Australian Tourism Research Articles

Inclusion of people with disability (PWD) in the tourism workforce: a critical discourse analysis of policies and plans

Purpose This paper aims to critically examine the discourse on the disability workforce in Australian tourism policy and planning documents. Design/methodology/approach This research draws on a database of 490 Australian tourism policy and planning documents, across national, state, regional and local levels of governments, destination management organisations and peak industry bodies, to systematically examine the issues pertaining to disability workforce over the ten-year policy cycle (2013–2023), through critical discourse analysis. Findings Analysis revealed 20 of the existing 490 documents had mentions of the inclusion of people with disability (PWD) in the tourism workforce. Through critical discourse analysis, the nuances of political attitudes are evident. Tourism policies tend to exert a cautious approach towards the inclusion of PWD employment. PWD do not have a strong voice when it comes to the formation of tourism policy, especially not as members of the tourism workforce. Practical implications This research underscores an emerging call for the government’s commitment to considering the underrepresented social group of PWD in the tourism workforce. By shedding light on critical discourse analysis of the disability workforce, tourism scholars and practitioners understand the current challenges and explore opportunities to implement tangible actions for an inclusive work environment for all. Originality/value The research is novel and innovative as it critically examines the discourse of the disability workforce in the tourism sector through an institutional theory perspective. The limited emphasis of government policies on the disability workforce may result in missed opportunities to encourage meaningful employment engagement of PWD in tourism organisations. Consequently, this research contributes a tripartite model of policy recommendations that explicitly articulates the mechanisms for change that are tailored to tourism workforce and advocates for the active voices of PWD community in the policy formation process.

Australian Tourist Flow: A Gravity Model Approach

Australian Tourist Flow: A Gravity Model Approach

A Convenient Truth? Austrian Tourism and Nation Brand in the United States

A Convenient Truth? Austrian Tourism and Nation Brand in the United States

Exploring the value of holiday preferences and routine activities for understanding tourist victimisation while on holiday

AbstractCrime risk can affect tourists’ choices of holiday destination, accommodation, and activities. However, victimisation of tourists has received limited attention in existing studies. This paper integrates tourists’ holiday preferences with lifestyles and routine activities explanations to examine the relationship between tourism and victimisation. Using a sample of Australian tourists who travelled to Bali or the British Isles (N = 1027), we demonstrate the usefulness of this integrated approach in understanding the risk of theft while on holiday. We found that tourists aspiring to be adventurous, but opting for pre-arranged package holidays and spending most of their time with other tourists, were most vulnerable to theft from their person. The findings can help ensure that security measures target those who will benefit it the most.

Study on Australian Working Holiday Experience, Place Attachment, Revisit Behavior, and Spending Power

Abstract This study aimed to explore the effects of Australian working holiday experiences on place attachment, repeat visitation behavior, and consumption. Based on social exchange theory, place attachment theory, and destination image theory, five research hypotheses were proposed. A total of 462 valid questionnaires were collected and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. The empirical results indicated that Australian working holiday experiences have a significant positive impact on place dependence and place identity. In addition, place dependence and place identity have a significant positive impact on repeat visitation behavior, and repeat visitation behavior has a positive impact on consumption. The findings of this study provide valuable insights for the Australian government and tourism industry to enhance the place attachment and identity of working holidaymakers, thus increasing their intention to revisit and consumption. Therefore, the Taiwan youth working holiday program in Australia has a substantial contribution to the development of Australian tourism economy. JEL classification numbers: Z30; Z32. Keywords: Australian working holiday experiences, Place attachment, Revisiting behavior, Spending power.

Developing a weighted model to measure knowledge diffusion in a tourism destination network

ABSTRACT Efficient knowledge transfer enhances tourism destination competitiveness. Multiple factors, however, affect knowledge transfer, making it a complex process to quantify. To address this complexity, we developed a quantitative tool by integrating a diffusion model with the major antecedents of knowledge transfer identified in the knowledge management literature. We applied this model in the Western Australian tourism industry and demonstrated its practicality. The proposed model provides a quantitative tool for destination management organizations to monitor, assess and improve the efficiency of knowledge diffusion within their tourism destinations. Such improved knowledge diffusion is critical in strengthening a destination's innovative capabilities and competitiveness.

‘We Come Here and Play Music Like Hell’: The Royal Papuan Constabulary Band’s 1945 Australian ‘Victory Loan’ Tour

The March 1945 Australian tour of the Royal Papuan Constabulary (RPC) Band offered Australians a vignette of Papuans’ progress since the Australian ‘civilising’ mandate began in 1906. After recounting the RPC Band’s origins and wartime propaganda role, this article examines the sponsors’ framing of the tour, the public’s responses to the visitors, and the outcomes of the trip for the musicians. The tour challenged Australians to rethink their sentimental appreciation of Papuans as ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels’, while press reportage described both what was strange (language, recreation, diet, sleeping habits) and what was familiar (discipline, musical skill) about the visiting Papuans. Colonialist attitudes regarding race relations were also challenged during the tour. The RPC tour gave Papua New Guineans and Australians an unusual opportunity to see each other in a different light.

How is the Australian tourism and hospitality curriculum and assessment quality framework perceived elsewhere? A Taiwanese case study

ABSTRACT External evaluations of curriculum and assessment design have received increasing attention in higher education. However, cross-border evaluations of programs have not yet caught up with the more significant push toward the internationalisation of global partnerships. Addressing this knowledge gap, the motivation of this study is to explore how the Australian tourism and hospitality curriculum and assessment framework is perceived in Taiwan. However, few institutions in Taiwan have embarked on this due to two main factors – lack of nationwide compliance and the perceived high-power distance that exists between academic staff of various ranks (e.g. professor vs. assistant professor). These outcomes contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the contextual differences that need to be addressed before adopting cross-national forms of external referencing involving curriculum and assessments. Insights from three focus groups and seven in-depth interviews with Taiwanese academics offer some strategies to introduce effective external evaluation outcomes.

Employment Outcomes for Australian Tourism and Hospitality VET Graduates During the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted employment, education, and the vocational education and training (VET) sector across the worldwide economy. This study examines the impact of the pandemic on VET enrollment figures and employment outcomes for graduates in the travel and tourism industry in Australia using data from the Student Outcome Surveys conducted from 2018 to 2021. We seek to determine if the pandemic had a negative impact on enrollment and post-VET employment outcomes in the tourism and hospitality sector. The findings suggest that employment outcomes after training, tourism and hospitality graduates experienced a transitory decline in job prospects particularly during 2020 but recovered substantially during 2021. In the case of hospitality graduates, the probability of employment in 2021 exceeded pre-pandemic levels. We conclude that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on VET enrollments and employment outcomes in the tourism and hospitality sector have been less devastating than public perception would suggest.

Does it matter to have rapport and social interaction on a group tour?

With rapport building growing in significance, this investigation of its role in attitude and behavioural intention in the group tour context used a multi-methods approach (a video experiment, a photo experiment and a survey). Group attentiveness was also examined as a moderator in the attitude–behavioural intention relationship. Three studies were conducted on the Australian tourism industry in which group tours are common. The first study (a video experiment) and the second study (a photo experiment) were conducted with participants living in Canberra, Australia, while the third survey-based study was conducted on domestic tourists visiting anywhere in Australia on a group tour for the purpose of generalisation. Results from the partial least squares method confirmed the crucial role of rapport in developing a positive attitude and behavioural intention, with the combined effect of rapport and social interaction higher than their individual impacts. Group attentiveness was also found to be a significant moderator.

The effects of past and expected experiences on revisit intention: a study of Australian and Indonesian tourists

PurposeThis study aims to better understand tourists’ revisit intention from their perspectives of past and expected experience and to investigate whether the formation of revisit intention differs between tourists from different nationalities.Design/methodology/approachThe sample consisted of 250 Indonesian tourists who have visited Australia and 275 Australian tourists who have visited Indonesia. The data were analysed by conducting structural equation modelling and multi-group analysis with group comparisons.FindingsIndonesian tourists’ intention to revisit Australia was influenced by past feeling experience and expected experience, while Australian tourists’ intention to revisit Indonesia was influenced by past feeling and relating experiences and expected experience. Both samples differ significantly in terms of relations between experiences and revisit intention. The relationship between past thinking experience and revisit intention was positive for Indonesians but negative for Australians. The relationship between past relating and expected experience was positive for Australians but negative for Indonesians. In addition, the influence of expected experience on revisit intention was stronger for Australian than Indonesian tourists.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study, for the first time, enriches tourism literature in understanding revisit intention by investigating revisit intention in relation to both past and expected experiences, along with examining nationality differences in the revisit intention formation.

Cross-cultural validation of the Chinese cultural value scale in tourism

This study aims to validate the Chinese Cultural Value Scale in Tourism (CCV-T) across cultures, using a sample of 405 Australian tourists. Through the application of Confirmatory Composite Analysis (CCA) within Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM), the study demonstrates that the CCV-T scale exhibits excellent measurement qualities, including indicator reliability, construct reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and nomological validity. The CCV-T scale comprises five dimensions: Life and Leisure Enjoyment (LLE), Filial Piety and Relationship (FPR), Self-fulfilment, Righteousness, and Humanity, consisting of 17 measurement items. The findings indicate that this scale is suitable for use with Australian tourists, representing a Western cultural context. Moreover, the CCV-T scale demonstrates its potential as a universal tool for measuring cultural values in tourism, applicable across various cultural and national contexts. This makes it a valuable instrument for future cross-cultural studies focusing on cultural values within the realm of tourism. This study makes a significant contribution to the field of cultural value studies in tourism by establishing a scale that is valid across different cultures. Industry professionals and policymakers can utilize this scale and its dimensions for purposes such as tourism product development and policy creation.

Cross-temporal probabilistic forecast reconciliation: Methodological and practical issues

Forecast reconciliation is a post-forecasting process that involves transforming a set of incoherent forecasts into coherent forecasts which satisfy a given set of linear constraints for a multivariate time series. In this paper, we extend the current state-of-the-art cross-sectional probabilistic forecast reconciliation approach to encompass a cross-temporal framework, where temporal constraints are also applied. Our proposed methodology employs both parametric Gaussian and non-parametric bootstrap approaches to draw samples from an incoherent cross-temporal distribution. To improve the estimation of the forecast error covariance matrix, we propose using multi-step residuals, especially in the time dimension where the usual one-step residuals fail. To address high-dimensionality issues, we present four alternatives for the covariance matrix, where we exploit the two-fold nature (cross-sectional and temporal) of the cross-temporal structure, and introduce the idea of overlapping residuals. We assess the effectiveness of the proposed cross-temporal reconciliation approaches through a simulation study that investigates their theoretical and empirical properties and two forecasting experiments, using the Australian GDP and the Australian Tourism Demand datasets. For both applications, the optimal cross-temporal reconciliation approaches significantly outperform the incoherent base forecasts in terms of the continuous ranked probability score and the energy score. Overall, the results highlight the potential of the proposed methods to improve the accuracy of probabilistic forecasts and to address the challenge of integrating disparate scenarios while coherently taking into account short-term operational, medium-term tactical, and long-term strategic planning.

Air travel and persuasive climate communications

This study explores whether air travel attitudes can be changed through persuasive climate change communications. A 3 x 2 experimental design was utilized to test the impact of climate-framed messages on Australian tourists’ attitudes towards leisure air travel. The manipulations were persuasive advertisements framed around attitude functions, containing either central or peripheral message cues. The results indicate that utilitarian and value-expressive messages containing central arguments were most impactful. Climate concern and objective knowledge also served critical roles in message elaboration. Our results indicate that persuasive climate communications are integral in changing air travel attitudes and overcoming moral disengagement. Such messages targeting consumers therefore play an essential role in transitioning to lower carbon mobilities.

The Czech Republic and Austrian Tourism in Scope of German Visitors

Tourism demand modelling is one of the most studied areas in tourism economics, particularly focused on time series and econometric research. In this study, directly interpretable one-equation techniques are utilised, i.e. the autoregressive distributed lag model (ADLM) and the derived error correction model (ECM). To complement the sharing of information and habits in tourism, we apply regressors derived from wages, general prices, and dummies. For the Czech and Austrian data, short- as well as long-run sets of outputs act differently, regarding the specific situation. Such information can straightforwardly be applied to the effective planning of various activities covering the public and private sectors. The results are completed by the standard cointegration testing procedure and residual analysis.

Visitors’ satisfaction towards indoor environmental quality in Australian hotels and serviced apartments

Tourism is Australia’s fourth-largest exporting sector, yet insufficient research has been done on how satisfied guests are with the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) of Australian guest homes. This project utilised web-mining, natural language processing and aspect-based sentiment analysis to analyse visitors’ IEQ satisfaction in Australian tourist accommodations across ten tourism cities. By analysing 543,213 IEQ-related reviews from 1397 hotels and serviced apartments with two-stars and above at the Booking.com, guests’ text comments were classified by semi-supervised word-embedding based models into nine IEQ dimensions. Using a cutting-edge custom-trained bidirectional context-aware deep sequence model, sentiment scores were computed to estimate the degree of IEQ satisfaction. Results showed that guests were most dissatisfied with facilities, cleanliness and maintenance, and acoustics. IEQ dissatisfaction reduced as the buildings’ star ratings rose, except for thermal, lighting, exterior view, and layout and design dimensions. There was a small effect of seasonal fluctuations on the levels of dissatisfaction with thermal conditions, indoor air quality, and cleanliness and maintenance. All IEQ dimensions, excluding indoor air quality, showed small effects on the percentage of dissatisfied visitors across climate zones. During the pandemic, there was a significant decline in the guests’ evaluation scores. Notwithstanding, the IEQ satisfaction was scarcely affected by COVID-19, except for indoor air quality, cleanliness and maintenance, and facilities. This study’s findings can serve as a rationale for the Australian hospitality industry to enhance visitor satisfaction.

Identifying Risks for Overseas-Born Beachgoers and Suggesting Future Preventative Strategies: A Qualitative Study Based on Interviews with 20 Lifesavers from Australian Tourist Beaches

While Australia sees a high proportion of coastal drownings involving overseas-born beachgoers every year, it should not be forgotten that professional lifeguards and surf lifesavers carry out about 11,000 rescues and 1,800,000 preventative actions every year. Given these figures, lifeguards and surf lifesavers would be assumed to have ways of identifying overseas-born beachgoers who are not familiar with Australian beaches and to take special precautions in relation to them. This study aims to explore the ways by which surf lifesavers are able to identify overseas-born beachgoers who have no or little understanding of Australian beaches, and identify the surf lifesavers??? perceptions as to the effectiveness of currently available public beach safety signage, as well as educational messages communicated by the popular TV show, Bondi Rescue. One-on-one in-depth interviews were carried out with 20 lifesavers from three popular Australian tourist beaches???Bondi and Tamarama beaches in Sydney, and Glenelg beach in Adelaide. The semistructured interviews were conducted using a fixed list of questions, and a code analysis was conducted employing the program NVivo 12 (version 12.70). Based on the interview data, surf lifesavers identified a number of characteristics that suggested a lack of familiarity with Australian beaches and differentiated overseas-born beachgoers from regular beachgoers, including wearing jeans near water, particular ways of approaching the water, and the use of inflatable toys. More than half of the lifesavers said that in general beachgoers were more likely to swim outside the flags, but some said that beachgoers stay between the flags because professional lifeguards and surf lifesavers enforce this regulation. Many lifesavers cast doubts on the effectiveness of public signage, and a majority singled out the popular TV show Bondi Rescue as a powerful tool for revealing the real dangers of Australian beaches. One interview, however, warned that Bondi Rescue might lead to the misunderstanding that ???all??? Australian beaches are patrolled and, therefore, ???safe.??? It is important to address safety issues such as the fact that wearing heavy clothing and using inflatable toys can cause problems on Australian beaches with dangerous waves and rip currents. Effective ways of delivering safety messages to the public, especially to overseas-born beachgoers, still need to be developed.

Econometric Forecasting of Tourist Arrivals Using Bayesian Structural Time‐Series*

This article introduces the Bayesian structural time series (BSTS) as a potential tool for forecasting in the tourism literature. Using data on Australian tourist arrivals in New Zealand, the forecasting accuracy of the estimated model is evaluated using a fixed partitioning approach. The MAPE of the fitted model is 3.11 per cent for the validation stage and 2.75 per cent for the test stage. The BSTS outperforms two other competing models both in the validation and test stage. In addition to forecasting, BSTS also estimates the trend, trend slope, and seasonality that change over time.

Colonial Mobility and the Cultural Replication of British Music: Granville Bantock’s Australian Tour, 1938–1939

ABSTRACT Legions of foreign musicians have toured Australia in an effort to transplant old musical cultures. One such tour was undertaken by Granville Bantock in late 1938 to further the examinations business of Trinity College of Music, London. As argued in this article, however, there was more to his visit than meets the eye: it was an attempt by Bantock to secure new audiences for his music. The press’s role in this tour was marked by fawning journalists reporting on the composer’s endorsement of local music-making as evidence of Australia’s musical maturity. Bantock’s music was celebrated by the press except for one journalist, who condemned his peddling of old-fashioned music in a modern Australia. Although Bantock’s visit to Australia in late 1938 was designed to promote Trinity College, it was in fact an exercise in cultural mobility, and the replication of a certain style of British music that invoked narratives concerning the cultural cringe in which Bantock, and most of the press, were complicit.

Planning Queen Elizabeth II’s Visit to Bondi Beach in 1954

Planning Queen Elizabeth II’s Visit to Bondi Beach in 1954