Aaron Tham Min-En

University of the Sunshine Coast | USC · School of Business and Creative Industries

The Melbourne Cup is Australia's pinnacle horse racing event, attracting more than 80,000 physical attendees each year (pre-COVID-19), as well as numerous others watching via live broadcasts around the country and overseas. In recent times, however, there have been growing calls to boycott the event, following concerns over the treatment of horses....

Quiet quitting has emerged as an area of concern for businesses and societies in the wake of the 'Great Resignation' following COVID-19. While there is an emerging body of work surrounding the motivations of quiet quitting as a rejection of being enslaved to one's work, little is known as to the implications of this phenomenon on Asian businesses....

Widening participation has been a vehicle to facilitate access and support towards the successful completion of university studies for underrepresented groups who are less likely to pursue higher education. Yet, despite its widely accepted importance and adoption across countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom, studies to date remain larg...

Purpose There is a growing interest in investigating craft beer tourism and consumption experiences as different destinations seek to position unique attributes and cultures in their culinary offerings. Yet, in this space, factors that have triggered the creation, management and marketing of craft beer tourism remain implicit. The purpose of this p...

Purpose This paper aims to critically evaluate the evolution of Assurance of Learning (AoL) in business education and identify gaps and responsibilities in higher institution landscapes moving into the future. This comes amidst increasing structural reforms, an increasingly digitalised world, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and wider scrutiny...

COVID-19 has significantly disrupted global landscapes and forced a quick adaptation towards new ways of conducting higher education, with almost all tertiary institutions compelled to embrace online teaching and learning quickly. In addition, this crisis presents an opportune moment to reflect on the why and how higher education assessments should...

This research note probes the largely ignored sphere of smart tourism curriculum as destinations and institutions seek to develop graduates ready to embrace the demands and challenges of future work environments where technology has a ubiquitous presence. This knowledge gap is somewhat surprising, even as destinations progress towards smart tourism...

Getting to and from campus matters, especially for students who have relocated from regional and remote (RR) areas who must wrangle, often for the first time, rigid mass public transportation (MPT). Little is known about MPTs' influence on RR students' retention intentions or how MPT interacts with other known geographic proximity barriers. Intervi...

MICE tourism legacies have become more important as these business events explore ways to give back to their respective host destinations. The purpose of this viewpoint is to unpack how such MICE tourism legacies can be operationalized, as applied to the context of an international conference. Drawing from extant literature surrounding MICE tourism...

Regenerative tourism has appeared as a buzzword but remains largely less understood as to its overall manifestation within different destinations and communities. This viewpoint coalesces existing knowledge about the rapidly evolving concept and denotes practical ways in which destinations can incorporate various stakeholder perspectives and levels...

Effective communication plays a part in the success and the sustainability of the tourism and hospitality management, including community-based tourism (CBT). In Brunei Darussalam, communication barriers have affected the growth of the CBT industry on both local and national levels. By analyzing responses from 16 local CBT operators, this investiga...

Hotel quarantine has been a prevalent process over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic as destinations seek to utilise such spaces to uncover potential positive cases within international tourism mobility. Yet, this abruptly designed layer of quarantine is vastly different to what hotels were built for and intended as spaces of leisure and hospital...

This research compares four travel motivations—socialisation, responsibility, attractions, and food—across four countries, namely India, Japan, Malaysia, and the United Arab Emirates. The investigation ascertains the factors that account for domestic traveller confidence during a pandemic. Through an online survey of 2,076 domestic tourists, it was...

Review of conference on responsible tourism and hospitality

Purpose –The main aim of this research was to explore specialty coffee experience dimensions and what drives revisit intentions through experiencescapes. The theoretical framework on experience co-creation in food and wine consumption by Carvalho et al. (2021) was employed to explore the dimensions of specialty coffee shop experiences and specialty...

The concept of responsible business is well-known, but not necessarily known well. In this editorial, we seek to conduct a timely introspection of the term, clarifying its definition and characteristics, and launching future research prospects for scholars. Within this vein, it is evident that there is overall consensus as to the principles of resp...

Purpose This paper aims to reconceptualise entrenched supply chains associated with coffee production and consumption to digital supply chains for sustainable development. Design/methodology/approach A case study of seven small businesses involved with Philippine coffee is employed to examine how coffee value chains should be envisioned following...

Community-based tourism (CBT) is part of East Asia's tourism landscape as local communities seek to diversify their livelihoods towards tourism. However, little is known about the evolution of research surrounding CBT in the region. Through undertaking a bibliometric analysis of 401 Scopus-indexed articles, this research found that CBT practices ha...

Purpose This paper aims to examine whether medical tourism can be a frontrunner in terms of post-pandemic recovery for the industry Design/methodology/approach A mixed-method analysis of 17 interviews and 210 questionnaires involving medical tourists to Iran was applied. Findings Medical tourists perceived the risks posed by COVID-19 as a tempora...

This research note explores the under-investigated assumption that cryptocurrencies are a panacea to stimulate regional tourism demand. Through the application of Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation Theory, a case study was designed to examine the cryptocurrency effect on two adjacent towns of Agnes Water and 17 70 in Central Queensland, Australia. The...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to argue for the merits of design thinking as an approach to develop a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) course in hospitality education. This argument is primed to address the dynamic and ever-changing landscape of the tourism and hospitality industry prompts educators to emphasize on learners dev...

Fake news was Collins Dictionary's 2017 word of the year. The term was made extremely popular before and during the 2016 U.S elections where sensationalist news reporting, often unverified, were disseminated by political actors in their bid to secure support towards their campaigns. In brief, fake news refers to the reporting of articles that has b...

The Olympic bidding process prior to 2024 was altered in 2019 to provide greater transparency and reduce unnecessary work related to the preparation for each bid, of which there can only be one host. This paper analyses the process of the 2032 Olympics through the notion of a preferred candidate in Brisbane, Australia. Through a document analysis o...

Daigou is worth billions globally and is fueled by mobile connectivity and advances in e-commerce, and therefore, it is important to understand the impact of the Daigou phenomenon. While shopping is very much at the heart of Chinese outbound tourism, very little is known of the role that Daigou plays in terms of manifesting the soft power agenda. S...

While the notion of external referencing has been undertaken across a range of disciplines, its adoption in a tourism setting remains largely fragmented. This project applies a 'floating class-room' as part of a virtual Community of Practice (CoP) to enable tourism policy and planning educators to perform a benchmarking exercise for maintaining tea...

This research provides empirical insights to reveal how value convergence occurs within Uber’s sharing economy. Uber’s business model is built on a digital platform that links private vehicle owners and their under-utilized assets to be economic revenue generating units for on-demand transport requests from potential clients. By analyzing adoption...

Daigou may be simply understood as purchasing on behalf of others. However, as an informal economy, Daigou trade between buyers and sellers is now a lucrative market and has emerged as a distinctive tourism segment. While Daigou occurs on the back of technological platforms that facilitate electronic commerce between customer to customer, academic...

Purpose-This research explores the role and influence of culture through the lens of key tourism related stakeholders in Nepal and the recovery process from a disastrous earthquake that shattered the country in 2015. Design/methodology/approach-In-depth interviews were conducted with key people involved in this process which included the President,...

Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, some hotels have introduced a new service model called contactless service. This paper unpacks this new hospitality landscape through a random sample of 510 valid responses collected at a smart hotel in Taiwan in June 2020 and discusses the emergent insights through Multiple Linear Regression (MLR)....

COVID-19 has flipped traditional face-to-face exchanges. This quickly prompted involuntary changes that required appropriate pedagogical strategies suited to online courses. This study explored the experiences, interactions, and social presence (SP) of participants involved in the 2020 spring term postgraduate program in a Taiwanese university. Thr...

This study probes the ethics of intrusive technologies for experimental research in tourism, through the lens of collaborative ethnography. Amidst the increasing uptake of technology to assess participant responses, the role of ethics in an experimental setting has received scant attention in tourism and hospitality. While intrusive technologies su...

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to propose a rigorous methodology to undertake systematic literature reviews for coffee and tea tourism, thereby providing prospects and challenges of developing these niche markets for destinations. Design/methodology/approach-The approach taken in this research is via a systematic literature review on past stu...

Responsible tourism has been crafted in the narrative of tourists making ethical decisions to ensure that they engage in tourism in respectful ways. Likewise, tourism practitioners also embed responsible tourism practices to their operations, to derive desired brand and destination images that are aligned to responsible tourism outcomes. However, l...

This paper revisits the value of online tourism forums as a vehicle for value co-destruction and corresponding responses by different users. Employing a content analysis of 469 trolling episodes recorded on Lonely Planet Thorn Tree forums, the research showed how such incidents allude to value co-destruction. However, the research also showcases ho...

Blockchain technologies are predicted to substantially transform the tourism industry. At present, cryptocurrencies are the most advanced application of public blockchains that promise benefits such as a universal means of payment and minimal fees through the removal of intermediaries. In the tourism industry, though many tourism vendors have been...

COVID-19 has posed unprecedented challenges to tourism due to the global nature of its pandemic effect. Health pandemics, such as the COVID-19, are some of the various types of crises that confront the tourism industry. While academic attention has been devoted to the management of crises, very little is known about the use of medical tourism as a...

Purpose This study aims to unpack the notion of travelling mobilities from the perspectives of an Asian solo traveller using the context of the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan. Design/methodology/approach An autoethnography was used for this research, analysing reflective notes drafted on hand-written journals over the duration of six days over thre...

Tham, A., Mair, J., & Croy, G. (2020). Social media influence on tourists’ destination choice: Importance of context. Tourism Recreation Research, 45(2), 161-175. doi:10.1080/02508281.2019.1700655 : : While social media receive considerable scholarly attention, studies reveal mixed outcomes in relation to its influence on tourists' destination choi...

Extant literature has emerged to shed light on Indigenous tourism peoples, places and partnerships. These studies to date have uncovered a rich diversity of contexts and collaborations, but likewise raise the challenges and complexities of working with stakeholder groups that feature diverse, and sometimes divergent interests. However, it has been...

Liminal spaces of medical tourism remain under-investigated. To address this gap, liminal spaces of Azerbaijani, Armenian and Iraqi medical tourists to Tabriz, Iran are explored. Using a mixed-method approach employing direct observations, interviews and 150 questionnaires of medical tourists, data were collected and analyzed using AMOS (Analysis o...

This research note highlights eclectic approaches to analyze recreational cruise sustainability. Whilst recreational cruising have become increasingly popular, studies to date are largely fragmented, often adopting an economically-centric perspective based on a particular cruise market or specific destinations. This research note advances cross-dis...

The purpose of this paper is to explore leisure etiquette as negotiated through the lens of recreational drones. While drones have experienced spectacular growth in terms of sales and revenue, there remains very little known about how the nuances of recreational drone users negotiate codes of conduct to guide their leisure activities and behavior....

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the disrupting usage and impacts of blockchains and cryptocurrencies and advocate their role as enablers of sustainable tourism development goals. Design/methodology/approach Literature on blockchains and cryptocurrencies is critically synthesized, debated and expanded to identify and discuss their i...

This article examines trends associated with tourism-related academic conferences scheduled between mid-2016 and end-2018. As a subset of a lucrative business events market, studies on academic conferences remain underinvestigated. Moreover, academic literature to date reveal that extant studies are often fragmented—using one conference or through...

Purpose This paper aims to propose a framework for engaging tourists as citizen scientists in marine research. Justification for such a framework is driven by the increasing use of citizen science (CS) as a method for collecting data in various research projects. While the tenets of CS exist, few studies have demonstrated how these could be integra...

Rainbow looms, America's 2014 Toy of the Year, are associated with colourful rubber bands that can be weaved into intricate objects using a plastic loom. These sets are sold without any accompanying instructions, requiring users to develop personal skills through family, friends and online. This paper explores the participatory practices of rainbow...

This paper examines tourism academic policy impacts of higher education subscribing to arbitrary citation impact measures of quality and the consequence towards tourism scholars engaging within intra-Asian mobilities. The research objective is prompted by the lack of insights exploring whether the default academic policies have shaped Asian identit...

Discussions about diverse economies have often been positioned in opposition to profit-focused global economic activity, whereas local communities are often assumed to be sites of diverse economies that embrace economic and non-economic exchanges. We argue that the perceived binary between global profit-focused economic activity and diverse economi...

The popularity of adopting ecotourism initiatives has led to a mushrooming of eco-precincts around the world. Arguably, ecotourism fulfils an ideological paradigm because of its inherent benefits to both natural and human environments. However, whilst theory has guided the justification for ecotourism and development of its principles, very little...

Academic interest in Visiting Friends and Relatives (VFR) tourism began during the 1990s, and yet, almost three decades have passed but the field remains one that is highly under-researched. Additionally, there is a scarcity of literature related to VFR tourism within an Asian context. This is somewhat surprising, given that Asian travellers have i...

Purpose This paper aims to present the case for a new integrated resort business model. It does so by integrating the notion of a smart tourism ecosystem into the concept of dynamic capabilities so as to guide integrated resort theory and practice in an evolving landscape. Design/methodology/approach The theoretical model is derived from synthes...

Despite the importance of social capital to organizational performance, there is scant insight within service contexts. Accordingly, this research explores social capital in two Asia-Pacific service enterprise cases – a Thai coffee franchise and a Coffee Roasters Guild in Australia. In the Thai case, social capital in the service experience emerged...

While the film tourism phenomenon has been welcomed by both practitioners and scholars, there remains a critical gap in our current understanding as to the determinants that hinder tourist intentions to visit film tourism locations. This chapter aims to elucidate some of these factors using the case of the Korean TV drama series Descendants of the...

This paper explores the developments of domestic medical tourism for Australia's Sunshine Coast. Most studies have characterised medical tourism to be an outbound phenomenon, where affluent tourists select mostly developing destinations for elective surgeries due to cost, quality or faster access to treatments. However, studies concerned with domes...

The popularity of adopting ecotourism initiatives has led to a mushrooming of eco-precincts around the world. Arguably, ecotourism fulfils an ideological paradigm because of its inherent benefits to both natural and human environments. However, whilst theory has guided the justification for ecotourism and development of its principles, very little...

Existing literature has portrayed tourism as a conduit for learning and transformation, with a view that such mobilities elucidate tourism cosmopolitanism. While such propositions are insofar useful in characterising global dispositions, very little has been done to investigate how the virtual space has helped to develop or curtail effects of touri...

The sharing economy has transformed the tourism landscape, though different destinations have featured various levels of receptivity. Two of the main organisations, or disruptors, are AirBnB and Uber. These two organisations were examined and compared in terms of how they have featured within two countries, Australia and Singapore. Using a case stu...

Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework for a wider Tourism Value Ecology (TVE) consisting of intermediaries, industry partners, and also various stakeholders to extend and/or modify the critical factors in a TVE. Design/methodology/approach – This is a conceptual paper using a thorough literature review approach, cu...

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Tourism is a key industry in the economy and it is expected to play a key role in the service industry sector. Because of the growing adoption of information technology in the world, the tourism industry too, has been in utilizing the information highway to redefine and deliver the tourism product to the end consumers.Because of the shift towards i...

The international student (IS) market in Australia has been a growing export economy. Because of the traditional definition of tourism being that of ‘a leisure activity outside a usual work scope area for a period of less than a year’, tourism research on IS has been minimal. This research investigates the tourism demand stimulated by IS in Austral...

Customers' perceptions of SIA in view of alliances, price vs service and security.