While importance-performance analysis (IPA) is one of the most ubiquitous methodological tools utilized in tourism research, its supply-side application to residents has been lacking. Additionally, ...little research has examined residents' perceptions of sustainable tourism initiatives (STIs) or their community's performance on these STIs. Given this gap, this study conducted an IPA of resident attitudes towards STIs across three U.S. counties in the Commonwealth of Virginia with varying levels of emphasis placed on sustainable tourism within their strategic plans. The results revealed residents of the three counties placed uniformly high levels of importance on the STIs, but varied in their perceptions of performance. The county with the most emphasis placed on sustainable tourism within their plan was found to have the highest performance evaluations. Methodological and theoretical considerations are discussed in detail, including the placement of cross-hairs and how IPA can be situated within social exchange theory and Oliver's expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm.
•IPA of sustainable tourism initiatives applied to residents.•IPA applied to three destinations with varying emphasis on sustainable tourism.•IPA combined data-centered and scale-centered techniques to create cross hairs.•County with most emphasis on sustainability in plan evaluated as most sustainable.•Residents place high importance on sustainability but evaluate performance as low.
Sustainable tourism indicators (STIs) are an integral element of tourism planning and management. This study systematically reviews the research contributions on the development of STIs based on four ...criteria including: i) the relevance of the STIs to the sustainable development goals (SDGs); ii) governance; iii) stakeholders involved; and iv) the distinction between subjective and objective indicators. A search of Scopus indexed journals published up to April 2018, yielded 97 papers for examination. The findings demonstrate the lack of direct attention to the SDGs in those papers published after their launch in 2016. However, the majority of the SDGs and their targets have indirectly been covered in the reviewed papers. The results revealed that, among the sustainability themes of economic growth, social inclusion, environmental protection, and governance, the STIs studies tended to overlook the dimension of governance. The findings showed that residents are the most engaged stakeholder group, and tourists the least engaged as compared with government and businesses. The results also indicated that more attention is afforded to objective compared to subjective indicators. The findings also demonstrated that much of the focus is on European countries rather than the Global South which is the major focus of the SDGs.
Examines tourism as a partial-industrialised system using an adaptive cycle model as the key element of panarchy to explain a healthy social-ecological system. Proposes a regenerative tourism model ...based on this, along with the indicators of regenerative tourism, to measure the degree to which a tourism product is regenerative and sustainable. Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
Indicators are a fundamental tool for destinations in their progress towards a more sustainable tourism development. However, the lack of real progress and the accelerated technological change are ...obliging policy makers to rethink the existing indicator systems. This paper examines the relationship between smart cities and destinations and sustainable tourism indicators by analyzing proposals at different scales. It provides a critical review of international smart city standards and the role that sustainability indicators play within them. Then, it conducts a content analysis of planning instruments applied in smart strategies in Spain, focusing on how sustainability indicators are considered under the smart paradigm. At the regional-local scale, this research compares two sets of indicators and tests the scientific validity of one of them for addressing the imbalance suffered by many indicators between their usefulness for policy makers and their academic rigor. The results show that little progress has been achieved despite the appropriation of the sustainability discourse by smart city and smart destination promoters. These findings reveal the (limited) real contribution made by smart cities/destinations to sustainable tourism development and contribute to identifying weaknesses and opportunities so as to redirect smart policies and projects. A final discussion contextualizes the findings within the novel framework of smart sustainability and highlights the need to reinforce public governance of urban and tourist spaces.
We aimed to evaluate the impact of sustainable tourism indicators on destination competitiveness with reference to the European Tourism Indicator System (ETIS), a scheme funded by the European ...Commission to address the evidence gap in tourism policy making. To do this, we evaluate the absorptive capacity of destination management organisations (DMOs) to implement and use sustainable tourism indicators to make policy decisions. We provide evidence of how DMOs have acquired knowledge about the importance of sustainable tourism indicators through ETIS, and how they have assimilated it by developing their own systems based on the principles of ETIS. However, we find that the European Commission had unrealistic expectations that DMOs, or their policies, would be transformed as a result of the use of indicators, or that indicators would be exploited to improve tourism sustainability and competitiveness. We contribute to the study of policy science by showing how absorptive capacity can be used to analyse and evaluate policy interventions, despite being a linear rational approach to explaining a complex policy context.
This paper presents a system of Sustainable Tourism Tags to evaluate the management of tourist destinations, using the information from a composite indicator called the Differential Dynamic Index. ...This vectorial indicator has two components: one dynamic which shows the advance or regress in time of each destination in terms of sustainability; the other static that compares the situation, at a moment of time, of each zone using multiple benchmarks according to each territory's physical characteristics and tourist activity. The sustainable tourism tags are awarded to the places which show advances, thus rewarding the work carried out by their managers. This system is a practical tool to link the evaluation of the indicator with the planning and management decisions of the destinations. We therefore define a linear programming problem which enables, for each destination, determining the minimum change necessary in the indicators to improve their qualification in the tag system. Finally, we present a case study for the urban destinations of Andalusia (Spain) that illustrates the practical application of the proposed tool.
•A vectorial composite indicator is used to evaluate tourist destinations via multiple benchmarks.•We propose a Sustainable Tourism Tags to assess destination management.•Sustainable Tourism Tags are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the strategic plans designed by the regional governments.•An improvement linear programming model is defined to formulate an objective strategy to obtain the best category tag.•The system of qualification via tags can mean an incentive to motivate local managers to carry out their work.
PDF
