Search Results (18)

Although lagoons are sites of water accumulation and runoff where a variety of animal species and plant varieties inhabit, they have also been positioned as spaces where rituals and religious practices take place, from which the transmission of knowledge emanates, and social activities are strengthened. The Laguna de Cajititlán (Cajititlán Lagoon) in the town of Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, Jalisco, México is a lacustrine landscape that faces a state of fragility due to incessant processes of urbanization along with basin desiccation and wastewater pollution. However, the community of Cajititlán has managed to protect its lacustrine landscape through the rescue of the religious tradition of the Procesión Los Santos Reyes (Procession of the Wise Men). Therefore, the objective of this article is to analyze how this tradition, as cultural heritage, has influenced the conservation of the lacustrine landscape. We conclude that cultural heritage and the lacustrine landscape are bidirectionally correlated because fostering Indigenous traditions like the Procesión in Cajititlán, as a manifestation of devotion and faith, enhances identity, promotes tourism, and supports conservation practices and the sustainability of the lacustrine landscape. At the same time, conservation of the lacustrine landscape enables the preservation of cultural heritage, generating an interdependent relationship between these elements. Full article

Museums help to conserve regional heritage and sustain regional identity, which is especially important in large countries. Russian regional museums constitute a whole phenomenon. Indeed, this phenomenon is a large field for research, and it cannot be comprehended by any single study. This is why attention should be paid for its particular aspects such as a historical dynamics of the expansion of regional museums in Russia. The information from the official websites of 76 regional museums sensu stricto of the entire country and 10 smaller museums of the Vologda Region was analyzed to measure the dynamics of their foundation and the relative importance of the different founders. It was established that regional museums were created in the Imperial, Soviet, and Modern periods of the Russian history, and the majority of them appeared in 1861–1935. Governmental founders prevailed, although private and societal initiatives also mattered, especially in the particular time slices. The smaller museums of the Vologda Region were created chiefly in the Soviet period, and both governmental and private initiatives were important. The results of this analysis were interpreted regarding attention to the broad public education and activity of so-called intelligentsia in the late Imperial and Soviet periods. It is hypothesized that the regional museum foundation can be brought in correspondent to the idea of a wise state and society development. Importantly, major transformations of the Russian society (particularly, in the beginning of the 20th century) did not interrupt the expansion of regional museums. It is proposed that the existing national network of regional museums itself has a heritage value, which can be important to tourism development. Full article

The development of sustainable tourism has various stakeholders such as local residents, businesses, governments, visitors, travel agencies, and tourism companies. Tourism destinations need to be protected not only to ensure a better travel experience but also to ensure that they can be enjoyed in the future. This study explored the degree of influence of key stakeholders such as the government, travel agencies, local residents, and tourists on the development of sustainable tourism in Haikou, the capital city of the island province Hainan, China. This city is rich in tropical natural resources and offers unique opportunities for the development of tourism. In 2018, Haikou was selected as one of the first “International Wetland Cities” by the 13th United Nations Ramsar Convention. However, the high dependence on tourism and centralized consumption have caused several ecological and environmental problems in Haikou. An online questionnaire survey of 419 stakeholders was conducted, and factor analysis was used to identify five dimensions. The structural equation modeling method was used to explore the degree of influence of different relationships on sustainable tourism development in Haikou. The results indicated that key stakeholders are most concerned about tourism awareness, ecological protection, and sociocultural development. Therefore, further efforts to promote and develop tourism must focus on ecological and environmental protection. Creating positive travel experiences and managing tourism wisely can meet the demands of today without compromising the future. Full article

Post-Smart Tourism Destinations (PSTD) need a sense-of-place approach based on uniqueness and thematic differentiation to deliver authentic and valuable experiences. Information and communication technology (ICT), digital technology adoption, sustainable development, community empowerment and local wisdom, and destination uniqueness are keywords that will be further explored in the development of tourism villages in Kenderan as the most important tourism destination development at the village level. The development of smart tourism, proof of the disruption of digital technology in the tourism sector, has become the objective of almost every tourism destination in the world today, be it an urban or rural area. Since its initial emergence, the smart concept in tourism development has evolved. In the beginning, it focused on ICT and the adoption of digital technology. Along with the pressure of the global requirement to apply sustainable development, the focus of smart tourism later included sustainability in the application of smart technology, which made smart tourism development (STD) become smart and sustainable tourism development (SSTD). The post-smart tourism concept arose because many critics suggested that destinations tend to place too much focus on technology adoption and lack attention to local wisdom, inclusivity, and local indigenous aspects of destination development. Applied research implemented mixed methods in the form of qualitative research through expert judgment and quantitative research through structural equation modeling analysis. The results of this research show that creative events for the local aspects of a tourist village, digital competence, and sustainability practice are the building blocks for a post-smart tourism village, while digital competence and sustainable practice have a significant mediating effect of locality on post-smart tourism villages. To ensure a tourism village possesses sustainable competitive advantages, the village must explore and promote its locality aspects to differentiate itself as a tourist village by identifying its valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable tourism resources. The implication of this research is that to develop wise and distinctive smart tourism destinations, tourist villages should explore their local values and resources, embed them into their basic components and core resources of tourism, and co-create, distribute, deliver, and promote them to the global market through technology adoption and global sustainability value. Full article

The EU has set ambitious targets to combat climate change. Incorporating renewable energy technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is a critical aspect of achieving the European Union’s (EU) 2030 climate goals. Similarly to all member countries of the EU, Greece shares the same climate goals. In order to achieve these goals, ensuring a consistent supply and the effective use of clean energy is pursued, as it has a significant impact on the sustainable development and growth of the country. As the Greek tourism sector is one of the most energy-consuming of the national economy and a major contributor to the country’s GDP, opportunities are presented for innovation and investment in sustainable practices. Such investments must focus on buildings and facilities, where the energy consumption is concentrated. One of the most popular holiday destinations in Greece is the island of Crete. Visitation patterns are seasonal, which means during the summer months, Crete is exceptionally popular and more demanding energy-wise. One of the highest energy-demanding types of tourism-based businesses is the hospitality industry. Energy demands in hotels are driven by factors such as heating, cooling, lighting, and hot water. Thus, such activities require thermal and electrical energy to function. Electrical energy is one of the most essential forms of energy for hotels, as it powers a wide range of critical systems and services throughout the establishment. Therefore, the hotels are highly susceptible to fluctuations in energy prices which can significantly impact the operational costs of hotels. This paper presents an analysis of the annual consumption for the year of 2022 of five hotels located in Crete. An algorithm is also implemented which strives to minimize the capital expenditure (CAPEX), while ensuring a sufficient percentage of self-sufficiency. Full article

The sustainable development of mountain tourism is crucial for preserving the delicate ecosystems and resources found in these unique landscapes. This research paper investigates the sustainability of mountain lodges, which serve as essential facilities for delivering mountain tourism services. To assess sustainability, expert decision making involving eight selected experts was employed. A hybrid approach combining the IMF SWARA (IMproved Fuzzy Step-wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis) method with Fuzzy Dombi Aggregation Operators was utilized to determine the weights of various sustainability criteria. The IMF SWARA method assigned initial weights based on expert input, which were subsequently adjusted using Fuzzy Dombi Aggregation Operators. The findings highlight the significance of two key criteria as per expert evaluations: the quality of the services offered (C21) and the preservation of natural resources (C15). To rank and evaluate the mountain lodges, the fuzzy CRADIS (Compromise Ranking of Alternatives from Distance to Ideal Solution) method was employed, ultimately identifying Zabrana (ML6) as the top-ranked mountain lodge. The validity of these results was confirmed through result validation and sensitivity analysis. This research contributes by providing insights into the current state of mountain tourism and offering guidelines for enhancing the overall mountain tourism experience through the integration of fuzzy methods. Full article

Social Media Analytics (SMA) is more and more relevant in today’s market dynamics. However, it is necessary to use it wisely, either in promoting any kind of product/brand, or interacting with customers. This requires its effective understanding and monitoring. One way is through web data scraping (WDS) tools that allow to select sites and platforms to compare them in their performances. They can optimize extraction of big data published on social media. Due to current challenges, a sector that can particularly take advantage of this source is tourism (and its related sectors). This year has the hope of tourism’s revival after a pandemic whose impacts are still affecting several activities. Many traders and entrepreneurs have already used these versatile tools. However, do they really know their potential? The present study highlights the use of WDS to collect data from TripAdvisor’s social pages. Besides comparing competitors’ performance, companies also gain new knowledge of unnoticed preferences/habits. This contributes to more interesting innovations and results for them and for their customers. The approach used here is based on a project for smart tourism consultancy, from the identification of a gap in our region, to aid tourism organizations to enhance their digital presence and business model. Many things can be detected in this big source of unstructured data very quickly and easily without programming. Moreover, exploring code, either to refine the web scraper or connect it with other platforms/apps, can be an object of future research to leverage consumer behavior prediction for more advanced interactions. Full article

This study aims to investigate the impacts and identify the causal links between tourism expansion and the environment among countries of the Eurozone from 1996 to 2019 in the context of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). To achieve this end, we used a new set of untested tourism proxies when elaborating the EKC. We disaggregated the tourism phenomenon and highlighted its heterogenous nature by including specific and high-impact market segments such as business and leisure tourism spending as well as capital investment spending. The research findings indicate the pivotal role that tourism proxies have on environmental degradation in terms of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). Specifically, the identified reciprocal causalities between leisure and investment spending and environmental degradation suggest some complementarities between these variables. In the case of business tourism spending, an increase (decrease) in this variable leads to an increase (decrease) in environmental degradation. The last two feedback hypotheses indicate that the primary and final energy consumption Granger cause GHGs and vice versa. Such a result offers evidence for incorporating the concept of energy efficiency in tourism. Practical implications should motivate supply and demand dimensions within the tourism system to improve efficiency in tourism flow management. The supply side should transfer the environmental message to visitors to spend wisely and consume smarter, whereas the demand side should perform pro-environmental behavior by spending wisely and acting responsibly at destinations. Full article

The tourism industry has experienced fast and sustainable growth over the years in the economic sector. The data available online on the ever-growing tourism sector must be given importance as it provides crucial economic insights, which can be helpful for consumers and governments. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques have traditionally been used to tackle the issues of structuring of unprocessed data, and the representation of the data in a knowledge-based system. NLP is able to capture the full richness of the text by extracting the entity and relationship from the processed data, which is gathered from various social media platforms, webpages, blogs, and other online sources, while successfully taking into consideration the semantics of the text. With the purpose of detecting connections between tourism and economy, the research aims to present a visual representation of the refined data using knowledge graphs. In this research, the data has been gathered from Twitter using keyword extraction techniques with an emphasis on tourism and economy. The research uses TextBlob to convert the tweets to numeric vector representations and further uses clustering techniques to group similar entities. A cluster-wise knowledge graph has been constructed, which comprises a large number of relationships among various factors, that visualize entities and their relationships connecting tourism and economy. Full article

This study examines whether a TV shopping host’s introduction and promotion on a tourism destination could develop viewers’ parasocial interaction (PSI) with that host and thus influence viewers’ behavioral intentions on that destination. In addition, moderating effects of two factors (self-destination personality fit and host-destination personality fit) on the relationship between the TV viewers’ parasocial experience with a TV host (PSI) and the viewers’ behavioral intentions on the advertised destination are tested. Data were collected from 310 TV shopping customers in Taiwan using a self-administrated questionnaire. Simple linear regression and hierarchical regression techniques were implemented to test the proposed hypotheses. Findings indicate that PSI between a TV host and TV viewers is strongly correlated with the significant positive behavioral intentions of viewers. In addition, self-destination and host destination personality fits were both reinforcements of the positive impact that PSI has on TV viewers’ behavioral intentions. Findings and data collected from this study would yield useful practical implications for tourism marketers in terms of wisely selecting a TV host and utilizing a TV host’s parasocial interaction with audiences to increase audiences’ behavioral intention on the promoted destination. Full article

This article covers the topic of the tourist attractiveness of Tokyo in the opinion of 369 tourists from Poland. A definition of tourist attractiveness and its factors is provided. Basic information on Tokyo, including accommodation, eating facilities, and tourist traffic in the city is offered. The results of the research performed with the use of a survey questionnaire are demonstrated. The research shows that tourists’ most appreciated elements of Tokyo’s tourist attractiveness are transport accessibility, eating facilities, and cultural assets. The article’s hypotheses, that the most attractive seasons in Tokyo, tourism-wise, are spring and autumn, and that the most attractive monument in Tokyo is the oldest Buddhist temple, Sensō-ji, located in the Taitō district, were confirmed to be positive. The third hypothesis was also positively verified. The research shows that younger people positively assessed Tokyo as an attractive and friendly city more than older people. Full article

Terraced tourism sustainability depends on maintenance for terraced landscape. The effective measures for protecting terraces rest on the cooperation among multi-stakeholders. Therefore, a multi-stakeholder involvement mechanism (MSIM) is very important for terraced landscape conservation. Dazhai village in Longji Terraces, Guangxi Province, Southwest China, explored a MSIM to maintain terraced tourism sustainability in the past 20 years. Based on the statistical data and the data from household interviews, this study analyses the development history of Dazhai tourism. Comparing the changes in different stages in components of MSIM of Dazhai, we revealed the successful key factors of MSIM for maintaining terraces tourism sustainability includes identifying accurately core attractions and stakeholders, an effective communication strategy, a democratic decision-making mechanism, dynamic benefit distribution schemes (BDS) facing terraced conservation, coordination teams with foresight and selflessness, and the effective supervision and management. In the end, we conclude that economic income is the most important driver stimulating villagers in Dazhai to insist on growing rice. It is crucial factor to drive farmers to protect their terraces. but economic income improvement of the households depends on a systemic and dynamic MSIM. The most important causes for Dazhai MSIM success results from the wise coordination teams and the effective communication strategy. Full article

The valorization of cultural heritage for regional development (“Conservation 3.0”) has been a widely used concept in the last decade. Heritage institutions and the European Union have advocated and fostered the view of cultural heritage as a place-based development potential. Therefore, this article investigates the impacts of such approaches in the context of sustainable development. It does so with a specific focus on more peripheral, (old) industrial regions in Central Europe, where industrial heritage and industrial tourism play an important role. Based on this background, this article highlights the difficulties of establishing a tourism product based on industry-related features. The product mainly serves a niche market, thereby not helping to overcome structural disadvantages of peripheral regions. The economic impacts of industrial heritage tourism on the transition towards a more sustainable regional development are rather low. Nevertheless, the case study highlights the social benefits that industry-related tourism yields in regions in transformation, forming an important pre-condition for any future development. However, ecological aspects are not widely addressed in heritage tourism in this region. Policy-wise, stakeholders in peripheral regions should be more aware of the different limits and opportunities cultural heritage utilizations can bring in terms of achieving a more sustainable regional development. Full article

Today, medical tourism is one of the fastest growing sectors of the tourism industry around the world. Medical tourism can contribute to the sustainable development and economic dynamism of countries. Therefore, in this study, we prioritize the world’s leading countries in medical tourism for Iranians. First, five main criteria and 20 sub-criteria were selected, which are the reasons for choosing a country as a medical tourism destination. In this paper a combined fuzzy SWARA-PROMETHEE approach was used to prioritize tourism destinations. The acronym PROMETHEE stands for Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation method and represents an useful MCDA (Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis) tool. On the other hand, SWARA acronym means Step-wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis. The criteria were weighted using the fuzzy SWARA approach. In the following, using the PROMETHEE approach, we prioritized eight countries as tourism destinations, then we identified criteria related to sustainability of medical tourism destinations and prioritized medical tourism destinations using these criteria as the contributions of this paper. The weights obtained for criteria “Abilities of skilled staff,” “Applied medical equipment,” “Marketing capability,” “Type of service provided,” and “Application of information and communications technology” were 0.176, 0.232, 0.108, 0.395, and 0.089, respectively. The results show that medical tourism destination priorities for Iranians are India (Phi = 0.1396), Malaysia (Phi = 0.1128), Panama (Phi = 0.0976), Mexico (Phi = 0.0790), Singapore (Phi = 0.0096), Taiwan (Phi = −0.0442), Brazil (Phi = −0.1747), and Costa Rica (Phi = −0.2196), respectively. Negative Phi values indicate below average performance of those countries and positive Phi values indicate above average performance of those criteria. The results indicate that countries with negative Phi values should be strengthened relative to the improvement of some criteria. Full article

According to our research findings, the future-oriented conservation of natural ecological resources in the Sahn-Yang Gotjawal area should be shaped and formed in a sustainable ecological way to improve the economy of the Sahn-Yang area. This study covers a systematic and quantitative assessment of the function, design, and purpose of establishing a regional eco-tourism program using the Sahn-Yang Gotjawal (Volcanic Lava Stony Forest) natural resources of Jeju Island, South Korea. Although citizens’ interest in Jeju Gotjawal has increased, reckless exploration and damage still occurred. There were improvements on the movement to preserve geological features and the ecosystem. However, unfortunately the negative effects of only seeking development opportunities without regard to the environment was realized as well. Through strengths, opportunities, aspirations, results (SOAR) analysis, various potential situations and conditions using the Sahn-Yang Gotjawal resources were analyzed with quantitative and qualitative techniques. In addition, through media analysis, the benefits and opportunities that the Gotjawal resources could provide the citizens were identified and the results were combined with SOAR analysis to present an integrated vision. In order to make wise use of Sahn-Yang Gotjawal, such as conserving, sustaining, and creating accessibility (guided by SESs), it is necessary to concentrate on the ‘strengths’ such as creating and maximizing attractions which can develop management programs such as preservation research and monitoring, as well as establishing sustainable usage of facilities such as visitors’ gathering spaces, exploration activities, and convenient facilities. Full article