This research focuses on residents' perceptions of personal benefits from tourism, identifying not only the relationships between personal benefits from tourism and residents' attitudes toward ...tourism but also the nature of benefits associated with tourism. The study was conducted in a small rural community where tourism is still at its emerging stage. It was found that residents' perceptions of personal benefits from tourism were closely associated with their attitudes toward tourism in a positive direction. The significant contribution of this study falls on the recognition of noneconomic perspective of tourism benefits for residents in a community where tourism has not yet explicitly emerged. In particular, the data lend support for social exchange theory and improve its understanding in tourism investigations.
Local participation is essential in rural tourism development in the Philippines. However, as technology becomes a critical factor in the digital transformation of the rural tourism paradigm, local ...participation evolves into local community empowerment. How does this local community empowerment affect the transition through digital transformation? The stakeholder engagement theory was utilized to ensure the relevance of the selected informants' roles and responsibilities in the local community empowerment process. Using a purposive sample of local tourism stakeholders engaged in the digital transformation functions and responsibilities, a semi-structured interview was conducted to describe the role of local community empowerment towards a more effective digital transformation of rural tourism development. The findings revealed that as residents engage in the digital transformation process, residents are empowered based on individual, gender, political, and social aspects. Individual empowerment constitutes the improvement of technical capabilities and setting higher goals, while gender empowerment leads to gender equality specialization and breaking the glass ceiling. Political empowerment was attained through the boosting of their influence and the taking of a decision-maker role. In contrast, social empowerment promotes building industry networks and implementing a family-centric approach. This study contributes to the academic landscape on rural tourism development that determined specific factors of community empowerment essential in the digital transformation of tourism management processes.
•Residents were empowered based on individual, gender, political, and social aspects due to digital transformation.•Individual empowerment allows the improvement of technical capabilities and setting of higher goals.•Political empowerment boosts the influence of residents while taking the decision-maker role in rural tourism development.
In the context of resident and tourist relationships in a destination, perspectives of the former are rarely considered. This is likely a function of the continued attention paid to studies focusing ...on the former in addressing sociocultural impacts of tourism. This work examines the relationship as perceived by tourists, utilizing the theoretical framework of emotional solidarity. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to examine the factor structure of the four constructs (i.e., shared beliefs, shared behavior, interaction, and emotional solidarity) within Durkheim’s model. This works shows continued support for the framework with each of the antecedent constructs significantly predicting emotional solidarity, explaining approximately 55% of the variance in the construct. Implications and limitations of the work along with future research opportunities are discussed.
This paper aims to further advance the theoretical and practical understanding of tourism and inclusive growth by evaluating the Tourism-Driven Inclusive Growth Diagnostic (T-DIGD) framework in ...practice. This was done by defining a mixed-method methodology including identifying 96 indicators and applying the framework to the tourism sector of North Macedonia. Testing the diagnostic and evaluating its strengths and weaknesses showed that this is a promising approach as it can identify the possible binding constraints to tourism-driven inclusive growth out of a large selection of possible factors. It can thereby contribute to a way of systematically and transparently prioritizing policies to formulate a context-specific development strategy in the presence of limited resources. This paper is timely and relevant for tourism policy makers as there is an increased demand for tools that can be used for evidence-based policy making for tourism development.
Sustainability has been a core conceptual framework for community development since the approach was popularized in 1987, although in its essence it reflects a long history of environmental ...conservation reactions to industrialization. Resilience, as a framework for understanding and approaching community development, emerged more gradually out of ecological studies in the 1980s, but has only recently, since the mid-2000s, emerged as a focus of public interest as a way of responding and adapting to the planet's growing anthropogenic changes. For many, sustainability and resilience are slightly nuanced perspectives on the same phenomenon. For others, however, there are distinct differences between them, with sustainability's conservation goals being in opposition to the adaptation goals of resilience. Two major reasons for these confusions are (1) both concepts are defined and used in many different ways to achieve a variety of political goals that may not reflect their core definitions, and (2) both concepts share similar goals and some common approaches, such as a focus on climate change and seeking a balance between humans and nature. Returning to the core definitions of conservation and adaptation helps to clarify their similarities and differences, as well as to articulate indicators for understanding how each applies to community tourism development. Indicators from research in rural Taiwan tourism communities were therefore based on responses to the questions: What does the community want to conserve and how do they want to do it (sustainability)? What do they want to change and how do they want to do it (resilience)? Preliminary results suggest that the new ideal community is the one that is both sustainable and resilient.
This empirical article is the first to consider tourism planning for tourism products based on intangible cultural heritage (ICH). It identifies two sets of factors that affect related tourism ...planning, the accessibility of ICH-based tourism products for visitor market(s), and the perceived appropriateness of ICH for use in tourism. The factors are derived using a qualitative, ethnographic method, implemented in the Qeshm Island Global Geopark in the South of Iran. Theoretical and practical implications address the requirements for tourism planners to extend the tourism planning arena, the integration of planning efforts for tourism and heritage preservation, and the need to involve stakeholders who co-create value from both tourism and heritage preservation perspectives. The impact of the article lies not only in its originality but also in its contributions to the literature on cultural (heritage) tourism as well as tourism planning.
World tourism cities perform multiple functions and exhibit various characteristics that influence tourism development within their boundaries. They are the main gateway for tourists visiting a ...country and their success has a direct impact on the visitor economy of that destination. London, the focus of this research, has been one of the world's top tourism cities for many years, and a key gateway for domestic and international visitors. But despite the important role tourism plays in the economy of the city, there is limited research on the development of this activity in the capital. Using London as an exploratory case study, this paper contributes to better understanding the challenges faced by policy makers when planning and managing tourism in world cities. The adopted research method offers the advantage of gathering insightful information using multiple data collection techniques. Examining this new evidence contributes to expanding the knowledge on the particularities of tourism development in one of the top world cities, which could help policy makers in their efforts to better prepare for potential challenges faced by these complex but important destinations.