•Slavery heritage tourism narratives stimulate plural public memories of the past.•The embodied absence of the past is physical presence yet narrative absence.•European cities are viable sites for ...studying slavery heritage tourism.•Guided tours and guidebooks are tools to subvert authorised heritage narratives.•Empirical and conceptual innovation is needed in slavery heritage tourism research.
Throughout my professional life I was an academic researcher who had a successful career in developmental biology. When I started the process of closing my lab and retiring from the University, I ...came to the conclusion that I wanted to do something completely different. I trained for and became a docent at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. I apply the skills I acquired as a scientist on a regular basis in my work at the museum, often in unexpected ways. In this article, I discuss my journey from the lab to the museum and what I learned along the way.
Guided bicycle tours are often overlooked in the bicycle-tourism literature. This study addresses that gap by developing an Integrated Framework for Guided Bicycle Tours (IFGBT), which takes account ...of the complex interplay of various temporal and contextual factors to provide a holistic understanding of guided bicycle-tour participants’ satisfaction. To establish the IFGBT, this study employed a text-mining approach on a dataset comprising 151,654 online reviews from 100 guided bicycle tours conducted in 36 countries between 2006 and 2022. The results suggest three key determinants of satisfaction: the characteristics of the tour participants, the tour quality, and the resources of the destination. The study also highlights temporal factors, such as seasonality, and COVID-19, as complex determinants of satisfaction. The pandemic unexpectedly boosted satisfaction due to reduced tourism, especially in peak seasons. Social interactions, guide competencies, and local regulations also emerged as significant influencers on satisfaction levels.
This paper examines the praxeology of informal educational practices (i.e. how participants produce setting-specific practices to make a tour happen) in the Geophysical and Astronomical Observatory ...of the University of Coimbra through close analysis of a video-recorded excerpt of a guided tour. Guided visits in informal science settings are important educational events that take place every day in many institutions. Even so, research addressing these activities in detail remains scarce. It is assumed that tours are "structured" interactions, having a stable format in which participants follow predetermined actions. Nonetheless, the results of this study show that the guided tour observed here is highly interactive, with educational practices being co-accomplished by participants (guides and students) with different levels of astronomical expertise. The present study aims to contribute to our understanding of guided tours, and in so doing shows the importance of methods for data analysis sensitive to naturally occurring events.
For micro-tourism firms, customers are a readily-accessible and highly important knowledge source that often remains unutilised. This study explores firm–customer encounters along the customer ...journey as learning opportunities. Based on data collected through participant observations, interviews and a review of user-generated content, this case study provides an in-depth look into the customer journey, with a Swedish micro-tourism firm. The findings suggest that the possibility to generate knowledge about experiential purposes is conditioned by the firm's ability to bestow encounters with an experience-like quality and promote the customers' transformation into participants. This is facilitated by involving customers, adopting an experiential discourse and utilising in-situ supporting moments to socialise. Firms can also learn about customers' subjective perception of value from user-generated content. The study concludes that in the context of learning from customers, small size provides micro-tourism firms with an opportunity to engage in personal relationships with their customers.
•In-situ supporting moments provide applicable opportunities to source customer knowledge.•Small Firms should adopt a discourse that focuses on imagining and fulfilment.•The ability to involve customers is key to impart encounters with an experience-like quality.•In firm–customer encounters, customers' assumed role influences what firms could learn from them.•UGC provides an opportunity to learn about customers' different value perceptions.
This research explores the travellers’ experience of daily local-guided shopping tours offered in a sharing economy platform-Withlocals using a netnography approach. Reviews of travellers ...participating in daily local-guided shopping tours in different destinations were gathered, and their content was analysed. As a result, seven main components of experiences of daily-local guided shopping tours revealed: guide, shopping companion, learning, hedonic experience, memorable experience, local interaction, and shop characteristics. The study substantially contributes to the shopping experience and sharing economy literature by providing a deep understanding of travellers’ shopping experiences in the local guided tours organised through sharing economy platforms.
Die Pandemie hat Kultureinrichtungen in besonderem Maß gefordert: Das in vielen Institutionen in unterschiedlichen Ausprägungen vorhandene digitale Angebot wurde mit der behördlich verordneten ...Schließung der musealen Einrichtungen und Bibliotheken zu einem „must have“, um einerseits nicht den Kontakt zu den Besucher:innen zu verlieren und andererseits nicht als Verlierer in der modernen Museums- u. Bibliothekslandschaft abgestempelt zu werden. Schnell hatten sich – meist kostenlose – Online-Führungen durch Dauer- oder Sonderausstellungen sowie Webinare zur Bibliotheksnutzung als obligatorisches Angebot etabliert. Mit der Rückkehr zum regulären Betrieb steht diese Form der digitalen Kulturvermittlung nun am Prüfstand: Ist sie gekommen, um zu bleiben oder ist/war sie nur Ersatz für ein Erlebnis, das online in dieser Form nie vermittelbar ist?
PurposeThis study aims to understand the components of the street food experiences of the local-guided tour in the meal-sharing economy based on the online reviews of tourists who experienced a ...meal-sharing activity with a local guide in Bangkok.Design/methodology/approachBased on the qualitative approach, this study involved a content analysis of 384 narratives on Withlocals.FindingsThe study identified five components that embrace the street food experience: a local guide’s attributes, perceived food authenticity, local culture, perceived hygiene or cleanliness. Results also revealed that the Thai street foods are unique and authentic and can reach this experience level through a local guide.Originality/valueAlthough the importance of international travellers' street food experiences and the popularity of the meal-sharing economy platforms are rapidly growing, there is no study which had combined both of these phenomena together to date. It is the first attempt to reveal the components of street food experiences in a meal-sharing platform.
This article provides an analysis on how disruptive innovation is spurred by the dynamics of digital and analogue networks in the sharing economy. The analysis builds on a free guided-tour company in ...Copenhagen. Data is collected in a bottom-up reiterative process, drawing on theories on disruptive innovation and network theory. Between 2013 and 2016, one of the free tour companies in Copenhagen was followed by means of participant observations, interviews with tour guides and interpretation of online documents. Results show that free guided tours based on tips alone and orchestrated within the frame of the sharing economy are not merely a product innovation. More importantly, they entail disruptive market innovations that circumvent traditional industry structures and ultimately produce disruptive organizational innovations where trust in network is the crux. Free guided-tour companies operate as communitarian organizations in extractive business models, and they are game changers in the field of guided tours, and ultimately in the field of tourism.
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