Search Results (341)

Objectives/Background: In this study, we aimed to examine the associations of participation in leisure dance activity with perceived health status, happiness level, and perceptions of leisure, and the relevance of demographic characteristics to these associations. Moreover, we sought to explore ways of revitalizing leisure dance activity. Methods: We used data from the 2022 Korea National Leisure Activity Survey organized by the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism. The 2022 Korea National Leisure Activity Survey was conducted from September to November 2022. The survey was conducted among 10,046 Koreans aged ≥15 who lived in 17 cities and provinces across the country. The participants were informed about the survey schedule in advance, and interviews were conducted at the participants’ homes using tablet PCs. Random telephone verification was performed on the recovered questionnaires to ensure the accuracy of responses. Questionnaires that passed the first verification were subjected to secondary verification by a computerized program, and questionnaires that did not pass the verification were supplemented and re-examined. The collected data were entered electronically through an encoding process, and only the data that passed the final test were compiled in the multi-stage verification process. The data were analyzed using frequency analysis, chi-squared tests, and multivariate logistic regression analysis. Results: Of the 1004 participants, 655 (6.5%) participated in leisure dance activity. Women, individuals in their twenties and thirties, college graduates or those with lower-level educational qualifications, and unmarried individuals were more likely to participate in leisure dance activities. In addition, leisure dance activities were found to be likely to increase happiness levels and leisure life satisfaction, and leisure expenses were likely to be low. Conclusions: Schools should provide high-quality dance education and enhance the professionalism of physical education teachers in the management of dance classes. This is because dance-related experiences in childhood can increase the likelihood of engaging in dancing in adulthood. Efforts are also needed to increase men’s awareness of and participation in leisure dance activities and to lower barriers to entry. The convergence of dance, games, and technology can make this possible. Full article

Previous studies on innovative courses have found that information on the elements of sustainable tourism is still lacking. To fill this research gap, this study examined the concept of sustainable tourism by focusing on two innovative courses titled “Seminar on Sustainable Tourism” and “Management and administration of Ecotourism”. Thirteen graduate students taking one of these courses were recruited as respondents for this study. The Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique (ZMET) was used to analyze photographs taken by the respondents and illustrate how graduate school students perceive sustainable tourism. The ZMET surveys were conducted in the 3rd week and 9th week and between the 17th and 18th weeks to represent the first and second semester, respectively. The results of the analysis illustrated that sustainable tourism involves constructs related to the natural environment and caring for wildlife, environmental conservation, sociocultural sustainability, natural and cultural experiences, perspectives on the environment, and government and policy. Four consensus maps were developed regarding environmental concerns, responsible behaviors, learning experiences, and reflections on sustainable tourism. Finally, the author concluded that when graduate students develop ecotourism itineraries, increase their environmental awareness, gain relevant learning experience, and exhibit reflective engagement, they experience positive feelings that benefit their environmental awareness, environmental attitude, sensory emotions, and reflective engagement, ultimately leading to pro-environmental or ecotourism behaviors that may subsequently boost sustainable tourism practices. Full article

The aim: The study aims to identify gender differences in preferences, motivations, and barriers related to participation in culinary tourism in Poland. Methods: A diagnostic survey was conducted among 1600 adults, and the collected data were analyzed using discriminant analysis to determine the extent to which gender differentiates attitudes toward culinary experiences. Results: The findings indicate that women present a broader and more experiential approach to culinary tourism, showing a stronger interest in festivals, workshops, and culinary trails, while men focus primarily on tastings. Motivational differences reveal that women value healthy and organic food, whereas men are driven more by entertainment and the desire to try new flavors. Women also report greater sensitivity to economic, time, and information barriers, while men more often indicate socio-psychological and organizational obstacles. Conclusions: Culinary tourism organizers should differentiate their offerings based on the gender of participants. For women, it is worth emphasizing a broader range of experience; for men, on the other hand, it is worth focusing on the attractiveness of the tastings themselves. Full article

Although urban studies are vital for a sustainable society, comprehensive meta-level overviews are scarce. To map the field and identify emerging areas, we analyzed over 100,000 publications containing the terms “urban” and “sustainable” or “sustainability” using citation network analysis and natural language processing following the PRISMA protocol. Emerging areas encompassed the economic–environmental relationship, smart sensing and urban air mobility, green development at the metropolitan scale, soil heavy metal pollution, tourism and emissions, and heatwave exposure countermeasures. Future research priorities included developing an integrated theoretical framework to evaluate locality in terms of the interaction between urbanization, economic growth, and environmental quality, organizing health-related data, researching underlying technologies, and determining the generalizability or contextual adaptability of policy applications. Comparing the newest sub-clusters with sub-clusters including the term “design” indicates the necessity and opportunity to integrate environmental, economic, and social dimensions into a bottom-up multiscale theoretical framework by connecting terminology and concepts that vary according to scale and synthesizing emergent issues into the conventional urban planning realm. These findings will inform decisions regarding funding and investment in scientific research by governments, companies and research institutions. Full article

This study examines how digital nomads act as unintentional brand ambassadors shaping destination image via lifestyle content. Although nomads influence place perceptions through blogs, vlogs, and social media, tourism institutions rarely acknowledge their role. We theorize this diffuse effect as ambient influence—the cumulative, non-promotional impact of lifestyle posts—and test whether nomads operate as unintentional brand intermediaries affecting destination image and travel intention. A multi-method design includes a survey of 487 international travelers modeling links among exposure, perceived authenticity, destination image, and travel intention; an experiment with 210 participants comparing nomad versus influencer videos; and interviews with 14 DMO professionals examining institutional responses. Results indicate that nomad content improves destination image and travel intention via perceived authenticity and relational trust. Relative to influencers, nomads are viewed as more credible and less commercially motivated. However, qualitative evidence shows that DMOs often overlook this influence due to ambiguity, control-oriented branding, and reliance on performance metrics ill-suited to informal media. The study formalizes ambient influence to capture the cumulative, non-promotional impact of nomad content and identifies a strategic blind spot in institutional engagement. It contributes by reconceptualizing influence beyond formal marketing and offers guidance for tourism management, including broader recognition frameworks and updated evaluation of user-generated content. Full article

Understanding the spatial heterogeneity of traffic congestion drivers is crucial for data-informed urban planning in tourist cities. This study investigates the spatiotemporal relationship between built environment characteristics and traffic congestion in the central urban area of a major northern Chinese tourist city. We apply a Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR) model to geospatial data across four typical peak periods and benchmark the results against Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR). The MGWR model demonstrates superior capability in capturing spatial non-stationarity and multiscale effects. The results reveal strong spatiotemporal heterogeneity in the effects of built environment factors on congestion. Intersection density demonstrates a stronger mitigating effect during weekday evening peaks. Catering facilities significantly exacerbate congestion in tourist hotspots. Tourism-related facilities such as hotels and attractions intensify congestion during weekend peaks. Parking availability shows dual impacts, with peripheral parking reducing pressure and central clustering worsening congestion. Our geospatially disaggregated results provide empirical evidence for location-sensitive and temporally adaptive traffic management and urban design strategies. This study highlights the value of MGWR-based spatial modeling in supporting geoinformation-driven urban mobility planning. Full article

Zanzibar has witnessed fast growth in tourism due to its natural beauty and unique cultural values. On average, about 600,000 tourists arrive annually, creating demand for more hotels, which significantly adds to the generation of waste streams on the island. Food waste is a multifaceted issue and a cross-sectoral problem. However, existing research on food waste management in hospitality focuses mainly on operational and managerial perspectives, while overlooking the role of stakeholder engagement and their social interactions, creating a gap in understanding the relational and context-specific factors shaping sustainable practices, particularly in small island destinations. Therefore, collaborative efforts from different stakeholders are required to ensure sustainable waste management. This study aims to map the key stakeholders and analyze engagement dynamics and structural patterns of social networks to improve hotel food waste management as part of a sustainable tourism strategy in Zanzibar. Stakeholder mapping and analysis, and social network analysis, were applied to examine both the dynamic and interaction patterns. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with different stakeholders related to tourism and waste management operations to solicit their roles, responsibilities, interests, knowledge, interaction, information sharing, influence, and power in decision-making. The results revealed that waste management is the responsibility of local authorities, and there was limited interaction, information sharing, and coordination among stakeholders and across sectors. Building collaborative relationships is important and can be achieved by stimulating interactions through active communication platforms, including social media and online webinar sessions. Moreover, the study proposes a context-specific model for analyzing small-scale stakeholder interactions regarding food waste management in tourist hotels that can inform future stakeholder coordination and policy interventions. Full article

This study evaluates the performance of seven large language models (LLMs) in generating context-aware recommendations. The system is built on a collection of PDF documents (brochures) describing local events and activities, which are embedded into an FAISS vector store to support semantic retrieval. Synthetic user profiles are defined to simulate diverse preferences, while static weather conditions are incorporated to enhance the contextual relevance of recommendations. To further improve output quality, a reranking step, utilizing Cohere’s API, is used to refine the top retrieved results before passing them to the LLMs for final response generation. This allows better semantic organization of relevant content in line with user context. The main aim of this research is to identify which models best integrate multimodal inputs, such as user intent, profile attributes, environmental context and how these insights can inform the development of adaptive, personalized recommendation systems. The main contribution of this study is a structured comparative analysis of 7 LLMs, applied to a tourism-specific RAG framework, providing practical insights into how effectively different models integrate contextual factors to produce personalized recommendations. The evaluation revealed notable differences in model performance, with Qwen and Phi emerging as the strongest performers, whereas LLaMA frequently produced irrelevant recommendations. Moreover, many models favored gastronomy-related venues over other types of attractions. These findings indicate that although the RAG framework provides a solid foundation, the selection of underlying models plays an important role in achieving high quality recommendations. Full article

The aim of the study was to identify doctoral and postdoctoral dissertations that were created between 2003 and 2023 and based on tourism research, and the promotion procedures were conducted within the discipline of ‘Physical Culture Sciences’ (PCS). An attempt was made to identify the connections between such theses and other fields/disciplines of science and the methodological approaches used in them. The conducted research was empirical in nature, and its result is the opinions of the authors of 119 doctoral theses and 42 postdoctoral dissertations addressing tourism issues on the scientific disciplines within which these works were located. An attempt was also made to estimate the contribution that PCS had in their creation. The research results revealed strong connections between ‘tourism’ Ph.D. and postdoctoral theses completed in the PCS discipline, especially with the fields of ‘Social Sciences’ and ‘Humanities’. The results also allowed for determining and performing multi-aspect analyses regarding the methodological profiles of the examined works, visualising such profiles in the form of radar charts, which included information on their 16 most important methodological features. In the research, it was shown that doctoral and postdoctoral dissertations devoted to tourism issues completed within the discipline of PCS are characterised by great diversity concerning the applied methodological approaches. They are largely multi-/inter-disciplinary in nature, and the doctoral theses are dominated by empirical methods focused on cultural research. At the same time, these profiles are strongly diversified depending on the other field of science to which the works formally assigned to the PCS are related. The research results presented in this article suggest that typical bibliometric analyses regarding the disciplinary structure of advance tourism research fail to capture the diversity and methodological specificity of research conducted within various scientific disciplines. This necessitates further research, particularly empirical studies identifying their methodological profiles and demonstrating their differences. These studies can be a valuable source of information not only for methodological refinement and improving the quality of tourism research, but may also provide a basis for discussion on the placement of PCS in the classification of sciences and the role that tourism research should play within this discipline. Full article

Accommodation constitutes a key element in the competitiveness of a destination. However, there is limited information on how overnight tourists evaluate the destination according to the type of accommodation. To date, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have led to an increased use of online media and the generation of large datasets available for analysis. This study analyses 47,568 feedback surveys administered by Spanish accommodation establishments to tourists, provided anonymously by a tourism software company. The main objective is to understand which destination attributes predict positive results on satisfaction and recommendation, depending on the type of accommodation (hotel and non-hotel). To this end, both a descriptive analysis and an analysis using neural networks are conducted. The results reveal significant differences in the evaluation of destination elements depending on whether the accommodation is a hotel or non-hotel, with the predictive variables varying across each typology. As a key conclusion, the study highlights that adopting this perspective makes it possible to understand destination evaluation from the standpoint of overnight tourists, thereby contributing to destination-related literature. From a practical perspective, recommendations are offered to both destination managers and accommodation providers. Full article

The digital transformation of Tibetan cultural tourism is hindered by high manual costs, weak semantic adaptability, and cultural security risks. To address these, this paper proposes RLT2C, a “Rule+LLM-Verify” approach to automated and culturally secure KG construction. It employs a lightweight-large model collaboration mechanism, where a fine-tuned lightweight model generates initial Cypher statements, rigorously verified by LLMs for local semantic accuracy and cultural compliance. This two-stage process, combined with a dynamic-static cultural constraint system, ensures high efficiency and preserves cultural integrity, supporting knowledge-driven naked-eye 3D immersive experiences. Experimental results on 1200 Tibetan tourism-related texts show that RLT2C outperforms baselines in construction efficiency (14.5 triples/100 words), relationship accuracy (91.5%), local semantic adaptability (87.9%), and graph redundancy rate (5.4%). RLT2C exhibits strong practicality and scalability. The constructed KG serves not only as an information repository but also as a foundational engine for immersive visualization. By acting as a “central index” for 3D assets and a “safety gatekeeper” for content generation, it enables the dynamic and secure rendering of culturally authentic naked-eye 3D experiences from natural language queries. Full article

Areas characterised by high ecological and cultural value are increasingly exposed to overtourism and intensifying land-use pressures, often exacerbated by mobility policies aimed at enhancing regional accessibility and promoting tourism. These dynamics create spatial tensions, particularly in environmentally sensitive areas such as those within the Natura 2000 network and Sites of Community Importance (SCIs), where intensified visitor flows, and infrastructure expansion can disrupt the balance between conservation and development. This study offers a geospatial analysis of the current state (2024) of such dynamics in the Lazio Region (Italy), evaluating the effects of mobility strategies on ecological vulnerability and tourism pressure. By applying isochrone-based accessibility modelling, GIS buffer analysis, and spatial overlays, the research maps the intersection of accessibility, heritage value, and environmental sensitivity. The methodology enables the identification of critical zones where accessibility improvements coincide with heightened ecological risk and tourism-related stress. The original contribution of this work lies in its integrated spatial framework, which combines accessibility metrics with indicators of ecological and heritage significance to visualise and assess emerging risk areas. The Lazio Region, distinguished by its heterogeneous landscapes and ambitious mobility planning initiatives, constitutes a significant case study for examining how policy-driven improvements in transport infrastructure may inadvertently exacerbate spatial disparities and intensify ecological vulnerabilities in peripheral and sensitive territorial contexts. The findings support the formulation of adaptive, place-based policy recommendations aimed at mitigating the unintended consequences of accessibility-led tourism strategies. These include prioritising soft mobility, enhancing regulatory protection in high-risk zones, and fostering coordinated governance across sectors. Ultimately, the study advances a replicable methodology to inform sustainable territorial governance and balance tourism development with environmental preservation. Full article

The proliferation of social media has made Sentiment Analysis an essential tool for understanding user opinions, particularly in underrepresented language variants such as Mexican Spanish. Recent advances in Large Language Models have made effective sentiment analysis through in-context learning techniques, reducing the need for supervised training. This study compares the performance of zero and few-shot with traditional fine-tuning approaches of tourism-related texts in Mexican Spanish. Two annotated datasets from the REST-MEX 2022 and 2023 shared tasks were used for this purpose. Results show that fine-tuning, particularly with the MarIA model, achieves the best overall performance. However, modern LLMs that use in-context learning strategies, such as Mixtral 8x7B for zero-shot and Mistral 7B for few-shot, demonstrate strong potential in low-resource settings by closely approximating the accuracy of fine-tuned models, suggesting that in-context learning is a viable alternative to fine-tuning for sentiment analysis in Mexican Spanish when labeled data is limited. These approaches can enable intelligent, data-driven digital services with applications in tourism platforms and urban information systems that enhance user experience and trust in large-scale socio-technical ecosystems. Full article

Yazıköy, a rural settlement in southwestern Türkiye situated within overlapping cultural and natural protection zones, provides a critical case for analyzing the implications of heritage regulations on village life. This study examines how conservation policies shape livelihoods, land use practices, and community participation. Employing a mixed-methods design, the research draws on 114 household surveys and five semi-structured interviews conducted in 2024 with residents, local officials, and business owners. Findings show that heritage designation stimulates tourism, creating income and employment opportunities while simultaneously imposing regulatory constraints that delay infrastructure improvements and restrict new construction. Rising land values, the conversion of agricultural land for tourism-related uses, and the involvement of external investors illustrate the early stages of tourism-driven rural transformation. Moreover, age emerges as a critical determinant of participation: younger residents engage more actively with conservation and tourism initiatives, whereas older inhabitants experience barriers stemming from limited resources and access to information. Overall, conservation regimes safeguard cultural identity but constrain local agency. Reconciling protection imperatives with community-defined development requires inclusive planning and participatory governance. The Yazıköy case highlights how heritage policy, shaped by overlapping conservation regulations and tourism pressures, intersects with broader dynamics of rural gentrification, providing insights relevant to other rural heritage contexts. Full article

The literature on resilience-building in the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is predominated by institutional voices. Although community involvement is appreciated in this scholarship, the perspectives are mainly those of scientists and researchers. Community input is used mainly to inform and strengthen academic findings, and there are few articles in the voices and words of GBR community members. Our opinion piece, with its majority co-authorship by the Stakeholder Advisory Group of Australia’s Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP), addresses this literary gap. The piece draws upon the barriers to involvement in adaptation delivery as experienced by these GBR locals who have diverse backgrounds related to reef adaptation, including aquaculture, tourism, robotics, natural resource management, civil society, policy and Traditional Owner-led environmental stewardship. Currently, the social capital of communities is underutilised in GBR intervention delivery. However, with the urgency for action in the Reef, we call on governments and researchers to leverage the expertise, labour and infrastructure of local communities to strengthen institutional deployment capacities and thereby accelerate the scale and impact of adaptation efforts. We identify the key elements of inclusive deployment as shared leadership, flexible and inclusive funding, and innovative strategies to address permitting and regulatory barriers to community-led interventions deployment. Full article