Search Results (282)

Accommodation establishments constitute a core component of tourism infrastructure, and their location choices directly affect water resource utilization, land pressure, and the spatial equilibrium of tourism development—issues that are particularly acute in vast arid regions. Yet the spatial organization of accommodation supply across extensive drylands characterized by fragmented oasis distribution, and the reasons why standard and non-standard accommodation follow divergent location logics, remain poorly understood. This study addresses three questions: (1) How are nine accommodation categories, differentiated by type and quality, distributed across Xinjiang? (2) Do directional spatial associations exist among categories that are consistent with hierarchical, path-dependent development? (3) Which factors drive these patterns, and do their effects exhibit the nonlinearity and threshold behavior predicted by location theory? Drawing on 12,073 accommodation establishments from the Ctrip platform, we construct a staged analytical framework in which each technique answers a specific question: the nearest-neighbor index and standard deviational ellipse characterize global patterns; kernel density estimation and OPTICS clustering identify local agglomerations; directional local co-location quotients measure asymmetric spatial associations; and XGBoost–SHAP isolates nonlinear drivers and threshold effects. Results reveal a highly concentrated “single-core, multi-center” structure anchored by Urumqi, Yining, and Kashgar, with rapid expansion toward the Ili Valley, Kashgar, and Altay since 2019. Standard accommodation tracks urban centrality and transport nodes, while non-standard accommodation tracks tourism resource endowments, consistent with location-theoretic expectations. Directional co-location analysis reveals hierarchical spatial associations among categories, and driving factors exhibit pronounced nonlinear threshold effects. From a sustainability perspective, the identified thresholds—elevation (1360 m), water-body proximity, and distance to rural tourism demonstration sites (3 km)—constitute quantifiable, spatially explicit sustainability indicators that can be incorporated into planning tools to monitor and steer accommodation development away from ecologically sensitive zones. Global Moran’s I diagnostics of model residuals (reduction of 83–99.7%) suggest that these findings are unlikely to be artifacts of spatial autocorrelation; this diagnostic, however, complements rather than replaces spatially blocked validation. The study contributes category-differentiated, spatially directed evidence for policies balancing tourism expansion against water security and ecosystem integrity, serving sustainable tourism development in arid-region destinations. Full article

Tourism is a complex economic activity all over the world shaped by distinct local resources: culture, nature, industrial heritage, urban ambiance, place-based uniqueness, and geographical accessibility. The simultaneous governance and management of economic growth motives, preservation of the cultural heritage base, and respect for nature and ecological quality calls for an evidence-based and multi-faceted policy analysis that seeks to achieve sustainable development among conflicting policy objectives in tourist areas. The present paper seeks to explore the feasibility of a sustainable balance for various heterogeneous cultural heritage areas in Europe (‘urban pilot regions’), with particular attention to sustainable local development characterized by circular economic objectives and an ecological balance strategy based on the principle of stakeholders’ co-creation. The paper addresses the knowledge gap between generic policy aims and site-specific views of actors or visitors. To that end, an extensive survey experiment was administered in the urban regions concerned, in which a wide range of relevant management issues/questions related to environmental preferences and perceptions were posed to stakeholders and visitors. The data were analyzed by means of a novel respondent-oriented multivariate statistical tool, viz. Generalized Q-Analysis, which is suitable for handling big databases with many respondents. The paper shows that the application of Generalized Q-Analysis to common survey data enriches the results from the application of a conventional Q-Analysis. Furthermore, the study also highlights that, based on the views expressed by the surveyed visitors, the tourist areas concerned are quite different from each other in attracting specific classes of visitors. Therefore, functional specialization in the tourist sector seems to be an important anchor point for effective governance of urban tourism, not only in Europe, but also elsewhere in the world. Full article

Henan Province is one of China’s most culturally resource-rich regions, yet the spatial organization and driving mechanisms of its high-grade tourism resources remain insufficiently understood. This study investigates the spatial distribution characteristics and influencing factors of 2396 high-grade tourism resource sites across 157 county-level units in Henan Province. An integrated analytical framework combining GIS-based spatial analysis (nearest neighbor index, kernel density estimation, and spatial autocorrelation), geographic detector methods, and a spatial error model is employed to examine the roles of natural, economic, social, and cultural factors. The results indicate that high-grade tourism resources exhibit significant spatial clustering, forming a pronounced core–periphery structure with a dual-center pattern centered on the main urban area of Zhengzhou and Dengfeng. Strong positive spatial autocorrelation is observed, characterized by contiguous hot spots in central and northwestern Henan and cold spots in the eastern plains. The spatial differentiation of high-grade tourism resources is driven by multiple interacting factors, among which topography and material cultural heritage are the primary drivers, while economic development and intangible cultural heritage act as secondary facilitators. These findings provide empirical evidence for understanding inland tourism spatial structures and offer practical insights for heritage-led, cluster-based tourism planning, aimed at promoting sustainable regional development. Full article

The impacts of international tourism on economic performance, sustainable development, natural resources and environmental outcomes have been extensively researched during the last couple of decades in the available body of knowledge. However, the specific role of international tourism on women’s empowerment is rarely researched despite the fact that it creates numerous employment and entrepreneurial opportunities in host economies for women. Accordingly, this research study attempts to examine the impacts of international tourism on women’s empowerment using the framework of Vision 2030 introduced by Saudi Arabia in 2016. Using the ARDL cointegration approach and utilizing annual time series data from 1995 to 2024, this study demonstrates that international tourism has improved women’s empowerment both in the long run as well as in the short run in Saudi Arabia. Besides tourism, this study found that urbanization and female’s labor force participation have accelerated the pace of women’s empowerment both in the long run and short run. In addition, the results underscored that trade openness only matters for women’s empowerment in the long run. Finally, this study demonstrates that internet use is helpful in promoting women’s empowerment in the short run only. The study’s research findings highlight the significance of international tourism as a determinant of women’s empowerment and advocates that the policymakers of Saudi Arabia should introduce gender-inclusive tourism policies. The findings of this research study contribute to the existing body of literature on tourism-led development and gender equality, which is consistent with SDG-5 and Vision 2030 of Saudi Arabia. Full article

As tourism shifts from sightseeing to experience-oriented consumption, understanding how tourist perception differs across heterogeneous destination types and spatial scales remains challenging. Using 23,439 Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) reviews archived for six destinations in Shangrao, China, this study compares mountain-type and rural comprehensive destination products. These are operational dominant-function categories rather than mutually exclusive geomorphological classes. The archive supports fine-grained sentiment, topic, and semantic-network analyses; annual temporal comparisons use the full 23,439-review corpus covering 2019–2025, whereas a separate subset of reviews posted from 1 August 2022 with official IP labels, aggregated into 2022–2024 province–year observations, supports Pooled Ordinary Least Squares (Pooled OLS) estimation. A hybrid lexicon–XLM-RoBERTa workflow, BERTopic, semantic co-occurrence analysis, and Pooled OLS are integrated in a cross-scale framework. Static results reveal shared strengths and weaknesses—high scenery and overall-experience evaluations but low price evaluations—alongside type-specific structures: mountain reviews concentrate on natural scenery, climbing effort, and accessibility, whereas rural reviews span village landscapes, cultural activities, accommodation, and nighttime experiences. Temporally, mountain demand retains a stable scenic core while accessibility concerns become more salient; rural demand shifts from traditional agricultural landscapes toward nighttime performances and other experience-oriented products. Cross-scale regressions identify destination- and dimension-specific correlates rather than causal drivers: urbanization is positively associated with several rural evaluations, while ecological contrast, climatic difference, and competing scenic resources are associated with more critical assessments in selected dimensions. The findings show that perception differences arise from the interaction of destination product structures and origin-region contexts, supporting differentiated accessibility management for mountain destinations and balanced product innovation, service improvement, and commercialization control for rural destinations. Full article

Urban–rural governance and planning systems, as viewed through the lens of online public attention, are reshaping approaches to achieving coordinated development of cultural heritage conservation and urban space. Taking Nanchang as a case study, this paper investigates the application mechanism of online public attention in the evaluation of heritage corridor nodes and the formulation of optimization strategies. Employing multi-source data collection, we extracted textual content from online travelogues. We quantified the online attention level of each cultural heritage unit and analyzed its spatial distribution using kernel density estimation and standard deviational ellipse methods. We then applied a minimum resistance model, incorporating geographic data on land use and transportation networks, to identify potential heritage corridor routes. Based on attention classification, we propose a three-tier optimization strategy: core-leading, marginal-activating, and gradient-linking. Specifically, high-attention heritage units are positioned as central nodes that reinforce corridor connectivity; low-attention nodes are targeted for activation through corridor links to overcome spatial isolation; and attention gradients serve as the basis for hierarchical integration across the network. Our results reveal a pronounced spatial pattern of “core agglomeration and peripheral dispersion” in Nanchang’s heritage corridors. High-attention resources are heavily concentrated in the historic urban core, anchoring the main corridor axes, whereas low-attention resources are scattered across peripheral counties, exhibiting a clear urban–rural attention gradient. Importantly, attention levels show a positive correlation with corridor hierarchy. These findings provide a novel perspective for heritage corridor spatial planning and offer practical insights for sustainable cultural heritage governance and culture–tourism integration in an era of pervasive internet and urban expansion. Full article

Land-use conflicts in non-urbanized areas are fundamentally governance problems rather than purely environmental ones: sustainability outcomes increasingly depend on integrated, cross-sectoral decision-making reconciling forestry, agriculture, tourism, infrastructure, and urbanization within a finite land resource. This study examines whether statutory land acquisitions by a public forest administration can be understood as such a governance instrument rather than simply forest-area expansion, using an original transaction-level database of 911 land purchases by the Polish State Forests (Lasy Panstwowe) through statutory pre-emption rights between 2022 and mid-2026. The database covers 2806.1 hectares and, for the 903 transactions with a determinable price, approximately 114.2 million PLN. Using descriptive statistics, concentration indices (Gini, Herfindahl–Hirschman), an exploratory hedonic-style log–log regression of unit price on parcel area with location and year fixed effects, and a spatial-autocorrelation analysis (Moran’s I), the study examines spatial concentration, price differentiation, and parcel-size effects. Results show pronounced sub-regional concentration (county-level Gini = 0.615, more than double the voivodeship-level value of 0.284), a systematic price premium for parcels below 0.5 ha, and a dominant role of location over parcel size in explaining price variation (R-squared rising from 0.042 to 0.198 with location fixed effects); these are descriptive associations rather than causal estimates, given the absence of parcel-level quality covariates and a fully specified spatial–econometric model. The findings support interpreting statutory pre-emption purchases as a market-based institutional mechanism contributing to boundary rationalization, ownership consolidation, and mediation of competing land-use pressures, with implications for county-level monitoring and cross-sectoral coordination with spatial planning. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic caused uneven employment losses and recovery across tourism economies. Using county-level Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data for 2010–2023, we estimate a 2020 third-quarter decline index and recovery indexes for 2021–2023, each benchmarked against national leisure and hospitality (L&H) employment change. In the full sample, a one-percentage-point higher 2019 L&H employment share was associated with a 0.0127 lower 2020 decline index and a 0.0495 lower 2021 recovery index. Pollution and population density were also negatively associated with both outcomes, whereas the share of second homes was positively associated with 2021 recovery. Natural amenities were positively associated with 2021 recovery. Social capital was not significant in the 2020 decline or 2021 recovery full sample but was negatively associated with decline and recovery in metro counties. The findings show that regional tourism employment resilience is shaped by economic dependence, environmental quality, settlement patterns, and amenity-based tourism resources. These are sustainability-relevant regional conditions, although the employment indexes do not directly measure sustainability outcomes. Policies should combine economic diversification with environmental protection and place-specific urban and rural resilience strategies. Full article

Although recreational experience segmentation is widely used in coastal tourism research, existing motivational frameworks have been developed primarily in island and protected-area destinations, leaving urban, open-access, developing-country contexts theoretically underexplored. This study addresses that gap by identifying the dimensions of recreational experience and market segments for the city of Salinas, Ecuador—an accessible, family-oriented, urban coastal destination—to advance sustainable tourism management. Using a quantitative, cross-sectional design, data were collected through a structured questionnaire administered to 385 tourists; 374 cases with complete scale responses were retained for analysis. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) identified seven motivational dimensions: environment and sustainable recreational resources, learning and knowledge, affective well-being and creative harmony, interest and enjoyment in the experience, aquatic natural resources and wildlife, cognitive stimulation and emotional connection, and hedonic well-being. A K-means cluster analysis, validated through the elbow method (inflection at k = 3) and silhouette coefficient (0.25), revealed three distinct tourist segments: intensive recreational tourists (n = 183; 48.9%), moderate recreational tourists (n = 136; 36.4%), and passive recreational tourists (n = 55; 14.7%). Chi-square tests confirmed significant associations between clusters and sociodemographic variables including gender, marital status, and number of visits. This study offers four theoretical contributions: it reports a more detailed motivational factor structure than previously documented three- and four-factor models for coastal destinations; it proposes recreational amotivation—grounded in self-determination theory—as a candidate visitor profile that merits further theoretical and empirical validation; it advances a destination-type-sensitive motivational framework; and it provides boundary condition evidence clarifying the contextual scope of recreational experience theory. These findings offer actionable segmentation tools for destination managers seeking to differentiate and sustain coastal tourism markets. Full article

Vernacular settlements retain tangible fabric and intangible knowledge that can support climate-responsive conservation, adaptive reuse, and urban regeneration, yet these dimensions are often assessed separately. This study applies a values-based conservation framework to examine how heritage significance is expressed through settlement morphology, material systems, environmental performance, community knowledge, and continuing use in two historic settlements and one contemporary neighbourhood in Oman. Heritage significance is interpreted through six interconnected domains: historical-continuity, architectural-spatial, environmental, material-technical, social-cultural, and functional-economic value. A comparative mixed-method case-study design combined field observation, photographic documentation, urban and architectural morphological analysis, semi-structured interviews, and building-performance simulation. The findings show that the historic settlements achieved greater built intensity through attached buildings, shared walls, limited setbacks, shaded routes, mixed functions, and layered public–private organization. Interview evidence associated these characteristics with privacy, shared-resource management, traditional construction knowledge, social continuity, adaptive reuse, and continued occupation. Simulation results indicated substantially lower cooling-energy demand in the representative vernacular dwellings, whereas the contemporary villas achieved higher daylight levels and thermal conditions closer to neutrality under mechanical cooling. The study concludes that vernacular heritage should neither be conserved as static physical fabric nor reproduced literally. Interventions related to tourism, infrastructure, accessibility, privacy, commercial reuse, and residential continuity should be negotiated among stakeholders. Full article

Water is a valuable resource that needs to be managed carefully. Therefore, sustainable water consumption is a critical issue, mainly in urban areas, where tourism activities are of great importance. In mainland Portugal, this has become a crucial matter, particularly because of climate limitations and the recent growth of the tourism sector. To manage water resources effectively, we must analyze the primary factors driving consumption. Therefore, an econometric model to identify the main factors is a relevant tool for policy design. This paper tries to fill this gap. In the first stage, an ordinary least squares (OLS) model was implemented. In a second stage, the autocorrelation is evaluated, and a weighted geographical regression (GWR) model is used to improve the previous results. The models were implemented in the 278 municipalities of continental Portugal, considering the average situation of the last decade. The results were promising since the OLS model presented an R² of 0.42 identifying purchasing power, urban green spaces, tourism and education as the main explanatory factors for water consumption. The geographical weight regression presented an R² of 0.646 proving the importance of considering spatial context for the identification of these factors’ influence on water consumption. Full article

The paper analyzes the evolution and strategy development for sustainable community-based ecotourism (CBET) in the commune of Hoa Bac in Central Vietnam. It is based on a pilot project carried out from 2019 to 2025 within the scope of a larger research project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) as part of the research line ‘Sustainable Urban Regions’. As a key component of the overall research approach, the goal of this pilot project along the Cu De River valley in the vicinity of the city of Da Nang has been a culturally adapted and ecologically sensitive tourism model that leads to income and socio-economic improvement, environmental protection and a decentralized low-impact infrastructure. The results of six years of qualitative longitudinal participatory research based on community workshops, interviews and surveys, direct observations as well as participatory field activities show how transformations in natural, cultural, human, social, financial and built capitals have shaped the transition from resource-dependent livelihoods to a diversified ecotourism economy. By mobilizing and empowering the local community, partly belonging to the Co Tu ethnic minority, sustainable development emerged not from isolated interventions but from a structured process of interlinked development strategies including cultural revitalization, environmental preservation, locally adapted agroforestry, skills and capacity development, cooperative governance, decentralized infrastructure, and income diversification. The study demonstrates that stakeholder and community empowerment, appropriately designed governance models (in this case the establishment of a tourism cooperative), targeted capacity development and knowledge transfer can strengthen the resilience and long-term sustainability of ecologically sound and culturally adaptive community-based tourism initiatives. Overall, the lessons learned from the research in Hoa Bac contribute to designing and implementing a holistic approach to CBET in rural settings. Full article

Identifying the spatio-temporal evolutionary patterns and driving mechanisms of rural tourism network attention is essential for predicting the development trends of the rural tourism industry and delivering refined industrial governance. Taking 356 prefecture-level cities in China from 2015 to 2024 as basic research units, this paper constructs a comprehensive evaluation system for rural tourism network attention based on multi-source data. Furthermore, its spatio-temporal evolution characteristics and internal influencing factors are systematically investigated by means of spatial autocorrelation analysis and geographically weighted regression. The results indicate that the overall level of rural tourism network attention in China shows an obvious fluctuating growth trend, which can be divided into three successive stages, namely steady growth (from 0.8530 in 2015 to 1.2028 in 2019), explosive growth (from 1.9563 in 2020 to 3.7471 in 2021) and high-level fluctuation (maintained in the high range of 2.4–3.4). In addition, with the continuous iteration of internet communication media, the guiding influence of traditional search platforms has gradually weakened, while emerging social media and short-video platforms have become the core carriers of online tourism traffic. Correspondingly, media innovation persistently reshapes the spatial distribution pattern of rural tourism network attention. In terms of spatial characteristics, rural tourism network attention has undergone a significant transformation from geographical gradient polarization to overall regional equilibrium. Specifically, from 2015 to 2024, the overall Moran’s I index remained positive, with values ranging from 0.0116 to 0.1358, indicating an overall trend of gradual decline. High-attention areas are predominantly concentrated in economically developed urban agglomerations, whereas remote and economically underdeveloped regions exhibit contiguous low-value aggregation characteristics, which reveals a remarkable trend of balanced development nationwide. In view of driving mechanisms, highway network density, tourism income, rural tourism resource and enrollment of university students are identified as the core driving factors dominating the spatio-temporal evolution of rural tourism network attention. Moreover, the intensity of the influence of each factor presents distinct spatial heterogeneity. This study further reveals that the spatial heterogeneity of rural tourism network attention calculated using multi-source fused data shows a remarkable convergent characteristic, which can reflect the actual distribution of the rural tourism market more objectively and accurately. Meanwhile, rural tourism network attention is typically characterized by scale-dependent with the spatial distribution at the macro-scale being more balanced than that at the meso- and micro-scales. Full article

Ice–snow tourism in Northeast China is developing rapidly. Against this backdrop, revealing the spatial network structure of ice–snow tourism cities and assessing their disturbance resistance capacity is of great significance for achieving high-quality development of regional ice–snow tourism. This study takes 25 cities across the three northeastern provinces as network nodes, using data covering the period from January 2024 to March 2025. Integrating a complex network analysis framework, this paper comprehensively employs an accessibility model, tourism symbiotic linkage intensity model, and core–periphery model to distinguish core and peripheral cities within the network, analyze its structural characteristics and spatial patterns, and evaluate network vulnerability by simulating two scenarios: random attacks and deliberate attacks. The results indicate that: (1) Accessibility presents a concentric zonal pattern that attenuates gradually from the center to the periphery, accompanied by pronounced north–south disparities. Urban symbiosis intensity is strongly influenced by transportation distance, exhibiting a distinct proximity symbiosis pattern. (2) An ice–snow tourism symbiotic network has initially taken shape among northeastern cities. The network displays small-world properties; however, urban development is unbalanced, with marked hierarchical differentiation. Based on geographic location and resource endowments, the network can be divided into four cohesive subgroups. (3) The symbiotic network proves robust under random attacks, whereas connectivity declines sharply under deliberate attacks, embodying typical “robust-yet-vulnerable” structural characteristics. Both expanding the scale of core nodes and optimizing inter-node connection weights can significantly enhance network robustness. The static identification and dynamic dependency evaluation framework constructed in this study can effectively identify key nodes and vulnerable links within ice–snow city networks, and can serve as a reference for the coordinated development and structural optimization of ice-snow tourism in Northeast China. Full article

The 15 min city offers a framework for sustainable urban environments. However, its application in historic centres faces challenges such as tourist pressure and heritage fragility. This paper explores cultural heritage as a strategic resource for urban resilience within the European ENACT-15 mC project. The methodology applies four lines of research—socio-economic diagnosis, educational innovation, participatory action research, and digital tool implementation—to the historic centre of Valencia. The study involved 42 students from architecture, commerce and tourism programmes in documenting a selected sample of historic commercial establishments protected by the Special Protection Plan of Ciutat Vella (PEP 2020), while community workshops recruited 30 stakeholders representing local associations, businesses and heritage-related actors to analyse urban conflicts and functional transformation. Results show that integrating educational and participatory approaches facilitates the generation of situated knowledge and social co-responsibility. The technical documentation and diagnostic reports produced serve as empirical evidence of how heritage can be monitored and protected in urban settings under tension. The study concludes that cultural heritage provides a vital social infrastructure for building resilient communities. By bridging the gap between academic research and local agency through digital and participatory mapping, this integrated model provides adaptive intervention strategies that balance tourism demands with the preservation of everyday local life and the proximity economy in heritage-rich environments. Full article