Tourism Governance Research Articles

An Assessment of Collaborative Governance in a Network for Sustainable Tourism: The Case of RedeTuris

This article presents a case study of a cross-sectoral organizational network created to promote sustainable tourism in Rio de Janeiro. We briefly introduce the topics of collaborative governance and sustainable tourism, and then describe the focal network and the methods used for the research. Findings are discussed in terms of three themes: 1) key elements of collaborative governance; 2) aspects of the network formation and development process; and 3) features of the Brazilian context that may influence the network's likelihood of success. We conclude with a comment on the role of public managers in a network such as this.

Climate change mitigation among accommodation providers in the South West of England: Comparisons between members and non-members of networks

Networks are a well-established feature in contemporary tourism governance and management. The aim of this article is to examine the extent to which there are differences among members and non-members of tourism networks in their efforts to introduce measures to mitigate the effects of climate change in their operations. Among accommodation providers in the South West of England, there is no significant difference between members and non-members of networks in the modest levels of innovation they have introduced. Possible reasons for the lack of difference are identified including the nature of the networks and the way in which knowledge is exchanged and retained among businesses. The article argues that, while formal networks still represent an important platform to promote climate change mitigation, their importance may also be in knowledge spillovers and boundary spanning behaviours ‘beyond the network’.

Managing local tourism: Building sustainable tourism management practices across local government divides

Increasingly, the challenge for local government in managing tourism is not in preparing plans and policies or undertaking new initiatives but in collaborating across internal organisational silos and across artificial administrative boundaries to provide a more integrated approach. The Managing Local Government Master Class was a programme designed to develop a ‘joined-up’ integrated approach to local government tourism management. This article outlines the Master Class approach within the increasingly complex context facing Australian local governments, and discusses two applications in Northern Rivers, NSW and Perth's Eastern Metropolitan Region. It was found that while the Master Class offers a mechanism to increase collaboration and leverage the benefits of working more effectively within and across councils, there remain political and administrative impediments to improved collaboration.

Cruise tourism in polar regions: promoting environmental and social sustainability?

Foreword Norman Douglas & Ngaire Douglas. 1. Setting the Scene: Polar Cruise Tourism in the 21st Century. Part 1: Market Dimensions. 2. Polar Yacht Cruising. 3. Cruising to the North Pole aboard a Nuclear Icebreaker. 4. Selling the Adventure of a Lifetime: An Ethnographic Report on Cruising in the Antarctic. Part 2: Human Dimensions. 5. Cruises and Bruises: Safety, Security, and Social Issues on Polar Cruises. 6. Exploring the Ethical Standards of Alaska Cruise Ship Tourists and the Role they Inadvertently Play in the Unsustainable Practices of the Cruise Ship Industry. 7. Students on Ice - Learning in the Greatest Classrooms on Earth. Part 3: Environmental Dimensions. 8. Environmental Impacts of Polar Cruises. 9. Monitoring Patterns of Cruise Tourism across Arctic Canada 10. Climate Change and its Implications for Cruise Tourism in the Polar Regions. Part 4: Policy and Governance Dimensions. 11. Stakeholder Perspectives on the Governance of Antarctic Cruise Tourism. 12. Port Readiness Planning in the Arctic: Building Community Support. 13. Beyond the Cruise: Navigating Sustainable Policy and Practice in Alaska's Inland Passage. Part 5: Conclusions. 14. Moving Forward. Index.

A framework of Collaborative Commerce and internet organisation business model innovation in the tourism industry: the case study of the Veterans Affairs Commission in Taiwan

The purpose of this study is to improve the website linking access of the government's tourism information portal. Through the Extra-Web Organisation (EWO) framework of the cross-website operations, the collaborative commerce led to the top-down and bottom-up modelling can be achieved. In accordance with the characteristics of the tourism, it also addresses three different scales EWO business models and eight farms case of Veterans Affairs Commission in Taiwan to explore the draft framework and to verify the managerial effects for the collaborative operation. The result of this paper provides the government agencies with the references for the development of tourism organisation.

Tourism Policies and Cross-Country Growth: A Disaggregated Analysis

Using recent cross-country data for over a hundred nations, this paper examines the effects of various disaggregated tourism policy measures on economic growth. Based on standard growth theory, the model uniquely incorporates tourism variables disaggregated across various dimensions of tourism policy, tourism infrastructure and human resources. Both standard growth models and endogenous growth models are estimated. The authors find that, among a wide set of tourism policies, strengthened tourism safety regulations and government prioritization of the tourism industry boost economic growth, while some tourism initiatives and infrastructure investments seem to have perverse growth effects. All else being equal, economic growth is higher in transition nations.

A historical analysis of tourism policy implementation by local government

Local government is critical to tourism policy delivery. This paper examines the failure of the public and private tourism sectors to educate local government policy-makers in understanding tourism and related policy issues, leading to poor tourism policy implementation at the local level. The paper presents a historical and descriptive analysis of policy development and documents how local government tourism policy and its associated processes came into being in New Zealand. There is little academic historical research examining institutional and political frameworks of local government and how they impact on tourism policy implementation. Both primary and secondary data sources such as interviews and administrative and archived documents have been used. This finding illustrates a lack of understanding of tourism by central and local government bureaucrats and local government. Due to the lack of historical policy knowledge there is an inability to measure whether progress is being made.

A structural equation model: Greece’s tourism demand for tourist destination

Structural equation model (LISREL 8) was applied to test the causal relationships between tourist travel motivations and tourist destination.A survey containing Likert scale questions was conducted to collect data from 100 tourists who had travelled to Greece’s tourist destination. With the help of factor analysis, four dimensions were identified for scales used in the study: travel cost satisfaction, tourism product, tourism product attributes, and tourism product management. Results indicated that the travel cost satisfaction of tourists has a positive influence on tourism product, tourism product attributes and tourism product management. Moreover, our results suggested that the tourist demographics has a positive influence on tourism product and tourism product attributes and has an insignificant relationship with tourism product management. Based on our findings the tourist demographics has not influence on tourism product management. However, these findings suggest that both the private tourism and the governmental tourism sector should develop a better management of tourist destinations so as to develop a stronger attraction of tourism, better amenities, a better accessibility, an appropriate image, to make tourism competitive and to keep tourism product prices at a reasonable level. The implications of the tourism demand model can be used for the public environmental policy-making process based mainly on reasons of interest, ideology or understanding.

The governance of coastal tourism: unravelling the layers of complexity at Smiths Beach, Western Australia

Fuelled by rapid population growth, coastal regions are increasingly vulnerable to the dynamic mix of coastal uses. In Western Australia, for instance, the issues associated with infrastructure shortcomings and increased population pressures have led to a spate of interest in the development of tourism and residential proposals along the coast. Many of these have emerged as hotly debated sociopolitical contests, thus raising questions in relation to the governance of coastal tourism. It is the intent of this paper to provide empirical insights into the practical nature of coastal tourism governance, using the Smiths Beach coastal tourism and residential development as a case study. An exploratory case approach is adopted so as to understand why this particular coastal tourism development has been surrounded by so much criticism and controversy. The exploration of the attitudes, experiences and views of various stakeholders have illustrated the inherent flavour of this case, with the issues of power-politics, divergent interests and agendas and lack of community consultation identified as some of the key aspects shaping the debate. The case therefore provides an ideal avenue to reveal the complex nature and key issue drivers associated with the governance of coastal tourism.

Impediments to Tourism Investment in Australia: A Scoping Study

This article reports on a scoping study identifying the impediments to tourism investment in Australia. It focuses on regional perspectives to present an understanding of tourism investment in metropolitan, regional, and remote tourism destinations. Despite the 2009 Jackson Report outlining several supply-side inhibitors to tourism development in Australia, the key impediments for tourism investment are not well covered in the tourism literature and are rarely brought together in an integrated manner. To identify these investment impediments, a case study approach, employing semistructured interviews with tourism industry and government representatives in several metropolitan, regional, and remote locations throughout Australia, was conducted in early 2010. Low profitability and variable demand were frequently nominated as the most significant impediments to investment by the majority of the interviewees. However, each location has its own unique circumstances and impediments to investment, underpinned by the type of economic development of the region, local planning controls and regulations, as well as issues particular to tourism such as location and natural and/or cultural attractions. A number of recommendations are formulated based on the findings from the case studies that emphasize the identification, monitoring, and publicizing of facilitators of investment and strategies to overcome impediments.

Whose Tourism City is it? The Role of Government in Tourism in Darwin, Northern Territory

Darwin, the capital city of the Northern Territory, has recently received high levels of government investment in tourism development. This paper examines the role of the Northern Territory Government in the development and marketing of tourism in Darwin and investigates the types of strategies that the government has sought to implement over the past decade. The results suggest that the Northern Territory Government has been using tourism primarily as a vehicle to boost immediate short-term economic and employment growth by investing in large-scale “showy” construction projects. Government sponsored initiatives in tourism are highly growth-orientated and show a tendency towards “superlativism”. The paper finally discusses a range of limitations and implications of such strong government patronage of tourism and identifies directions for future research.

Tourism expansion and corporate earnings in the tourism industry

Although tourism expansion is theoretically assumed to have a direct influence on the tourism industry, previous studies have not found any significant connection between tourism expansion and tourism firms’ stock performance. This study argues that tourism expansion would have a more direct impact on tourism firms’ earnings than on their stock performance. Accordingly, whether tourism expansion can create significant growth in corporate earnings for tourism firms is tested on the basis of a Granger non-causality procedure using a four-variable vector autoregression model. Test results support the assumption that tourism expansion could significantly improve the corporate earnings of tourism companies. The analyses of the generalized impulse response function and variance decomposition further indicate the critical role of tourism expansion in explaining increases in the tourism industry's corporate earnings. Policy implications are provided to guide the government tourism authorities.

Ride on the Gaming Boom: How Can Hong Kong, Macau and Zhuhai Join Hands to Develop Tourism in the Region?

Macau's gaming boom and the planned construction of the Hong Kong, Macau and Zhuhai (HMZ) Bridge present good opportunities for the three destinations to develop tourism. However, developing tourism without regional coordination and collaboration could result in overcapacity and cut-throat competition, and dampen the healthy growth of tourism in the region. This study investigated the HMZ tourism cooperation issue by conducting in-depth interviews with government officials, industry practitioners and tourism researchers in HMZ. The question it sought to answer was: How could the three destinations join hands to develop the region's tourism cooperatively? Based on the interviews, SWOT analyses were conducted for each of the cities as well as for HMZ as an integrated destination. Recommendations on the way forward that could benefit the region were made based on the analyses.

Strategies For Entrepreneurship And Innovation - A Case Study


 
 
 Entrepreneurs all over the world have contributed to the economic development of their region. They play a major role not only in organizing production, but in a broader sense, promote the process of economic development. The function of an entrepreneur is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or more generally an untried technology possibly for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of raw materials or developing a new market. The factor responsible for change, development and ultimately economic growth is innovation. Innovation is the key for not only in developing, new products or (services) for the market but also in stimulating investment interest in the new ventures being created. Innovation is the principal ingredient of entrepreneurship.Tourism is a smokeless service industry as it consumes less energy and pollutes least compared to any manufacturing industry. United Nations, World Tourism Organization and Department of Tourism Government of India have bestowed 'Industry' status to tourism in order to enable the industry to enjoy all the incentives and grants offered to industries in general. Currently tourism enjoys the pride of being the second largest growing industry next to IT. Tourism promotes better national and international relationship through cross culture interaction. Backward areas with its residing people can be uplifted with tourism activities without investing in capital intensive industries. The importance of tourism industry is more pronounced as it employs the largest number of manpower and earns the maximum foreign exchange. Being a part of the services sector tourism has also given birth to innumerable entrepreneurs who thrived on their personal creativity and innovativeness.An effort has been made in this paper to present the career progress of Captain Gopinath who is undoubtedly one of the greatest tourism/ entrepreneurs of the 21s1 century in India. Gopinath sacrificed a secured career in the Indian armed forces to strike on his own and in the process established a number of entrepreneurial establishments in aviation and tourism industry. Captain Gopinath neither followed management theories nor had formal management qualifications. But his actions and achievements had close resemblance with the deliberations of the best management gurus. A study have been conducted to compare the behaviors, actions and achievements of Captain Gopinath with the works of great authors who have researched and contributed over the years on 'Entrepreneurship'. 
 
 

Participative Planning and Governance for Sustainable Tourism

Advocates of sustainable tourism development often indicate that the participation of destination communities in decision-making is important for sustainability. This paper indicates some of the ways in which research on local participation in tourism planning has furthered our understanding of governance for sustainable tourism. A number of suggestions are made concerning a future direction for research on participative planning and more generally on governance for sustainable tourism in destinations. It is argued that we should examine participative planning critically and also that we should see it fully as a reflection of our times and of contemporary economic, social and ideological circumstances. It is also suggested that we should devote more research attention to the broad range of contexts and activities of tourism governance. Finally, it is contended that the adoption of holistic and critical frameworks may benefit research in this field. One such framework is also outlined briefly.

Local tourism governance: a comparison of three network approaches

There is an absence of knowledge about the advantages and disadvantages of different local tourism governance approaches. Consequently, experimenting with different modes of local tourism governance is increasingly common. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by investigating the ways in which three different local tourism governance networks operate, and the effects of this governance on local tourism policy. The three local tourism networks examined are a council-led network governance structure, a participant-led community network governance structure and a local tourism organisation (LTO)-led industry network governance structure. The study found that these governance arrangements were underpinned by four key trade-offs and that these tended to shape the effectiveness of local tourism governance. The significance of this paper is that it opens up discussion about local tourism governance, highlights the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches and reflects on their relevance to sustainable tourism management. The findings can inform local councils interested in improving their local organisation of tourism, and spur further research.

Governance for sustainable tourism: a comparison of international and Dutch visions

This study focuses on the role of public authorities in the governance of tourism for sustainable development at national level. Departing from an overview of international recommendations, it analyses whether those recommendations are reflected in the way public authorities influence domestic tourism in the Netherlands. The conclusion is drawn that, currently, the internationally recommended horizontal and vertical coordination of public authorities and their policies is missing. This is largely due to a design approach that follows from neo-liberal principles of governance, as opposed to the sustainability performance of the tourism sector. The paper then discusses the results of a survey carried out to map the extent to which Dutch tourism stakeholders would be in favor of adopting measures to improve coordination. It is concluded that, although there is support for more coordination, there is no converging vision on how specific aspects of it should be best organized. The paper highlights the need for multi-stakeholder debates that should consider the links between governance features and the sustainability performance of tourism.

The economy, tourism growth and corporate performance in the Taiwanese hotel industry

This study investigates the impact of economy and tourism growth on the corporate performance of tourist hotels in Taiwan. The indicators of corporate performance under consideration are occupancy rate ( OPR), return on assets ( ROA), return on equity ( ROE), stock return, and the overall financial performance measured by a comprehensive score (a combined measure of asset management, profitability, short-term solvency or liquidity and long-term solvency based on factor analysis). The effects of changes in the state of economy (real GDP growth rate, Δ GDP ) and tourism growth (growth rate of total foreign tourist arrivals, Δ TA ) on the corporate performance of tourist hotels are then examined via panel regression tests. Test results show that both Δ GDP and Δ TA are significant explanatory factors of OPR, but only Δ TA can strongly explain ROA and ROE. However, neither Δ GDP nor Δ TA have a significant influence on hotel stock performance. Further, the economic factor ( Δ GDP ) is slightly more crucial than the industry factor ( Δ TA ) in describing the overall financial performance in the Taiwanese hotel industry. Empirical findings offer valuable information for government tourism policymakers and tourist hotel owners and managers.

Trust perceptions of online travel information by different content creators: Some social and legal implications

Consumers are increasingly turning to the online environment to provide information to assist them in making purchase decisions related to travel products. They often rely on travel recommendations from different sources, such as sellers, independent experts and, increasingly, other consumers. A new type of online content, user-generated content (UGC), provides a number of legal and social challenges to providers and users of that content, especially in relation to areas such as defamation, misrepresentation and social embarrassment. This paper reports research that examined the level of trustworthiness of online travel information from these different sources. The study used a survey of Australian travel consumers (n?=?12,000) and results support the notion that there are differences in the level of trust for online travel information from different sources. Respondents `tended to agree' that they trusted information provided by travel agents, information from commercial operators and comments made by travellers on third party websites. However, the highest level of trust was afforded to information provided on State government tourism websites. These results suggest that greater trust is placed in online travel comments when they are on a specific travel website than when they are on a more generic social networking website. However, respondents were `not sure' that they trusted comments made by travellers on weblogs and on social networking sites. Some 88% of respondents that had not visited UGC websites (or were unsure if they had) indicated that they thought that UGC would be useful in the future --- suggesting that they feel that any concerns they may have in relation to legal and social problems resulting from its use will be resolved.

Commercial Organ Transplantation in the Philippines

Countries throughout Asia promote themselves as leading destinations for international travelers seeking inexpensive healthcare. India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Thailand are all trying to attract greater numbers of what their promotional campaigns call “medical tourists.” Government tourism initiatives, hospital associations, medical tourism companies, and individual hospitals advertise hip and knee replacements, spinal surgery, cosmetic surgery, and other medical procedures. In contrast to most nations marketing treatments to international patients, the Philippines differentiates itself by selling “all inclusive” kidney transplant packages. Patients from other countries travel to the Philippines and receive kidneys purchased from poor individuals.