Tourism Domain Research Articles

Embracing the paradox of customer experiences in the hospitality and tourism industry

AbstractThis paper aims to re‐evaluate the customer experience literature in the hospitality and tourism (H&T) domain by employing a paradox lens and constructing a model for future research direction and practitioners. Using two co‐citation analysis methods—a hierarchical cluster analysis and a multidimensional scaling analysis—to investigate 312 customer experience papers from the leading H&T journals with 22.124 citations over the 44‐year period (1987–2021), we identified five knowledge foundations that have made up the intellectual structure of customer experience in H&T: experiential consumption, authenticity, memorability, place branding, and service. This result reveals the dualistic representations of the paradoxical character of customer experience including authentic/fantastical, structured/unstructured, branded/ecological, and bubbled/exposed. Based on this finding, this study developed a framework for scholars and marketers to reveal different approaches to managing the tensions between paradoxes.

L’impact de la prise en charge des couches sémantiques sur la recherche d'information touristique : Cas des établissements et services touristiques digitalisés au Maroc

Tourism is an economic and a wealth-creating pillar that involves several volatile actors that are rich in dynamic, complex and heterogeneous information (Benckendorff et al., 2019). Therein, the continuous increase in the volume of information available on tourism offerings on the web has made user decision making a crucial task. As a result, the use of personalized and intelligent recommendation systems is essential for the satisfaction of tourism consumers (Grün et al., 2017). The objective of this article is to reveal the impact of the deployment of semantic techniques on the quality and accuracy of search results for tourism information, in the case of tourism in Morocco. This will be done through ontologies, which are a key component in the semantic web (Buhalis, 2020). To this end, we first presented the implementation of the semantic web and the use of ontologies in it. Then, we described the basic background of ontologies. Finally, we discussed the existing ontologies in the tourism domain in Morocco. The findings show that, the assumption of ontological conceptualization during the creation of digital content by tourism establishments, as a context-aware knowledge base, ensures the implementation of a semantic correspondence between users' preferences and the characteristics of tourism offers published, thus improving the quality and accuracy of the recommendations according to the user's context (Abbasi-Moud et al., 2022). Nevertheless, the evolution of tourism ontologies following changes in this sector is of major complexity. For this reason, the invention of an automatic approach, based on artificial intelligence techniques, NLP, Machine Learning or Deep Learning, can contribute to an evolutionary, reliable and easier maintenance of tourism ontologies, in the Moroccan context.

Multi-criteria Decision-making in the Tourism Domain: The Past, Present and Future of the Research Field

Multi-criteria Decision-making in the Tourism Domain: The Past, Present and Future of the Research Field

Rural tourism in Bali: towards a conflict-based tourism resource typology and management

ABSTRACT Although conflicts over resource utilisation have been widely discussed, tourism resource typology has not been explored clearly from a conflict-based perspective. Based on a case study of two Balinese villages, this research extends the previous literature by exploring tourism resource typology and management. The findings reveal four typologies with a two-dimensional matrix: activity and facility-based resources on one axis and localised and ubiquitous resources on another. The resource management model applies three steps: planning, regulating and implementing. The findings contribute to practical suggestions about rural tourism development within a strong spiritual context by emphasising spiritual resources and development. They also encourage a counterbalance towards spiritual development and suggest a triadic intermingling in resource management. Several directions for future research are suggested in the rural tourism domain, especially for developing countries.

Mapping embodiment across the nexus of gender, tourism, and entrepreneurship

Informed by critical perspectives on embodiment, our article demonstrates how gendered assumptions reproduce and sustain particular bodies. We investigate how bodies are constructed across academic and policy literatures within entrepreneurship and tourism domains. To do so, we conducted a reflexive thematic analysis of relevant entrepreneurship, tourism, and gender scholarship and mapped thematic embodied tensions. These five thematic tensions - visible vs invisible, active vs passive, desired vs problematic, labouring vs redundant, and insider vs outsider bodies – then guided our analysis of tourism and entrepreneurship policy within Wales. Our findings highlight implications of the limited exploration of embodiment in both academic and policy literatures. Moreover, we emphasise the risk that – separately and relationally – current perspectives are epistemically recursive through the reinforcement of idealised bodily subjects.

Service Re-Selection for Disruptive Events in Mobile Environments: A Heuristic Technique for Decision Support at Runtime

Modern service-based processes in mobile environments are highly complex due to the necessary spatial–temporal coordination between multiple participating users and the consideration of context information. Due to the dynamic nature of mobile environments, disruptive events occur at runtime, which require a re-selection of the planned service compositions respecting multiple users and context-awareness. Thereby, when re-selecting services the features performance, solution quality, solution robustness and alternative solutions are essential and contribute to the efficacy of service systems. This paper presents an optimization-based heuristic technique based on a stateful representation that uses a region-based approach to re-select services considering multiple users, context information and in particular disruptive events at runtime. The evaluation results, which are based on a real-world scenario from the tourism domain, show that the proposed heuristic is superior compared to competing artifacts.

#BoycottMurree campaign on twitter: Monitoring public response to the negative destination events during a crisis

Research on how the public responds and attributes their experiences to negative destination events on social media during a crisis is limited. This study fills the research gap by analyzing public response on social media to highly visible immoral destination events and service failures. A chain of negative events took place when a heavy snow storm hit a popular tourism destination (i.e., Murree); these events were extensively publicized on Twitter, and is used as a case. Applying text mining as a combination of topic modeling and sentiment analysis to 89,897 tweets in the dataset, the study analyzes temporal and topical dynamics of public discussion to investigate the useful insights of such data at each disaster stage based on the extended Fink's four-stages of crisis and disaster model. The study shows that the public response on twitter as a number of tweets is moderated by the series of negative events. Results reveal that the majority of tweets are posted in the chronic phase. The most popular tweeted themes are related to tourists' switching intentions – and voicing, portraying negative image of Murree as a tourism destination. Further, anger has been the most dominating emotion, following fear, sadness, and joy during the crisis life cycle. Moreover, the most negative emotions expressed in Tweets relate to topics: local and international sentiments about the incidents followed by the public emotions toward crisis and negative destination image. The findings offer practical implications in tourism, hospitality, and crisis management domains having the potential for future research, which will truly offer value addition for potential researchers.

Integrated use of KOS and deep learning for data set annotation in tourism domain

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology for the enrichment and tailoring of a knowledge organization system (KOS), in order to support the information extraction (IE) task for the analysis of documents in the tourism domain. In particular, the KOS is used to develop a named entity recognition (NER) system.Design/methodology/approachA method to improve and customize an available thesaurus by leveraging documents related to the tourism in Italy is firstly presented. Then, the obtained thesaurus is used to create an annotated NER corpus, exploiting both distant supervision, deep learning and a light human supervision.FindingsThe study shows that a customized KOS can effectively support IE tasks when applied to documents belonging to the same domains and types used for its construction. Moreover, it is very useful to support and ease the annotation task using the proposed methodology, allowing to annotate a corpus with a fraction of the effort required for a manual annotation.Originality/valueThe paper explores an alternative use of a KOS, proposing an innovative NER corpus annotation methodology. Moreover, the KOS and the annotated NER data set will be made publicly available.

An affective and posthumanist cosmopolitan hospitality

This conceptual article argues for revisiting and revising notions of cosmopolitanism and hospitality in light of the increasingly interconnected local to global domain of contemporary tourism. We briefly trace the contributions of three key philosophers in modernity who have contributed to the theorization of these concepts: Immanuel Kant, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. We then note some shortcomings of these approaches for contemporary problems of cosmopolitan hospitality and argue that Gilles Deleuze's conceptual apparatus enables a novel theorization to overcome the limitations of current approaches. This is done through an affective and posthumanist perspective, which introduces a new ethical understanding of cosmopolitan hospitality, dissolves problematic conceptual dualisms, and puts the focus on relational encounters, beyond spatiality.

A Novel Hybrid Recommender System for the Tourism Domain

In this paper, we develop a novel hybrid recommender system for the tourism domain, which combines (a) a Bayesian preferences elicitation component which operates by asking the user to rate generic images (corresponding to generic types of POIs) in order to build a user model and (b) a novel content-based (CB) recommendations component. The second component can in fact itself be considered a hybrid among two different CB algorithms, each exploiting one of two semantic similarity measures: a hierarchy-based and a non-hierarchy based one. The latter is the recently introduced Weighted Extended Jaccard Similarity (WEJS). We note that WEJS is employed for the first time within a recommender algorithm. We incorporate our algorithm within a real, already available at Google Play, tour-planning mobile application for short-term visitors of the popular touristic destination of Agios Nikolaos, Crete, Greece, and evaluate our approach via extensive simulations conducted on a real-world dataset constructed for the needs of the aforementioned mobile application. Our experiments verify that our algorithms result in effective personalized recommendations of touristic points of interest, while our final hybrid algorithm outperforms our exclusively content-based recommender algorithms in terms of recommendations accuracy. Specifically, when comparing the performance of several hybrid recommender system variants, we are able to come up with a “winner”: the most preferable variant of our hybrid recommender algorithm is one using a ⟨four elicitation slates, six shown images per slate⟩ pair as input to its Bayesian elicitation component. This variant combines increased precision performance with a lightweight preferences elicitation process.

What if we could travel without passport? First sight to blockchain-based identity management in tourism

ABSTRACT Blockchain technology, as a distributed digital ledger, enables users to control their credentials without being breached by third parties. From a tourism perspective, it allows tourists to pass through checkpoints and/or bookings without waiting and having to go through third-party transactions. Hence, this paper aims to discuss traditional identity management (IdM) system challenges and what blockchain might offer as a counterpoint to conventional travel experiences within the tourism domain. We have tried to identify challenges, issues, and implementation areas of IdM in the tourism industry domain.

Rethinking Metaverse Tourism: A Taxonomy and an Agenda for Future Research

The metaverse is expected to be a game changer that starts a new epoch for digital commons and content creation in all aspects of tourism. Both opportunities and challenges will ensue. Current tourism research remains minimal with regard to this “next generation of the Internet,” and the logic of its applications in tourism is still unknown. The metaverse does not only enhance customer experiences; it also, as reality and virtuality converge, changes the paradigms, norms, rules, and the way we define experiences. To fill this gap, in this conceptual paper we scrutinize the past, present, and future of the metaverse, with a focus on the tourism domain. In particular, this research sorts out the key technologies of metaverse applications and pioneers the exploration of virtuality–reality amalgamation by theorizing a “4Is” taxonomy of metaverse tourism: imitation, intensification, interaction, and integration. An agenda is set for future research.

Gen Z perceptions of sustainable tourism: a scale development study

ABSTRACT In pursuit of sustainable tourism, it is vital to measure and track any progress towards this desired outcome. Over the past 30 years, academic research upon sustainable tourism has been developed substantially, focusing on the balance of economic, environment and social-cultural elements, yet the techniques used are frequently based upon an overly simplified perspective. This research focused upon Gen Z (those born after 1997) and consists of three studies: Study 1: Mapping the domain of sustainable tourism using concept mapping with 28 Malaysian participants and 82 statements derived from indicator frameworks. Study 2: Scale item refinement using exploratory factor analysis from 231 Malaysian Gen Z within the normative [importance] domain. Finally, Study 3: Confirmation and application using confirmatory composite analysis evaluated the derived measurement instrument cross-nationally between 177 Malaysian and 182 British Gen Z in both the normative domain and the descriptive [applied] domain. The results of the study produce a seventeen-item instrument comprising four factors: Social, Cultural, Environmental Protection and Destination Management. These results support contemporary theoretical perspectives with only small variations, but this better reflects the dynamics of the tourist industry.

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS’ NEEDS BETWEEN EFFICIENCY AND PROFICIENCY: TOURIST AGENTS AS A CASE STUDY

Nowadays, the fact of learning English becomes an urgent linguistic need that all the professionals and mid-professionals in the domain of tourism are striving to accomplish due to the requirements of their jobs in the light of the pace of life that they witnessing and which tends towards promptness and rapidity in everything. The conducted survey that was adopted in this investigation shows to what extent the majority of the informants prefer to learn basic English in a short span of time instead of learning it proficiently in a long period of time, which means that they prefer to sacrifice proficiency for the sake of time. Hence, our query is related to the quality of the learned product and whether it satisfies the learners’ needs in terms of acceleration in the absence of any comprehensive model of language learning in a teaching context or not. This new comprehensive model should combine two extremely significant elements, the factor of time and the factor of proficiency in such a way as to take the full advantage of the notion of time in terms of learning and the use of the resources and energy adequately.

Proposing a visualized comparative review analysis model on tourism domain using Naïve Bayes classifier

This study, using the Naïve Bayes classifier, proposes a new descriptive model for conducting a comparative review analysis on the tourism domain. The proposed model seeks to improve the understanding of tourists' experiences by visually representing their opinions between various tourist destinations. The model predicts the sentiment of tourist reviews using the Naive Bayes classifier, which is then used to generate visualizations that facilitate comparative analysis. The comparison takes two tourism sites as experimental examples. The results, in terms of accuracy, show 80% and 64% for the first and the second site respectively. The study discusses the model's implementation, effectiveness, and potential applications in the tourism industry. The findings of the study suggest that the proposed model can provide valuable insights into tourist experiences and help tourism stakeholders, such as the managements of tourism sites, the future or soon coming tourists to make informed decisions based on comparative analysis.

Data-Driven Methodology for Knowledge Graph Generation Within the Tourism Domain

Data-Driven Methodology for Knowledge Graph Generation Within the Tourism Domain

POTENTIAL OF CREATIVE TOURISM DEVELOPMENT IN MONTENEGRO AND ITS BENEFITS TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF DESTINATION

The results of global market research have long been pointing to the fact that the importance of the creative economy is constantly increasing, with notable synergies with tourism appearing as a side effect, offering significant potential for increasing demand and developing new products, experiences and markets. This process results in a transition from conventional models of cultural tourism to new models based on intangible culture and contemporary creativity, interaction with the local population and active contribution to the sustainable development of visiting environment. All of the above are determinants of creative tourism, which UNESCO defined in 2006 as an engaged and unique tourist experience, with active learning about art, heritage or the special character of a place and establishing a connection with those who live there and create that culture of life. Bearing in mind the increasing demand in the domain of creative tourism, as well as the fact that significant results have been achieved in the region of southern Europe in the design and planning of creative and authentic tourist contents and products, the question arises as to whether Montenegro has the prerequisites for the development of this specific model of tourism and whether it has the potential to position itself on the tourist market as an attractive destination for creative tourists. The aim of this research is to explain in more detail what is meant by creative tourism, how it can impact the sustainable development of the destination and to analyze the possibilities of developing creative tourism in Montenegro, taking into account current tourism indicators and tourism development strategy.

Named entity recognition in Odia language: a rule-based approach

NLP can be defined as a process of automatic handling of human spoken languages by computers. NLP is a vast research field linked to multiple areas like artificial intelligence, machine translation, information retrieval etc. NER is an information extraction (IE) process concerned with extracting named entities (NE) from raw data and categorising these NEs into some predefined classes. The process of recognising and extracting NEs from unstructured corpus or data is an essential task for solving different complications in various research fields such as, question answering, summarisation system, information extraction, machine learning, semantic web search, bio-informatics, video annotation and many more. For this research work a classical methodology, i.e., rule-based approach is used to construct a system for automatic identification of NEs from tourism domain data. The system considers words with their repetition and without their repetition and acquires 83% and 71% accuracy respectively.

A decade of ‘blue tourism’ sustainability research: Exploring the impact of cruise tourism on coastal areas

AbstractCruise tourism research has developed exponentially during the past decades. Global tourism activity in general and cruises in particular are concentrated in coastal areas and represent a dominant part of the so-called ‘blue economy’. Within this context, the public debate surrounding the impact of cruise tourism on port communities reflects a narrative of unsustainable growth, environmental pollution and negative globalisation-related symbolism. Yet, the relatively small size of the cruise sector and the over-focus on emissions arguably misrepresents the overall impact and potential of this tourism domain for portside communities, economies and ecosystems. Cruise-related scientific research, as probably expected, offers a much more refined and holistic picture, transcending the somewhat populist public debate on this matter. Based on a systematic literature review examining cruise-related papers published between 1983 and 2009, Papathanassis and Beckmann (2011)Annals of Tourism Research38(1), 153–174, identified 145 papers, which were subsequently subjected to a metadata- and a thematic-analysis. Approximately, a quarter of them addressed the environmental-, social- and economic impacts of cruising on coastal regions. A decade later, and following an analogous methodological approach, a total of 305 cruise research papers, published between 2012 and 2022, yielded 161 relevant papers, subjected to the same coding scheme and thematically compared to previous findings. The subsequent thematic analysis, revealed a comprehensive set of issues, opportunities and challenges cruise tourism poses to coastal areas. Following a critical discussion of past developments and their trajectory, a future research and action agenda is proposed.

A Domain Specific Parallel Corpus and Enhanced English-Assamese Neural Machine Translation

Machine translation deals with automatic translation from one natural language to another. Neural machine translation is a widely accepted technique of the corpus-based machine translation approach. However, an adequate amount of training data is required, and there is a need for the domain-wise parallel corpus to improve translational performance that shows translational coverages in various domains. In this work, a domain-specific parallel corpus is prepared that includes different domain coverages, namely, Agriculture, Government Office, Judiciary, Social Media, Tourism, COVID-19, Sports, and Literature domains for low-resource English-Assamese pair translation. Moreover, we have tackled data scarcity and word-order divergence problems via data augmentation and prior alignment concept. Also, we have contributed Assamese pre-trained LM, Assamese word-embeddings by utilizing Assamese monolingual data, and a bilingual dictionary-based post-processing step to enhance transformer-based neural machine translation. We have achieved state-of-the-art results for both forward (English-to-Assamese) and backward (Assamese-to-English) directions of translation.