Search Results (63)

Balancing tourism seasonality remains a significant challenge in the management of tourist attractions. Despite existing research on the impact of seasonality from the perspectives of tourist intention cognition and spatial theory, gaps still exist in the relevant literature. This study examines 16 5A-level scenic spots in China with peak season, flat season, and off-season themes, utilizing 8385 tourist reviews from Ctrip.com as data. The LDA topic model is employed to analyze tourism destination image (TDI) under seasonality of destination, and the spatial level (SLs) model is combined to analyze the spatial hierarchy of these images. The findings reveal an association between TDI and SLs under seasonality of destination. For instance, peak season TDI themes (e.g., ‘viewing the scenery’) exhibit a support level of 0.789, while off-season themes (e.g., ‘relaxed itinerary’) reach 0.682, reflecting tourists’ prioritization of functional versus psychological dimensions across seasons. The proposed TDI-SLs correlation theory bridges supply-side spatial resource allocation with tourists’ perceptual dynamics, offering a novel framework to rebalance seasonal demand–supply gaps through strategic spatial planning and image recalibration. Practically, this framework guides destination managers to design season-specific strategies, such as optimizing crowd management in peak seasons or promoting immersive experiences in off-seasons. Full article

This short concluding chapter reflects on the work of an ongoing collaborative academic project focused on the C18th home tour. Curious Travellers could be described as a ‘crucible’ project—a space in which different media, different perspectives, and different research skills combine and collide. Currently funded by the AHRC, it is a digital humanities project involving TEI tagging and crowd-sourcing, but its foundation is archival research into manuscripts. It is focused through the influential Tours of Wales and Scotland published by the naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant, yet it seeks to unpick the multiple voices and collaborations behind his texts and to explore their legacy in the journeys and texts of others. The creation of new editions continues to generate new topics and research questions, including Anglophone/Celtic-language interactions; the writings of women tourists; the role of material objects (specimens and souvenirs) and of visual culture in knowledge exchange and production. Increasingly, project researchers are relating their work to broader global contexts of colonialism and environmental history. The diversity of the genre has proved hugely stimulating for a range of audiences beyond academia: community engagement and creative practices have been a key feature from the start. There are, of course, challenges—practical, methodological, financial. This reflective piece will acknowledge the constraints, as well as the possibilities, of being multi-stranded, cross-disciplinary—and intermittently funded. Full article

Whale watching (WW) is a growing tourist activity that is at risk of becoming unsustainable. Legislation regarding WW must mitigate adverse effects on species and address the dynamics of complex systems. This study proposes analyzing this interaction using a socio-ecological resilience framework, considering both social and ecological components. Resilient governance is characterized by four features: flexibility to respond to change, adaptability, multi-level governance, and participation. The aim of this study was to assess how Mexican WW regulations contribute to the resilience of the socio-ecosystem through a literature review on compliance with the regulations and the presence of resilience elements in the regulations. Non-compliance with 12 guidelines was identified, with vessel crowding, distance, and unauthorized vessels being the most frequently reported issues. The analysis of the regulations revealed the presence of all four elements of resilient governance; however, participation is limited to certain key stakeholders, which undermines whale conservation due to non-compliance. In conclusion, the Mexican regulations contribute to resilient governance; however, to ensure whale conservation and socio-ecological resilience, it is essential that all involved parties understand their roles and actively participate in decision-making processes. Full article

World Heritage Sites (WHS) possess outstanding universal value (OUV) centered on science and aesthetics, and the large scale of tourism has a certain influence on sustainable development, which will have some degree influence on the quality of tourist service and experience. Taking the World Natural Heritage Site Mount Sanqingshan National Park in China as a case, we collected 535 samples of tourists and used structural equation modeling as a methodology to construct a theoretical framework from the perspective of tourists’ perception, including tourism crowding (functional crowding, personal crowding, and social crowding), service quality (interpretation, goods, commuting, accommodation, and catering), tourists’ satisfaction, and OUV attractiveness as intermediary variables. The results were: (1) tourist crowding has a substantial negative influence on satisfaction, and the negative influence on OUV attractiveness is not tenable; (2) service quality has a substantial positive impact on OUV attractiveness and satisfaction; (3) the tourists’ perception of OUV attractiveness has a mediating influence on service quality and satisfaction, but there is no mediating impact on tourism crowding and satisfaction; (4) this paper puts forward the SCA-S (service, crowding, attractiveness, and satisfaction) framework of WHS, and explores impact factors and mechanisms of visitor satisfaction of WHS from different aspects. The relevant research conclusions have some theoretical value and practical significance for the interpretation and display of heritage value, improved service quality, and tourism experience, and they are conducive to protecting WHS. Full article

With the development of positioning technology and the widespread application of mobile positioning terminal devices, the acquisition of trajectory data has become increasingly convenient. Furthermore, mining information related to scenic spots and tourists from trajectory data has also become increasingly convenient. This study used the normalization results of information entropy to evaluate the attraction of scenic spots and the experience index of tourists. Tourists and scenic spots were chosen as the probability variables to calculate information entropy, and the probability values of each variable were calculated according to certain methods. There is a certain competitive relationship between scenic spots of the same type. When the distance between various scenic spots is relatively close (less than 8 km), a strong cooperative relationship can be established. Scenic spots with various levels of attraction can generally be classified as follows: cultural heritage, natural landscape, and leisure and entertainment. Scenic spots with higher attraction are usually those with a higher A-level and convenient transportation. A considerable number of tourists do not choose to visit crowded scenic destinations but choose some spots that they are more interested in according to personal preferences and based on access to free travel. Full article

User-generated geo-tagged photos (UGPs) have emerged as a valuable tool for analyzing large-scale tourist place emotions with unprecedented detail. This process involves extracting and analyzing human emotions associated with specific locations. However, previous studies have been limited to analyzing individual faces in the UGPs. This approach falls short of representing the contextual scene characteristics, such as environmental elements and overall scene context, which may contain implicit emotional knowledge. To address this issue, we propose an innovative computational framework for global tourist place emotion analysis leveraging UGPs. Specifically, we first introduce a Multi-view Graph Fusion Network (M-GFN) to effectively recognize multi-view emotions from UGPs, considering crowd emotions and scene implicit sentiment. After that, we designed an attraction-specific emotion index (AEI) to quantitatively measure place emotions based on the identified multi-view emotions at various tourist attractions with place types. Complementing the AEI, we employ the emotion intensity index (EII) and Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) to deepen the exploration of the association between attraction types and place emotions. The synergy of AEI, EII, and PCC allows comprehensive attraction-specific place emotion extraction, enhancing the overall quality of tourist place emotion analysis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework enhances existing place emotion analysis methods, and the M-GFN outperforms state-of-the-art emotion recognition methods. Our framework can be adapted for various geo-emotion analysis tasks, like recognizing and regulating workplace emotions, underscoring the intrinsic link between emotions and geographic contexts. Full article

This research assesses the environmental uses of Haleakalā Crater, and adjoining east Maui areas, by native Hawaiians during recent centuries, and evaluates the modern utilization of this volcanic depression. The study methods examine, and focus on, numerous historical and modern accounts and reports. Three historical periods were identified as follows: (1). A phase, from the ~1400s until contact with foreigners in 1778, characterized by the development of settlements, population expansion, the intensification of traditional agriculture, and the political consolidation of Maui. The construction of the Kiha-a-Pi‘i-lani trail across the crater enhanced travel between distant island areas. (2). Following the collapse of Maui’s human populations during the late 1700s, and until the 20th century, came a period distinguished by scientific exploration of the crater, and intentional or accidental introductions of animals, including goats, horses, cattle, and wild dogs. (3). After Haleakalā became a National Park in 1916, efforts to eradicate introduced animals and to encourage the reproduction of silverswords and other plants were initiated. Unfortunately, in retrospect, construction of a modern paved road, improvement of hiking trails, and building of facilities allowed swift access to the Park and substantially increased tourist numbers, up to ~2 million yearly visitors. Faced with such crowds, the long-term planning of Park resources appears to be a formidable task. Full article

As core public spaces in cities, urban commercial pedestrian streets are important destinations for local residents and foreign tourists, and confusion regarding the visual space of a commercial pedestrian street sends direct environmental warning signals to pedestrians, affecting their visiting decisions. In this paper, through an investigation consisting of the artificial field simulation of the visual perception of pedestrians, we collect the corresponding street images and extract visual elements using the full convolutional network. Semantic segmentation is performed to obtain the visual parameters of the street. According to the quantitative model, the visual elements are matched with geographic elements, and a geographic information database is established to evaluate the spatial visual quality of commercial pedestrian streets. (1) There is obvious spatial heterogeneity in the spatial visual quality of different streets in commercial pedestrian streets. (2) The building heights, street widths, as well as the street vegetation, facilities, and landscape vignettes are spatial elements that shape the spatial visual quality of commercial pedestrian streets. (3) The main distribution of commercial facilities and the distribution of active businesses have an important impact on the degree of crowd gathering in a street space and the visual spatial quality of a street. This paper provides comparable data collection methods and research methods for the visual spatial quality of commercial pedestrian streets. This paper can also provide valuable data for the design, planning, and sustainable renewal management and regulation of the visual perception of commercial pedestrian streets. Full article

The sustainability of cities often changes as rapid urban developments and population growth affect the carrying capacity. Understanding the dynamics of carrying capacity becomes crucial for tourist-oriented cities. This study focused on Baguio City, the “Summer Capital of the Philippines”, attracting large crowds on holidays and actively promoting various events on other days, thus having temporal context variations classified as regular days, days with events, and holidays. Using the enhanced urban carrying capacity load number (EUCCLN) model, the changes in the load number (LN) are calculated for different temporal contexts based on spatial indicators grouped into air, traffic, economy and waste. The city experiences the worst pressures on air quality during holidays, with 99.23% of the districts at very high to critical levels, followed by regular days and days with events. However, the total LN during holidays is balanced by favorable economic conditions with only 9.23% of the districts at the critical level. EUCCLN effectively pinpoints areas that are at critical states at any given time, advocating targeted government monitoring. We demonstrate that nighttime light, for places with no available economic data, can be used as a proxy to highlight areas requiring improved urban vibrancy. This work suggests that monitoring urban pressures using EUCCLN can easily be extended to real time with nowcasting indicator data. Full article

A significant number of new metered parking systems have been introduced in recent years by the local authorities of various spa towns in Poland in connection with home zone conversion projects. The traffic signs posted in these locations were limited to the beginning and end of the demarcated parking area. Traffic circle (TC) is an example of a traffic calming measure (TCM) used in home zones to slow down the traffic (case study—home zone in a small spa village). This article presents the results of a study investigating the speed reductions obtained within a home zone and a traffic circle used as traffic calming measure. The indispensable speed surveys were carried out in relation to this study in two periods: in summer when the streets are crowded with tourists and in September with little pedestrian traffic. Two research hypotheses were formulated as part of the speed data analysis to verify the slowing effect of the traffic circle and the relevance of the traffic circle’s design parameters and location, road function and the surrounding streetscape. For each hypothesis, statistical analyses were carried out using two nonparametric tests: two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov test and median test. The third research hypothesis formulated in this study was related to sustainable development factors related to fuel consumption and traffic-related air pollution, including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and hydrocarbons. This hypothesis was verified by estimating the amount of air pollution in the home zone under analysis in three different situations (scenarios): in summer with the travel speed reduced by pedestrian traffic to ca. 8–10 km/h, in September with a small number of pedestrians and 20–25 km/h resulting speed between traffic circles, reduced at the traffic circle, and in a theoretical 30 km/h zone with 25–30 km/h assumed speed between traffic circles, dropping at the traffic circle. These analyses confirmed the appropriateness of the traffic circle as a home zone traffic calming measure, as long as its design is based on a detailed analysis of the relevant factors, including location, road function and the surrounding streetscape. Full article

Geoheritage sites are important resources due to the diverse ways in which they can be utilized. There are small, low-ranked geosites that have attracted significant attention from the lay public. This study reports on one such geosite from the Hosta area of the Western Caucasus. Field observations allowed us to make judgments related to its geoheritage properties and establish the factors for its successful touristic exploitation. This geosite represents a furrow in the Upper Cretaceous limestones in the area, which inherited the former weak zone or minor fault and grew due to landslides. The degree of uniqueness of this geosite is low; it is curvilinear in space; it boasts perfect accessibility, including from a nearby resort, and its landscape context is scenic. The Labyrinth geosite is located in a yew–boxwood grove in the natural reserve, and it is visited by crowds of tourists. Three direct factors in its exploitation success are proposed as follows: story (popular explanation of the geosite’s origin), route (inclusion into a popular touristic route through the grove), and cultural appeal (analogy to man-made labyrinths). Applying these factors to another geoheritage-rich area of the Western Caucasus implied that some of them may not be meaningful according to objective reasons, but that there are other important factors such as geoproduct (particularly geofood) selling. It is also noted that the small size and relatively low value of geosites do not necessarily limit their geotouristic potential. Overall, this case study suggests that “selling” geosites successfully requires advanced, innovative solutions and significant creativity. Full article

As urbanization accelerates, parks, as vital urban public open spaces, and their acoustic and thermal ambience directly impact visitors’ comfort and the sustainability of parks. Selecting Xihu Park in Fuzhou, China located in the subtropical region as a typical example, this study utilizes covert observational experiments with different typical sounds (grass cutting, music, and no sound source) across temperature levels to examine the influence of thermal–acoustic interactions on crowd behaviors in the park. The findings are as follows: (1) melodious music can attract more tourists, while strong stimulating grass cutting noises under high temperatures reduce crowd flow. Excluding unpleasant audio sources, park soundscapes across temperatures have a relatively limited influence on attractiveness to people flow. (2) High temperatures diminish tourists’ interest in landscape experiences and persons staying, especially when the soundscape quality is poorer. Under non-high temperatures, audio environments have a minor impact on the staying time. (3) The soundscape quality plays a role by affecting people’s path choices of approaching or avoiding sound sources, where grass cutting noise has the most negative influence. Music, grass cutting sounds, and natural sounds demonstrate conspicuous differences in their effects under varied temperatures. (4) Comfortable acoustic environments can draw larger crowds and decrease the walking pace. High temperatures make crowds take slower steps. Different sound types have significant influences on crowd movement velocity under three typical temperature levels. This study comprehensively investigates the mechanisms of typical thermal–acoustic environments’ impacts on park crowd behaviors, providing important references for optimizing the acoustic and thermal environments of urban parks, while also enriching related research on landscape design and environmental psychology. Future studies can conduct in-depth explorations by creating more abundant thermal–acoustic combinations and probe differences across diverse populations. Full article

Forest parks are important for ecological conservation, recreation, and the health and well-being of the people who use them. However, forest parks located in urban areas often face the problem of crowding. To better understand perceived crowding in urban forest parks and to improve tourists’ recreation experiences and satisfaction, we constructed a conceptual model of the relationships between perceived crowding, emotion, and satisfaction with mechanisms of adjustment based on survey data from Dafu Mountain Forest Park in China. The results indicate that, in urban forest parks, perceived crowding significantly and negatively affects tourists’ satisfaction, but there is no significant difference in satisfaction between different activity types. Both positive and negative emotions have partially mediating effects on the relationship between perceived crowding and satisfaction. Crucially, our modeled mechanisms of adjustment play a moderating role in the effect of crowding on tourist satisfaction, and the choice of adjustment behaviors varies according to the activity type. This work enriches the research related to perceived crowding, mechanisms of adjustment, and satisfaction in tourist destinations and provides a theoretical basis for the future management of urban forest parks. Full article

The residents’ attitudes towards tourism are heterogeneous, although most studies do not focus their analysis on analyzing this variability. The segmentation of residents based on their attitudes has sought to determine the existing profiles within the local society of tourist destinations and their quantitative importance. The aim of this article is to carry out a segmentation of Ibiza residents according to their attitudes towards tourism. In this case, it seeks to analyze the existing heterogeneity in the local society of a mature and highly mediated tourist destination. Ibiza is a Spanish island in the Western Mediterranean with a surface area of 572 km and 150,000 inhabitants. It receives three million tourists a year, making it one of the most internationally known tourist destinations. The methodology used is a descending hierarchical cluster analysis (Howard-Harris algorithm) on a sample of 418 residents selected by a random procedure. The analysis has made it possible to identify five groups with opinions ranging from the most favorable towards tourism (enthusiastic supporters) to the most adverse (critics), with several intermediate groups (interested supporters, supporters with nuanced opinions, and neutrals). The most numerous groups are the supporters with nuanced opinions (23.0%), called by other authors “realists” for being aware of both the positive and negative impacts, and the critics (23.4%) concerned about the negative impacts. The minority group is the neutrals (13.6%). These proportions are plausible given the fact that it is a mature and highly crowded destination. This heterogeneity of attitudes should remind us that, in societies, there are always very different personal situations that will generate very different attitudes, and it is essential to know this social heterogeneity in order to manage the tourist destination correctly. Full article

This article aims to illuminate the overlooked entanglement of space, material practices, affects, and cognitive work emplaced in walking tourism. Walking as a tourism activity is generally practised in the open air away from crowded locations; therefore, it is being encouraged even more in this (post)pandemic era than prior to the pandemic. While walking is often represented as a relatively easy activity in common promotional discourse, this article argues that it is much more complex. It revises the notion of tourist place performance, focusing on walking both as a tourist practice and as a research method that questions multi-sensory and emotional walker engagement. While extensively revisiting literature on walking tourism and the most novel methodological innovations, the article draws from a walking tourism experience undertaken as part of a student trip to demonstrate that the emotions that arise from walkers’ embodied encounters with living, as well as inanimate elements, extend beyond what might be included in a simple focus on landscape “sights”. In conclusion, it is suggested that a phenomenological approach to walking may prove particularly useful for understanding key issues associated with space, place, and tourism mobilities. Full article