The paper aims to critically review past and emerging literature to help professionals and researchers alike to better understand, manage and valorize both the tourism impacts and transformational ...affordance of COVID-19. To achieve this, first, the paper discusses why and how the COVID-19 can be a transformational opportunity by discussing the circumstances and the questions raised by the pandemic. By doing this, the paper identifies the fundamental values, institutions and pre-assumptions that the tourism industry and academia should challenge and break through to advance and reset the research and practice frontiers. The paper continues by discussing the major impacts, behaviours and experiences that three major tourism stakeholders (namely tourism demand, supply and destination management organisations and policy makers) are experiencing during three COVID-19 stages (response, recovery and reset). This provides an overview of the type and scale of the COVID-19 tourism impacts and implications for tourism research.
Literature on social entrepreneurship provides a limited understanding of how to generate social value. The article expands on a “learning with the market” approach for developing a framework, ...explaining how social entrepreneurs can manage, get engaged with, form, and create (new) markets for co-creating social value and transformation. The applicability and implications of the framework are examined through a case study of a social restaurant (Mageires). Data collected from various restaurant stakeholders (customers, employees, suppliers, owners/founders, and other business partners) identified three market capabilities for generating social value and change: network structure (building networks with various stakeholders), market practices (e.g. institutionalization of “new currencies” for conducting economic transactions, adoption of ethical, flexible, and all inclusive recruiting practices), and market pictures (e.g. use of a common terminology and performance metrics and generation of stakeholders’ dialogues for creating intersubjective meanings).
Despite the wide diffusion of gamification in business, limited research exists investigating the application and impacts of gamification. As the gamification effects are heavily dependent on the ...context of its implementation, this study used the design of the TripAdvisor’s funware for investigating the use and the impacts of gamification in a specific tourism context. After reviewing the literature for understanding how to design funwares that can lead to desired experiential and behavioural user outcomes, the paper discusses the way in which the TripAdvisor designed its funware for motivating the travellers to engage with its website and for enhancing the travellers’ online experiential values and trip planning processes. Data from TripAdvisor users were also collected for investigating the impacts of the TripAdvisor’s funware design on the following users’ outcomes: experiential values gained by using TripAdvisor; impacts of TripAdvisor on travellers’ trip planning processes; impacts of Tripadvisor on trip experiences. Finally, the paper discusses the implications of the findings to researchers, designers and tourism organisations.
Increasing awareness and demands in sustainable tourism require firms to implement sustainable Supply Chain Management policies (SCM). Tour operators can significantly influence and promote ...sustainable tourism development due to their central distribution role and capability to direct tourists to destinations and suppliers. Despite the emerging role of SCM and sustainability, the applicability of SCM practices in tourism is not studied yet. This paper adapts and illustrates the value of using SCM concepts within tour operators' business for integrating sustainability into tourism supply chains. After reviewing the literature in SC management and collaboration, a model for implementing sustainable SCM is proposed and its applicability is shown by analysing the case of TUI. The implications of the model and the case study are discussed.
Social media is fundamentally changing the way travellers and tourists search, find, read and trust, as well as collaboratively produce information about tourism suppliers and tourism destinations. ...Presenting cutting-edge theory, research and case studies investigating Web 2.0 applications and tools that transform the role and behaviour of the new generation of travellers, this book also examines the ways in which tourism organisations reengineer and implement their business models and operations, such as new service development, marketing, networking and knowledge management. Written by an international group of researchers widely known for their expertise in the field of the Internet and tourism, chapters include applications and case studies in various travel, tourism and leisure sectors.
Smart tourism is a new buzzword applied to describe the increasing reliance of tourism destinations, their industries and their tourists on emerging forms of ICT that allow for massive amounts of ...data to be transformed into value propositions. However, it remains ill-defined as a concept, which hinders its theoretical development. The paper defines smart tourism, sheds light on current smart tourism trends, and then lays out its technological and business foundations. This is followed by a brief discussion on the prospects and drawbacks of smart tourism. The paper further draws attention to the great need for research to inform smart tourism development and management.
This article investigates how the perceived threats caused by COVID-19 affect consumers’ travel choices and actions by influencing their intentions to seek variety. Four studies show that the ...perceived threat of COVID-19 increases variety seeking in travel choices. Study 1 finds that travelers who perceive a greater threat of COVID-19 tend to undertake more varied activities during their travel. Study 2 shows that the main effect exists only for individuals who have previously visited the destination. Study 3 replicates the moderating effect of previous visiting experience by using a different way to manipulate the perceived threat of COVID-19. Study 4 illustrates the moderating impact of another important factor: the number of travelers included in the companies’ communication messages. The article concludes by discussing the theoretical and managerial implications of the findings.
Technology advances enable people to trade and sell their own travel products, which in turn create numerous transformation changes into the tourism industry structure, the nature of tourism products ...and experiences, the competitiveness of traditional and new tourism players and the process creating (social) value in tourism. This paper investigates the application and implications of collaborative commerce in tourism and provides suggestions for future research.
Technologies transform tourism management and marketing from a static and utilitarian sense (whereby managers and tourists use technologies as tools) to a transformative conceptualization whereby ...tourism markets and actors both shape and are shaped by technology. This paper unravels the transformative power of technologies on: the tourism actors and resources (both the traditional but also new actors, i.e. the technology agents); the ways actors interact to (co-)create but also (co-)destruct tourism value; and the context in which tourism actors interact from a linear supply chain tourism ‘industry’ to a complex socio-technical smart tourism ecosystem. To study such complex phenomena and transformations, the paper emphasises that research should not only adopt a multi-disciplinary approach, but it also needs to follow an anti-disciplinary thinking whereby new knowledge and constructs do not simply fall within existing paradigms, disciplinary silos and mindsets once developed by studying the ‘pure’ humans and their behaviours.