions. This study suggests that relational reinterpretation, rather than formal imitation, may support cultural continuity and spatial sustainability in rural revitalization, while broader environmental, economic, and long-term social sustainability remains beyond the scope of this assessment. Full article

When smart tourism data are shared across scenic areas, hotels, transportation platforms, and regulatory authorities, existing access control schemes often struggle to simultaneously support batch authorization for data object sets, multi-authority collaboration, revocation-version binding, and low-latency online encryption. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Threshold Distributed Batch Identity-Based Encryption scheme for object-level authorization of smart tourism data, termed TD-BIBE. The scheme jointly binds data object identities, batch labels, authorization periods, revocation versions, and authorization contexts to ciphertext access control. It employs Shamir secret sharing for threshold distributed key generation, preventing any single authorization authority from obtaining the complete master secret key. Set-polynomial digests and membership witnesses are used to support batch authorization over identity sets and object-level membership verification. A revocation-version binding mechanism restricts the validity scope of authorization materials, while an offline/online encryption structure reduces the online computational overhead of data providers. Formal security analyses are conducted in the random oracle model with respect to data confidentiality, object-level authorization, batch-label binding, revocation-version binding, resistance to unauthorized key-combination attacks, and threshold authorization security. Experimental results demonstrate that TD-BIBE is suitable for cross-departmental, multi-object, and on-demand data sharing in smart tourism scenarios. Full article

Wildlife tourism can harm both the species in question and the local communities if not properly implemented. Nevertheless, a comprehensive and effective approach to evaluate the potential of community-based ecotourism (CBET), especially wildlife ecotourism, is lacking. We aimed to assess the potential of utilizing the endemic Philippine colugo (Cynocephalus volans) as a focal species for CBET in Bilar and Anda, Bohol and Ormoc City, Leyte, by understanding the perspectives of tourists, residents, and the local government units (LGU). To gather their perspectives, we conducted mixed-method interviews and online surveys from January to May 2026. Despite low familiarity with the species, potential tourists showed high interest in seeing colugos in their natural habitats, with most of them confirming to participate in the CBET in the next five years. Residents showed high interest in the CBET for economic and conservation purposes, while LGUs varied in their views on the use of the species for tourism, assessment of local community capacity, and the support they can provide. Anda had the highest CBET potential based on local community capacity, LGU support, and tourist preference. We determined the CBET operational model, features of the offer, and optimal pricing points. The proposed CBET initiative has the potential to enhance public awareness, stimulate research efforts, and promote monitoring of the species, which may positively contribute to the conservation of the Philippine colugo. Full article

Improving the precise perception of disaster risk and evaluating the effectiveness of warning systems are essential for natural-hazard prevention, mitigation, and spatial risk management. Using Sichuan Province, China, as a case study, this study treats government-issued disaster warning texts within 72 h before accident occurrence as formal risk signals and spatiotemporal information sources. Drawing on the protective action decision model and risk communication theory, we propose an integrated framework combining BERT-CRF-based information extraction, spatiotemporal analysis, and a case-crossover design to evaluate a multi-level warning system through the chain of risk identification, risk communication, protective action, and risk outcome. The results show a clear gradient across warning levels. High-level warnings are significantly associated with lower accident risk, whereas lower-level warnings can identify risky contexts but have limited intervention effects. These findings indicate that disaster warning systems have dual functions of risk identification and intervention, while medium-level warnings may reveal a weak link in the transition from risk perception to protective action. The study provides a geospatial analytical framework for linking official warning information with tourism safety outcomes and offers empirical support for optimizing warning systems and strengthening hazard risk governance in high-risk regions. Full article

Travel agencies and tour operators employ large numbers of women, yet the evidence remains fragmented on whether employment provides comparable rewards, working conditions, career opportunities, and organizational authority. This scoping review mapped indexed empirical research on gendered employment and organizational power in tourism intermediaries. Scopus and the Web of Science Core Collection were searched through 20 July 2026. After deduplication, 390 unique records were independently screened by two reviewers, 30 reports underwent full-text assessment, and 17 reports representing 16 studies were included. Data were extracted using a structured matrix and synthesized through evidence-role classification, design-sensitive interpretation, methodological robustness appraisal, and sensitivity analysis. The evidence base was small and heterogeneous. Thirteen studies provided direct and separable evidence, whereas three were contextual. The clearest findings concerned unequal wage returns, work-design conditions associated with retention and safety, and selective routes into leadership or ownership. Evidence from three settings did not support a simple capability-deficit explanation, while strategic decision rights, collective voice, board processes, and platform governance were rarely examined directly. The review organizes these findings around reward allocation, work organization, and access allocation. Future research should broaden database coverage and use longitudinal, comparative, and decision-level designs to examine these allocation processes directly. Full article

Early-stage post-conflict regions must rebuild essential infrastructure while avoiding development pathways that create long-term environmental and institutional costs. This study examines how green reconstruction, policy sequencing, and sustainable regional competitiveness may co-evolve in Karabakh and Eastern Zangezur during 2025–2040. A scenario-based System Dynamics (SD) model developed in Vensim compares Baseline Reconstruction, Eco-Tourism Promotion, Green Investment, an Integrated Policy Mix, and Accelerated Reconstruction. The normalized simulations indicate that stand-alone interventions generate partial gains and trade-offs, whereas the full Integrated Policy Mix produces the most balanced outcome under its stated, more favourable policy settings. Eco-tourism promotion increases attractiveness and demand but may intensify carrying-capacity stress when services and environmental management lag; accelerated reconstruction can create institutional overload when implementation demands exceed absorptive capacity. A matched policy-intensity comparison does not show uniform mixed-package dominance over both stand-alone alternatives, so the full Integrated advantage cannot be interpreted as a pure coordination effect. An exploratory global uncertainty analysis preserves the original ranking under the specified perturbation design. The results are assumption-dependent policy experiments rather than empirically estimated forecasts and support conditional, phased, and capacity-sensitive reconstruction strategies. Full article

Protected Natural Areas (PNAs) face a structural challenge in Tourist eXperience (TX) management: existing TX evaluation instruments were developed mainly for controlled commercial environments and do not account for the ecological variability, diverse visitor profiles, and dual conservation-recreation mandate that characterize these spaces. This article presents the development and appraisal of the PNAs TX Checklist (PNA-TX), a 41-item instrument designed to evaluate tourist experience quality in protected natural areas across six dimensions: Sensory, Emotional, Cognitive, Practical, Relational, and Sustainability. The instrument was developed following Stufflebeam’s Checklist Development Checklist (CDC) methodology, grounded in a systematic review of TX literature. It was appraisal through an initial review by three Tourism Administration students, followed by two sequential rounds of expert appraisal involving eight and nine practitioners, respectively, from Chilean national parks and private conservation reserves; the perceived usefulness of PNA-TX was also assessed with tourists of varied cultural backgrounds. This appraisal process indicates that the PNA-TX showed evidence of applicability, usefulness, and feasibility within the Chilean protected-area contexts examined by experts, complemented by preliminary evidence of perceived usefulness across a culturally diverse tourist sample. The PNA-TX addresses a gap in the literature by combining field-observable management conditions with experiential quality indicators specifically calibrated for the protected natural area context. It also supports sustainability-oriented management practices aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 11, 13, and 15. Full article

The digital transformation of tourism has turned traveler reviews into a continuously expanding record of what visitors value, yet this evidence is fragmented across platforms and languages and is usually reduced to star ratings that obscure the underlying structure of preferences. This study develops a method for the aspect-based semantic analysis of tourist preferences and applies it to Kazakhstan, an emerging destination whose digital space spans three languages. We assembled a corpus of 571,153 reviews from 2GIS, Booking, TripAdvisor, and GetYourGuide in Russian, Kazakh, and English, balanced it to 234,663 reviews, and annotated a gold set of 1500 reviews against an 11-aspect taxonomy. Aspect categories were detected with a linear support vector model, and their sentiment was classified with a multilingual transformer, enabling reliable processing of short, code-mixed texts. The results show that platforms do not merely differ in tone but describe fundamentally different destinations. 2GIS, which carries the domestic voice, diverges sharply from the international platforms, whereas TripAdvisor and GetYourGuide are almost indistinguishable. Domestic and inbound tourists likewise emphasize different aspects, with food and service dominating domestic reviews and location, infrastructure, and nature dominating inbound ones. These findings demonstrate that any single-source analysis yields a systematically biased picture of a destination and argue for multilingual, multi-platform designs in tourism analytics. Full article

Food-related, environmental, informational, experiential, and decision-related dimensions may be configured differently across tourist-consumers, yet less attention has been paid to their joint configuration within broader tourist-consumer profiles and to the roles of food-related and sustainability dimensions within these configurations. This study addresses this gap by examining these dimensions jointly within a single exploratory, profile-oriented framework, with particular attention on how food-related and sustainability dimensions are positioned within the resulting multidimensional configurations. A cross-sectional online survey was conducted among 656 adult Italian consumers recruited in Campania. Principal Component Analysis was used for data reduction, and the resulting component scores were analysed using K-means Cluster Analysis. The analysis identified thirteen components explaining 64.204% of the variance and four sample-specific tourist-consumer profiles. Food-related dimensions varied across the profiles; in one profile, gastronomy was associated mainly with cultural and territorial experience rather than with specifically food-related destination-choice criteria. Pro-environmental beliefs, environmental attitudes, and food safety and sustainability behaviour were not fully aligned. The findings support an exploratory and multidimensional interpretation of tourist-consumer heterogeneity and the role of food in tourism. Food-related dimensions should not be treated as interchangeable, and the profiles should be understood as sample-specific configurations rather than stable categories. The results provide preliminary indications for differentiated tourism communication, destination management, and policy initiatives. Full article

The aim of this study is to explore the adoption of Smart Tourism (ST) and Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) skills demanded by the tourism industry, graduate preparedness, and curriculum alignment in accommodation establishments in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. A pragmatic explanatory sequential mixed-methods approach involved a quantitative survey of 295 respondents, semi-structured interviews with 11 industry managers, and curriculum document analysis. Qualitative data were thematically analysed, while quantitative data were analysed using descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, and exploratory factor analysis. The results show a high uptake of ST technologies and demand for digital competencies. The competencies most required by employers were digital marketing and social media (M = 4.13), mobile application use (M = 4.07), and basic computer literacy (M = 4.03). However, graduates were viewed as less proficient in AI (M = 2.69), cybersecurity (M = 2.67), virtual and augmented reality (M = 2.60), and blockchain technology (M = 2.55). Reliability analysis revealed good internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.742–0.950). The integrated findings indicated a clear gap between industry expectations and curriculum provision, leading to the development of a proposed evidence-informed Transformative Curriculum Model (TCM) to enhance graduate employability and support ST implementation. Full article

Marine pollution in the Philippine archipelago poses increasing threats to biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human health due to rapid urbanization, population growth, and inadequate waste management. As a core region of the Coral Triangle, the Philippines is particularly vulnerable to pollutants transported across interconnected marine ecosystems. This review synthesizes current knowledge on the occurrence, sources, analytical approaches, risk assessment, and knowledge gaps associated with conventional and emerging major marine pollutants, including oil, heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, persistent organic pollutants, pharmaceuticals and personal care products, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, plastics, and additional stressors such as nutrients, pathogens, and shipping-related contaminants. Available evidence indicates widespread contamination of coastal waters, sediments, and marine biota, with pollution hotspots commonly associated with urbanized coastlines, river systems, industrial zones, shipping routes, aquaculture areas, and tourism centers. Emerging pollutants such as plastics and microplastics are increasingly detected even in remote environments, highlighting limitations in current monitoring and management frameworks. However, significant gaps remain in long-term monitoring, standardized methodologies, human health risk assessment, and interdisciplinary integration. This review emphasizes the need for harmonized monitoring programs, improved waste management infrastructure, strengthened regulatory enforcement, expanded analytical capacity, and integrated science-based policies to support sustainable marine management and ocean governance in the Philippines. Full article

Travel blogs and vlogs increasingly influence destination choices, yet limited research explains how their informational characteristics and planning functions help prospective tourists evaluate less familiar destinations. Drawing on the Stimulus–Organism–Response framework, this study examined how seven travel-content stimuli influence intention to visit Khon Kaen through perceived destination diagnosticity. Survey data from 403 respondents were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling, bias-corrected and accelerated bootstrapping with 5000 resamples, and permutation-based multigroup analysis. Content novelty, content reliability, itinerary information, and attraction information significantly enhanced perceived destination diagnosticity, whereas content understandability, content interestingness, and accommodation information had nonsignificant effects. Perceived destination diagnosticity strongly increased visit intention and transmitted the effects of novelty, reliability, itinerary information, and attraction information. Attraction information produced the strongest direct and indirect effects. Although some relationships displayed different significance patterns across the female and male subsamples, permutation testing identified no statistically significant between-group differences. The findings position perceived destination diagnosticity as a cognitive mechanism through which digital travel content supports destination evaluation and behavioral intention. They also provide practical guidance for destination marketers, tourism businesses, and content creators seeking to develop credible, distinctive, and decision-relevant content for digital tourism platforms. Full article

Family-run small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) dominate the tourism and hospitality sector, and a growing number are digitalizing while retaining their family character. The present study develops a multi-level conceptual framework explaining how strategic human resource management (SHRM) practices support talent retention in these firms under digital transformation. Three research streams bear on the question, namely strategic HRM and employee well-being, socioemotional wealth in family business, and digital transformation in tourism and hospitality, and each rests on an assumption that the other two contradict in this setting, concerning respectively the formality of the HR system, the stability of the relational channel of delivery, and the irrelevance of ownership structure to how employees experience technology. Drawing on the deliberate–emergent strategy distinction and on the separation between intended, implemented, and perceived HR practices, the study argues that strategic HRM in these firms is emergent rather than absent. Seven propositions are formulated from job demands–resources and socioemotional wealth theory, according to which SHRM practices support retention through employee well-being, family involvement strengthens this conversion, digital transformation weakens it, the two organizational forces interact, and the external labor environment conditions the outcome. The framework identifies the mechanism through which digitalization erodes the HR advantage of family firms, which rests on the channel of implementation rather than family ownership as such. Full article

Cultural heritage holds great value, yet its sustainability faces numerous pressures. Technological advances and the COVID-19 pandemic have promoted the development of virtual tourism, bringing new opportunities and challenges to the cultural heritage sector. However, research on the impacts of virtual tourism on cultural heritage sites has mainly focused on socio-cultural factors, with limited attention to environmental and economic aspects. Moreover, most studies have examined online rather than on-site modes of virtual tourism. To address these gaps, this study draws on a heritage sustainability framework based on the triple bottom line and investigates users’ perceptions of the implications of virtual tourism for the overall sustainability of cultural heritage sites, encompassing both online and on-site contexts. Qualitative questionnaire surveys, observations, and visual documentation were conducted at two virtual heritage tourism sites in Sichuan, China. The findings show that the virtual tourism applications at both sites were perceived as enhancing the socio-cultural values of the associated heritage sites in various ways. Virtual tourism also showed potential to expand the economic utility of heritage at these sites and support their environmental sustainability, despite involving substantial investment costs and possible environmental harm associated with its development. Overall, virtual tourism was perceived as having the potential to support heritage sustainability, but its development should balance socio-cultural, environmental, and economic dimensions. Full article

This study examines the dynamic connectedness and spillover transmission mechanisms among tourism-related exchange-traded funds (ETFs), clean energy markets, oil, geopolitical risks, and tourism transportation using daily percentage returns from 24 March 2017 to 16 March 2026. We employed a battery of econometric methodologies, including the R²-decomposed connectedness approach, a TVP-VAR framework to examine the extent and nature of connectedness and distinguish contemporaneous and lagged spillovers, and the DCC-GARCH specification to assess dynamic conditional correlations. The data exhibit substantial volatility and non-normality, supporting these dynamic econometric approaches. The results reveal that connectedness varies considerably over time and tends to intensify during periods of major economic and geopolitical uncertainty. PEJ emerges as the dominant overall net transmitter of shocks, primarily through lagged spillovers, while Transportation and Clean Energy act as contemporaneous transmitters but become net receivers in the lagged horizon. The decomposition further shows that contemporaneous linkages are relatively weak, while lagged effects are stronger, suggesting that shock transmission occurs gradually rather than instantaneously. The dynamic correlations are time-varying, and ETFs display asymmetric behavior across different market conditions. Overall, this study highlights the time-varying nature of interactions between tourism and clean energy assets, driven by energy market dynamics and geopolitical risks, and provides useful implications for portfolio diversification, risk management, and policy decisions in interconnected tourism and sustainable financial markets. Full article