Tourism Management Perspectives

The objectives of the Rural Development Programme for Lithuania for the period 2007 to 2013 are to: (a) preserve natural and cultural heritage objects, (b) support complementary activity in the rural areas, and (c) generate rural tourism as an economic sector. The aim of this study is to identify current trends specific to the Lithuanian rural tourism sector and propose potential means of development. This study focuses on an inter-county assessment of rural tourism flows within Lithuania by the means of an index decomposition analysis. Consequently, an analysis was undertaken covering factors including the number of the rural tourism farmsteads, spatial distribution of those farmsteads, and capacity, an amended Defert Index, and duration of stay effects. The analysis suggests that the Lithuanian rural tourism sector was negatively affected by the 2008 recession. Indeed, the impacts exhibited relatively high elasticity of demand for rural tourism. Hence, there is a need for the further development of appropriate marketing and information dissemination strategies aimed at both middle and lower income consumers.

This paper presents the findings of a systematic review performed on 115 academic papers published over a 26-year period from 1984 to 2009 and provides a content analysis of research themes and trends in China hotel research. The findings reveal that hotel management and performance is the theme most frequently examined by researchers, followed by hotel development strategies, and hotel business environment analysis. The analysis also indicates shifts in research methods, trends of publication, journal outlets and authorship information.

Generally, most studies on volunteer tourism have placed an emphasis on motivations and experiences of participants ignoring a significant component of tourism —accommodation. This paper is an attempt to unravel accommodation preference among international volunteer tourists focusing on homestay facilities in Ghana. The data are derived from a study of 151 volunteer tourists in Kumasi, Ghana. The primary reasons for the choice of homestay accommodation included a wish to better immerse themselves in the host community and to aid social interaction but differences are found on the basis of gender, level of education and other socio-demographic variables.

Outsourcing is one of the strategic tools used by organisations to meet a myriad of objectives in the Western world and Asia. Hotels in Ghana are engaged in one form of outsourcing or the other. However, little is known of what actually happens in these hotels as existing literature on the subject matter is from the perspective of Western and Eastern industries. It is for this reason that the study set out to explore how hotels in the Accra Metropolis of Ghana employed outsourcing as a business strategy. The study specifically sought to examine how managers understood outsourcing, the activities outsourced, the reasons for outsourcing and the challenges faced by these hotels. The findings indicate that outsourcing is well understood and although there are important reasons for outsourcing, there are also teething challenges that must be overcome if outsourcing is to become a strategy of choice in the hotels.

This study examines the personal emotional journeys that tourists experience while participating in adventure activities during their packaged mountaineering holidays. It also investigates whether the adventure activities within these holidays provide experiences that they consider to be adventurous. Although an understanding exists about the experiences of recreational adventurers, including mountaineers, there is only a limited awareness of the experiences of tourists who engage in adventure activities as part of packaged mountaineering holidays. Hence, the paper extends understanding of the personal emotional journeys of mountaineers from an adventure recreation to an adventure tourism context. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with tourists during or at the end of their packaged mountaineering holidays. Key findings focus on three interrelated themes. First, respondents perceptions of risk associated with their participation in the packaged adventure activities; second, the contrasting emotions that they encountered; and, third, the "other world" feelings that they experienced.

For tourism stakeholders in the South Pacific, the need to adapt to the negative impacts of climate change is urgent and crucial. Adaptation is costly and puts significant pressure on government resources. Using Samoa as a case study, this research examines if and how public–private partnerships (PPPs) may help the tourism sector in Small Island Developing States and Territories (SIDST) in the South Pacific adapt. Policy-makers and business owners were interviewed. The paper illustrates the different perspectives of the stakeholders, and suggests what can be done to exploit the potential contribution of PPP in adaptation. This research also contributes to the body of literature by demonstrating how existing theories related to PPP can be applied to climate change adaptation.

The modern world is characterized by various forms of social, economic, political and natural changes on a global scale. Among them, climate change poses a unique challenge to the entire human civilization and affects all aspects of human life, including tourism. Therefore, both people and the environment need to adapt to new conditions, a process that means accepting the fact that climate change is already happening. The earth has warmed by 0.7 °C since 1900. Even if all emissions were to stop today, the Earth would continue to warm by a further 0.5 °C to 1 °C over the next decade (Stern, 2006). Furthermore, adaptation will appear as a response to specific climatic events within the context of other socio-economic changes. The first step in adapting to climate change is bringing about a change in behaviour, while the second step includes preparing for climate change, by using flood resistant irrigation systems, developing sea defence systems in coastal areas, developing health care and methods to address new types of diseases, and implementing other measures.

Using a case study approach, this paper analyses the leadership role of Adventa, Monmouthshire's LEADER+ programme, in promoting followership amongst rural tourism small-scale businesses in Monmouthshire. Adventa is identified as a best practice example of leadership for rural tourism development as a result of their approach to creating competitive advantage for Monmouthshire by working with local rural tourism businesses to promote grassroots rural tourism. This paper focuses on Adventa's leadership role in relation to various tourism projects, through which they promote authenticity and the use of local producers; raise awareness of food miles; attempt to increase linkages to other sectors in the local rural economy and endeavour to promote followership amongst local rural tourism small-scale businesses.

Information technologies provide important opportunities for museums to create more engaging visitor experiences. Many museums have decided to adopt podcasting technologies to provide more interesting and cost efficient audio tour offerings. The study presented in this paper investigates whether museum visitors also perceive podcast tours as being able to enhance museum experiences. Using a technology adoption framework, influences on museum visitors' performance expectations regarding podcast tours were investigated. The results show that podcast affinity mediates the influences of innovativeness and Internet familiarity and is significantly positively related with perceptions of podcast tours as means to enhance museum visits. Thus, the research stresses the importance of conceptualizing performance expectations relevant to tourism settings and understanding the personal characteristics of tourists that influence them. It also shows that general Internet familiarity drives attitudes toward newly emerging Internet-based technologies.

This paper explores the influence of age, gender, project type and length of stay on the impacts of a volunteer tourism experience. The impacts measured were changes to volunteers' personality traits. A quasi-experimental study was carried out on volunteer tourists undertaking community, wildlife and conservation projects, in South Africa. These tourists completed a standardised web-based personality inventory (IPIP-NEO) prior to and following their volunteer vacation to measure changes to 15 personality traits.The findings address a number of shortcomings in the volunteer tourism literature by providing statistical evidence of the influence of age, gender, project type and length of stay on the impacts of a volunteer tourism experience, and they broaden our understanding of the limited and contradictory research into these factors. The findings can therefore contribute theoretically; and practically to tourism marketing, and programme design.

The goal of this study is to analyse the e-tourism development in Bulgaria, and particularly customer satisfaction with the quality of the tourism companies' websites. A total of 249 firms' websites have been evaluated by tourism master students according to selected indicators. The conceptual model contained 10 indicators as antecedents for customer satisfaction. The results of the multiple linear regression analysis confirmed the positive influence of the website quality on customer satisfaction in terms of playfulness, navigation, trust, variety of destinations abroad, online transactions, and information quality. Four website dimensions (responsiveness, personalization, diversity of tourism products and services, and variety of destinations inside the country) were not supported, which can be explained by the stage of the tourism companies' e-development and the specific segment of customers. The findings suggest that the firms are underperforming in terms of providing web quality dimensions that enhance the young and well educated customers' satisfaction.

In the online marketplace, many hotels are concentrating on increasing their market share by establishing cooperation with online travel agencies (OTAs). Meanwhile, hotel websites and OTAs are marketing the hotel rooms at the same price as a result of the strong competition for the same pool of customers. Therefore, it is necessary to balance the cooperation and competition between hotels and OTAs. This study investigates the online coopetition (cooperation and competition) through an economical game analysis of an online supply chain consisting of a hotel and an OTA. It first provides an optimal solution to determine the unit commission fee of the hotel to maintain the cooperation. Afterwards, it studies the pricing process of the OTA to determine the cash back value for the customers with respect to the OTA's maximal profit. Moreover, the deeper analysis of the cooperative model demonstrates that a quantity discount contract based on the revenue sharing could eliminate the competition and coordinate the participants in the online supply chain.

The performance of the tourism supply chain depends on the efficiency of the members involved. A significant role in the performance of the tourism supply chain is played by travel agencies. The level of travel agencies' integration with transport service providers is an important indicator of a companies' performance, yet it has not been sufficiently examined so far. The purpose of this study is to analyse the level of integration between travel agencies and air carriers, rail carriers, water carriers, and bus operators. Based on the data obtained from Slovenian travel agencies included in the survey, the study indicates that travel agencies most often cooperate with bus operators, with which they achieve the highest level of integration, followed by air carriers, water carriers and, lastly, rail carriers recording a low level of integration with travel agencies.

Building on case studies of four European regions this article discusses and tests the empirical applicability of a common agenda for the development of industrial tourism. It analyses the conditions under which visits to operational firms fit in the strategies of both public and private entities. Relevant factors explaining actors' willingness to cooperate are 1) the characteristics of the visitor flow, 2) co-branding and the image fit and 3) the potential of industrial tourism products. The case studies provide several insights on how to reach consensus on these factors.

This paper presents a critical review of recent progress in research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in tourism management, and possible directions for future research. In comparison to a well established, empirically-grounded body of knowledge dealing with other sectors of economic activity, dedicated research on CSR in travel and tourism is at a relatively early stage. In the past decade, CSR has been the primary subject of a limited number of studies from a small academic community of practice. Studies have primarily focused on three macrolevel topic areas: implementation; the economic rationale for acting more responsibly; and the social relations of CSR. Interest in responsibility as an approach to tourism governance and management is nevertheless growing as several policy prescriptions and corporate vision statements reveal. For research to progress further and to match these ambitions, greater critical engagement with mainstream thinking on CSR is required as well as greater conceptual and methodological sophistication.

This paper aims at exploring the profile of (agri-)tourism entrepreneurs and their businesses, to estimate and compare, using a full account approach, the cash flows earned from tourism and (where appropriate) from farming at firm level and to explore the influence of socioeconomic characteristics of the owners and their businesses in tourism businesses' effectiveness. These issues are not sufficiently dealt with in the international (agri)tourism literature. Research in mountainous Corinth, Greece, shows that the relationship between agritourism and agriculture is weak with non-residents having largely exploited the tourism development opportunity which emerged in the area in the 2000s. This, in turn, implies the leakage of tourism development benefits out of the local economy. When accommodation businesses are differentiated depending upon the owners' relationship to agriculture the analysis of their accounts as well as multivariate analysis show that the combination of tourism and farming is able to support the farming households; however, the opportunity was rather marginally captured by local farmers.

Few studies in tourism and transport have discussed the connection service between metro systems with urban airports or proposed strategies to assist in improving performance for long-term development. The purpose of this study is to address this problem using the novel method of hybrid MCDM (multiple criteria decision-making), including DEMATEL (decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory), DANP (the DEMATEL-based analytic network process) and VIKOR, to examine the influential relationships among dimensions and criteria of the empirical case and to ultimately present the best improvement schemes, which are valuable for both practitioners and researchers and for those destinations attempted to integrate the urban transport with tourism development.

While there is a growing literature related with corporate social responsibility (CSR) in hospitality and tourism large firms, much remains to be done in the case of CSR in tourism small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In this paper we provide three studies regarding this particular aspect through the evidence present in different destinations: Catalonia, European natural parks and Chile. Among the conclusions that can be highlighted is the prevalence of altruism in the reasons for being responsible, the introduction of increasingly advanced measures or their impact on different business variables, and the link to financial performance.

This study applies Quan and Wang (2004) structural model of the tourist experience to a netnographic analysis of the food experience offered in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. The food experience in this context is conceptualised both as a peak experience, as well as simply an extension of daily life. Netnography makes use of tourists' “word-of-mouse”, taking advantage of an evergrowing cybercommunity which specifically relates to food tourism. Two hundred and eighty-five online reviews of five Victoria Falls restaurants were analysed. Thematic findings illustrate the nuanced nature of food experiences, including tourists' interest in authenticity, as well as food neophilia and food neophobia. The study also demonstrates the potential of Internet-based, qualitative research methods to illuminate current understanding of tourist experience, while assessing Quan and Wang's model in terms of its potential and usefulness in modelling the touristic food experience.

Tourism is a development option that is pursued in the Philippines from the 1970s until present where it is a pillar of the country's economy. Arrivals from foreign origins are increasing at double digit growth rates while domestic tourism continues to outpace international arrivals. Recent legislation on tourism during the past two years continues to place importance on the industry as an engine of growth. However, such legislation should be viewed against the backdrop of local governance structures, power relations, and stakeholder linkages that include processes on comprehensive land use planning and tourism. The country faces a lack of environmental planners, where tourism planning is a sub-specialization. The current political ecology is that of a national government that relinquished its broad powers in land use and tourism planning to local governments that since 1992 have struggled to keep abreast with the implementation demands of national legislation. These testy relationships in turn create negative consequences to the natural environment well-documented in the experiences of Boracay Island. Tourism planning in the wider environmental planning spectrum in the country is in need of re-evaluating linkages, working relationships, and power relations between the various stakeholders in the land use-tourism planning processes, given the challenges of existing political and administrative frameworks in the national and local governments.