Search Results (2,758)

This study presents a comprehensive regional analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on tourism in Slovakia during 2018–2024, employing rigorous statistical methods to quantify sectoral transformations. Based on extensive data on visitor arrivals, revenues, and accommodation facility utilisation across eight NUTS III regions, the analysis identifies four distinct regional tourism clusters characterised by differentiated recovery trajectories. Paired t-tests confirmed statistically significant changes in international tourist arrival indices across seven regions (p < 0.05), validating fundamental structural reorientation in tourism demand. The findings reveal pronounced heterogeneity in recovery patterns: while the Bratislava Region and the Žilina Region achieved substantial revenue growth (46.04% and 146.54%, respectively), domestically oriented regions (Banská Bystrica, Košice, Nitra, Prešov, and Trenčín) demonstrated minimal recovery (8.19% aggregate growth). Critical findings include the persistence of passive tourism dominance (94.09% of national revenues), declining international competitiveness from traditional Western European source markets, and compensatory expansion from emerging markets (USA +398.73%, Oman +234.68%, and Poland +226.55%). The ANOVA analysis revealed no statistically significant differences between regional indices in 2024 (p = 0.362), indicating market stabilisation despite differentiated trajectories. The study emphasises the necessity of regionally calibrated sustainable strategic interventions to diversify experiential tourism, activate the domestic market, and enhance technological infrastructure to build sectoral resilience against future exogenous shocks. Full article

Balancing tourism development with ecological integrity remains a central challenge in the management of protected areas. This study proposes a spatial framework that integrates the Outdoor Recreation Suitability Index (ORSI) and the Landscape Ecological Risk Index (ERI) to identify and optimize low-impact recreation corridors within Giant Panda National Park, China. Recreation suitability and ecological risk were modeled using environmental variables and landscape metrics, respectively. The results reveal a clear spatial pattern: high-suitability zones are concentrated in the central and northeastern areas, characterized by gentle terrain and extensive forest cover, while ecological risk is elevated in fragmented, human-disturbed peripheral regions. Although ORSI and ERI exhibit an overall negative spatial correlation, bivariate analysis reveals localized mismatches—areas where high recreation potential coincides with ecological vulnerability—indicating potential conflict zones. These zones are typically located along transitional park boundaries where accessibility intersects with ecological sensitivity. To mitigate such conflicts, a least-cost path analysis was conducted based on a composite resistance surface combining ORSI and inverted ERI values. The resulting corridor network connects 40 core areas while effectively avoiding ecological hotspots. Corridor buffers are predominantly composed of forest and shrubland, suggesting high environmental compatibility, particularly in the Qinling region. By translating spatial trade-offs into practical corridor design, this study provides a replicable approach for harmonizing recreation planning with conservation objectives. The proposed framework offers actionable guidance for evidence-based zoning, visitor flow management, and adaptive tourism development in ecologically sensitive protected landscapes. Full article

Urban green spaces (UGSs) are considered a key component of the urban ecosystem because they promote sustainable development and can improve people’s quality of life. The present study aimed to analyze human perceptions of services and disservices provided by UGSs in the city of Puerto Maldonado (southeastern Peruvian Amazon) and their relationships with socioeconomic variables. A questionnaire was designed to quantify the degree of user agreement regarding 14 services and 15 disservices provided by UGSs. Cultural and ecosystem services received the highest level of agreement. Thus, providing shade and reducing air temperature, improving air quality, beautifying the urban environment, and regulating rainwater were the four most important services of UGSs. However, the respondents perceived that the main concerns generated by UGSs were reduced visibility for drivers and damage to infrastructure. There were significant but weak associations among four socioeconomic factors and residents’ perception. Likewise, the age, education, and income level of respondents were significantly related to perceived levels of most UGS services and disservices. The findings are valuable because they provide relevant information for developing sustainable public policies for urban areas and to align them to maintain and enhance the services provided by UGSs and diminish their potential disservices. Full article

This article discusses the rise of archaeology in Asia Minor and the related development of heritage tourism in Turkey. It focuses particularly on the branch termed archaeobiblical tourism. It first discusses the demographics of its clientele and then looks at publications related to biblical archaeology that have created interest in these sites. The article next discusses five areas of interest to archaeobiblical tourists: two are related to the Old Testament and three to the New Testament. Since sites related to Paul number the most in Asia Minor, special attention is given to visiting them by land and sea. A list of archaeological realia that archaeobiblical tourists encounter at various sites is presented. The article closes with an extended discussion of how archaeobiblical tourism developed and how it is currently marketed globally. It concludes that Christian visitors are motivated primarily to see the cities where biblical events took place and where the apostles ministered. Along the way they learn about archaeology and Greco-Roman history and culture, and therefore begin to integrate this new knowledge with the biblical texts they are reading. Full article

Tourism 4.0 integrates Industry 4.0 technologies into tourism services to enhance visitor experiences and improve destination management. This study presents the design, implementation, and pilot validation of an integrated IoT–Augmented Reality (IoT–AR) cyber-physical urban node developed for smart tourism infrastructure in Baños de Agua Santa, Ecuador. The system combines distributed environmental sensing, LoRa-based communication, edge-level preprocessing, cloud data management via RESTful services, and immersive visualization through a cross-platform augmented reality mobile interface. The development followed the TDDM4IoTS methodology, adapted into five phases covering requirements analysis, technological design, modeling, validation, and deployment. The architecture supports contextual real-time information delivery while maintaining low power consumption and robustness under heterogeneous connectivity conditions. Field tests confirmed stable communication between sensor nodes and the gateway, as well as reliable AR marker recognition under varying light and distance conditions. Usability evaluation using the System Usability Scale (SUS) yielded a mean score of 84.38, classified as excellent, with high internal consistency (α ≈ 0.89). The results demonstrate technical feasibility and strong user acceptance, providing a scalable and replicable model for interactive IoT–AR urban systems in smart tourism environments. Full article

Overtourism has intensified socio-environmental pressures in popular destinations, raising concerns about ethical responsibility and sustainable behavior among tourism actors and visitors. In this study, we explored how environmental awareness and ethical values shape behavioral intentions under overtourism pressure by combining a systematic literature review with qualitative field data from Bali. Through a PRISMA-based review of 100 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2015 and 2024, we synthesized evidence on environmental ethics, responsible tourism, and pro-environmental behavioral mechanisms. The review reveals that increasing scholarly attention is being paid to ethical norms, emotional engagement, and contextual constraints but shows that there is limited empirical understanding of how these factors are experienced in practice by local actors and domestic tourists. To address this gap, qualitative interviews were conducted with three key stakeholders, including accommodation and tourism service providers, and 10 domestic tourists. Thematic analysis identifies three interrelated mechanisms influencing behavioral intention: (a) recognition of environmental risk and destination vulnerability, (b) ethical reasoning and sense of collective responsibility, and (c) structural barriers shaped by convenience, economic pressures, and weak governance. While participants express strong environmental awareness and moral concern, behavioral intentions are often constrained by limited information, the perceived ineffectiveness of individual actions, and a lack of regulatory enforcement. This study contributes to the sociological literature on sustainable tourism by elucidating how ethics and awareness translate into intention under overtourism pressure. We report the practical implications for ethical communication, stakeholder collaboration, and participatory governance. Full article

Over the past 20 years, trends in the construction or renovation of football stadiums have undergone rapid transformation. Simple sports venues are constantly evolving into multifunctional facilities and play a decisive role in shaping cities’ image. To date, significant emphasis has been placed on developing stadiums as venues for sporting events, with a focus on supply-side perspectives, particularly in relation to design, marketing, and sustainability. However, we know relatively little about how the direct consumers of this product, the visitors to these facilities, experience and perceive these infrastructures, especially outside of match days. This paper follows a framework for researching this perspective, focusing on the services provided as key points of interest in stadium tourism, and on the written reactions on social networks. This framework is implemented by employing a set of well-known single-word themes, matching each review to these themes, and finally measuring the sentiment of the collected short texts as an implicit indicator of sentiment on the studied themes. Its realization is based on natural language processing, semantic similarity analysis, and sentiment evaluation to identify dominant themes, recurring lexical patterns, and emotional tones in visitor comments. The study concerns thirteen major European stadiums and reviews posted on Google and TripAdvisor. The research findings highlight the themes that shape a unique tourist experience, capturing tourist interests in stadium tourism in the post-COVID-19 era. Finally, the individual evaluation of the themes provides practical and clear tools for stadium managers, tourism operators, destination managers and legislators who seek to maximize visitor engagement and multiply the overall socio-economic value of these iconic infrastructures for the benefit of the wider urban environment that hosts them. Full article

Wellness tourism represents a significant growth sector within the global tourism industry; however, empirical research examining development determinants in resource-constrained, emerging African destinations remains limited. This study investigates the structural relationships among infrastructure development, community involvement, marketing and promotion, and visitor expectations/service quality in advancing wellness tourism at Allelobad Hot Spring in Ethiopia’s Afar Region. Using a quantitative methodology, structured questionnaires were administered to 210 respondents (visitors, local community members, and tourism stakeholders), resulting in 186 valid responses. Data were analyzed through Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Results demonstrate that all four determinants exert statistically significant positive effects on wellness tourism development (p < 0.001), with visitor expectations and service quality emerging as the strongest predictor (β = 0.35), followed by infrastructure development (β = 0.32), marketing and promotion (β = 0.30), and community involvement (β = 0.27). The structural model explains 68% of the variance in wellness tourism development, indicating substantial explanatory power. These findings underscore that sustainable wellness tourism growth in emerging destinations necessitates integrated, multidimensional strategies that simultaneously address physical infrastructure, stakeholder engagement, strategic positioning, and experiential excellence, rather than isolated sector-specific interventions. Full article

Computer vision and machine learning have accelerated the automation of animal re-identification pipelines used in conservation programs worldwide. For species with distinctive markings, such as the spot patterns of giraffes, these automated methods are crucial for research and population monitoring purposes. However, many tools are designed for experts, and their implementation requires substantial technical expertise. Research teams often use specialist software and workflows that are not accessible to the general public. In a zoo setting, visitors lack a simple way to identify an individual animal, and unique features are easily missed by untrained visitors. This study presents a three-part solution: a web interface for zoo visitors to upload photos, a deep learning model for giraffe torso detection, and a fast re-identification method for matching observations to a gallery of known individuals using server-side processing. We compare several re-identification methods (RootSIFT, MiewID, and MegaDescriptor) using a consistent evaluation protocol and report both identification performance and system latency for this closed-set zoo setting. Taken together, this study presents a visitor-facing web system that integrates existing re-identification models into a modular, real-time pipeline for zoo deployment, lowering the barrier to visitor participation and making state-of-the-art re-identification methods more accessible to the general public. Full article

This paper empirically investigates the influence of specific direct sales approaches in attracting visitors to an agritourism operation and its profitability using survey data from the U.S. This study further examines the mediating role of the number of visits to a farm in the relationships between specific direct sales approaches and profitability. Agritourism operations enhance economic viability and sustain the business by opening farms to visitors for education, recreation, entertainment, and direct sales of farm products and services. The goal is to invite visitors to a farm and enhance income. Previous studies in the U.S. show that on-farm direct sales, in general, show a positive association, whereas off-farm direct sales show a negative association with the profitability of agritourism operations, along with many other factors. Farmers consider U-pick, sales through a farm stand/store, and subscription farming or community-supported agriculture (CSA) (on-farm pick-up) as on-farm, and CSA (off-farm delivery) and selling at a farmers’ market as off-farm direct sales approaches. However, which specific approach attracts visitors to a farm and generates profitability is not known. Multivariate analysis using the recently collected data from a U.S. national survey of operators reveals that on-farm direct sales such as a U-pick and a farm stand/store attracted significantly more visits to an agritourism operation, which ultimately yielded higher profitability. In contrast, the selling of produce at farmers’ markets attracted significantly fewer visits to the farm and reportedly reduced profitability. These results are adjusted for other factors including various agritourism experiences offered to the visitors. Moreover, as theoretically expected, the number of visits mediated the effects of specific direct sales (particularly a U-pick and farm stand sales) on profitability. This evidence has implications for agritourism operators, policymakers, and extension educators engaged in starting, expanding, and promoting direct sales via agritourism operations for their economic viability and sustainability. Full article

The cultural services of urban cultural landscape ecosystems are easily perceived by visitors, and their quantitative assessment and exploration of influencing factors can provide a scientific basis for the optimization of urban cultural landscapes. Existing studies rarely reveal the spatial distribution of the social values of urban cultural landscape ecosystem cultural services and the influencing factors of this spatial distribution from the visitors’ perspective. To reveal the spatial distribution pattern of the social values of urban cultural landscape ecosystem cultural services from the visitors’ perspective, explore its influencing factors, and verify the applicability of the SolVES model in urban cultural landscapes, this study obtained the overall perception and preferences of visitors towards Cangzhou Garden Expo Park through a questionnaire survey. Combining the questionnaire survey data with geographical data, the SolVES 3.0 model was employed to conduct quantitative assessments and spatial distribution analyses of six social values of the ecosystem: esthetic, biodiversity, historical, recreation, learning, and life-sustaining values. The following conclusions were drawn: (1) The maximum value index of recreation value and esthetic value were highest, and showed significant spatial concentrated characteristics, with hotspots concentrated at the northeast side of the park. (2) Biodiversity value and historical value were prominent near areas rich in plant resources and industrial heritage sites. (3) The distance to roads and slope significantly influenced the assessment of social values; social values showed a significant negative correlation with distance to roads. (4) The Garden Expo Park had strong advantages in ecological restoration and social value supply, but there were still problems such as inconvenient transportation and uneven value distribution. Based on the above results, this study proposed suggestions for enhancing the social values of the ecosystem services in Cangzhou Garden Expo Park, and further provided targeted optimization suggestions for the construction and management of urban cultural landscapes. The SolVES model showed good performance in assessing the social values of the ecosystem services of an urban cultural landscape, with high reliability and promising application prospects. Full article

Accurate one-step forecasting of scenic-spot visitor demand is challenging due to strong non-stationarity, holiday-induced peaks, and abrupt reputation-driven shocks. We propose a symmetry-aware dynamic graph learning framework that fuses social–physical sensing streams for robust demand prediction. Online reviews are treated as social sensing, transformed into daily sentiment indicators, and aligned with demand using a delay-aware aggregation scheme. To capture evolving inter-spot dependencies, we construct a time-varying adjacency matrix that is updated over time and integrated into a lightweight spatio-temporal forecasting model, Dynamic Spatio-temporal Graph Attention LSTM (DSGAT-LSTM). The model preserves the permutation-invariant property of graph learning while introducing sentiment-guided feature reweighting and sentiment-gated temporal updates to better track volatility. Experiments on multi-year daily data from multiple A-level scenic spots with holiday and weather context demonstrate consistent error reductions over representative temporal and graph-based baselines, together with improved stability under peak and shock conditions. We will release the processed feature-level dataset and implementation scripts to support reproducibility. Full article

This paper develops the Mobilized Nostalgia Tourism conceptual model, positioning historic automotive events as dynamic, multisensory mobile heritage performances through which nostalgia is actively produced rather than merely recalled. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship across heritage studies, mobilities and performance perspectives, and destination branding, the model specifies how event design levers (sensory staging, narrative scripting, participation architecture, and digital mediation) can mobilize nostalgia as an affective mechanism, shaping visitor outcomes (authenticity, memorability, attachment, advocacy) and, under certain conditions, destination outcomes (brand meaning, dispersion effects, and cultural capital). The paper uses three illustrative cases—Mille Miglia (Italy), Goodwood Revival (England), and the Historic Acropolis Rally (Greece)—to demonstrate the model’s portability and to highlight variation in how mobilized nostalgia is staged and contested. By clarifying constructs, boundary conditions, and propositions, the paper provides an analytical vocabulary that supports comparative research and offers practical insight for designing heritage events that are emotionally resonant, culturally legitimate, and strategically coherent. The proposed model is widely applicable, extending beyond automotive events to vintage railway, aviation, maritime heritage tourism, and diverse cultural festivals. Furthermore, it translates the mechanism model into a practical design toolkit that can inform event organizers, destination managers, and policymakers as they develop affect-rich heritage experiences and manage trade-offs around authenticity, community legitimacy, and sustainability. Last, the paper outlines empirical pathways, including mixed-method approaches, for future validation of its conceptual propositions. Full article

The sustainability of experience-intensive wellness tourism services increasingly depends on managers’ ability to understand heterogeneous and implicit tourist preferences that are rarely captured through traditional survey-based approaches. In the context of Korean Templestay tourism, this study develops a data-driven decision-support framework that leverages large-scale unstructured review data to address managerial challenges such as choice overload, inefficient resource allocation, and cold-start conditions. Using 74,015 user-generated reviews collected between 2020 and 2024, the framework integrates Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract image-embedded text, achieving a validated character-level accuracy of 96.8%. In addition, a weak supervision strategy is applied to identify latent tourist preferences in a cost-efficient and scalable manner. Preference classification is conducted using Random Forest models combined with SMOTE, followed by clustering and user-based collaborative filtering to support personalized recommendations. The findings indicate that the Templestay market is better understood as an interconnected preference network rather than a set of mutually exclusive segments. Across user groups, “rest” emerges as a shared foundational value, while differentiated sub-preferences coexist within the network. The proposed framework successfully generates recommendations for all users in the dataset, demonstrating strong applicability for mitigating cold-start risks and supporting adaptive and sustainable program design. Full article

This research assessed management strategies for overtourism in Zadar County. Overtourism has become apparent in both city and seaside destinations, affecting residents’ quality of life. This study defines overtourism as a challenge for urban management, emphasizing that exploring strategies to address overtourism also influences the management of sustainability and quality of life in urban areas. Here, a methodological framework was created with five strategies, each evaluated against seven criteria. The evaluation was carried out by the directors of the county’s tourist boards. Since these strategies have not yet been implemented, the directors had to rate them with some uncertainty, as they lacked complete information about the criteria and potential effects. To handle this uncertainty, the intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) approach was used. Additionally, the SiWeC method determined the importance of the criteria, and the TOPSIS method ranked the strategies. Results, based on ratings from 12 directors, indicated that Digital Support and Environmental Sustainability are the most important criteria. Strategy C, which aims to redirect tourists to lesser-known locations within the county, performed best, maintaining visitor numbers while helping preserve the region’s natural resources. This research has shown that strategies for managing overtourism help reduce the pressure tourists place on urban environments, thereby improving the quality of life and sustainable development of these environments. Full article