David Bruce Weaver

• PhD
• Professor at Griffith University

Vicarious destination exposure, which affects satisfaction and image recalibration that variably influence visit interest, desire and intention, has not been previously investigated in live performance contexts. Five statements related successively to satisfaction, image recalibration, interest, desire and intention were therefore used to segment 9...

To make contemporary Anglo-Western sustainable tourism discourse more responsive to non-Western contexts, we augment the generic content of the enlightened mass tourism model with crucial endogenous injections, using China as exemplar. Han Chinese cultural values as input are summarized as harmony in all things toward creative transformation throug...

Dalian is a particular Chinese city, which was occupied for half a century successively by the British, Japanese, and Russian Empires before 1949, with each imposing its own urban planning and building styles onto the city’s development. Since 1984, with China’s open-door policy and economic reform, dramatic changes have taken place in Dalian, tran...

Face is self-reflection through another's gaze, facilitated by face strategies (“facework”) to regulate social dignity. Despite the phenomenal growth of Chinese tourism, the culturally central concepts of face and facework have been investigated mainly as explanations and not as subjects of their own. This study utilises social exchange theory to u...

Market diversification, one critical means by which tourism-dependent small island states can maintain sector resilience and destination life cycle stability, requires understanding of the destination loyalty of strategic new inbound markets such as China. An online survey of 1260 Chinese adults with previous travel experience to the Maldives ident...

Large-scale park-visitor symbiosis remains an aspiration despite the need for new models to address the challenges of managing contemporary protected area systems. A survey of 1050 visitors to the Red Beach National Scenic Corridor in Northeast China, however, indicates a latent potential, with 36.0% qualifying as “enthused ecotourists” and 32.4% a...

This paper explores resident attitudes toward tourism development in the Maldives. Findings from 50 semi-structured interviews and 200 household surveys collected in two island communities provide insights into the reconciliation of deeply held Islamic social representations with proximate hedonistic tourism. In the less tourism-affiliated island,...

Based on a quantitative survey of 200 local residents from two structurally different communities, this chapter investigates the extent to which locals perceive that they are represented in tourism planning and development processes in the Maldives, a classic pleasure periphery which also encourages the parallel development of community-focused tou...

This study extends previous research on the motivations and expenditures of overseas Chinese tourists in mainland China by segmenting these visitors on the basis of their connectedness and experience with Chinese culture. Using empirical materials collected during diaspora-specialized tours, we identified Shallow, Extrinsic, Hybrid and Intrinsic se...

The lack of tourism development in Timor-Leste can be situated as an opportunity to build ‘from scratch’ an innovative and sustainable tourism sector that capitalises on the advantages of peripherality, including amenability to peak experiences, tourism centrality, opportunistic innovation, optimal autonomy and cultural/natural distinctiveness. As...

Ocean cruising is an increasingly influential form of tourism generating each year tens of millions of excursionist visits to ports-of-call. This inductive multi-methods research presents the ideal type mature “cruise shorescape” that emerges in ports-of-call within warm water pleasure periphery regions such as the Caribbean where the sector is con...

Engaging the neglected intersection between dark tourism, the visitor postexperience and geopolitics, this research reports the findings from a survey of 1,082 domestic visitors to Lushun Prison Museum in Dalian, China, a Japanese-era incarceration and punishment site that projects hegemonic anti-Japanese social representations. Most respondents re...

This research examines the potential of transit hubs and affiliated airlines to stimulate future stayover visits by stopover passengers, thereby securing new market opportunities for the host destination and a new relationship between the transportation and tourism sectors. Data were obtained from 694 stopovers who transited with Singapore Airlines...

Current “second generation” approaches to visitation in higher order protected areas are based on biocentric management and monitoring that positions visitors as an inherent threat. The result is suboptimal sustainability outcomes of coexistence and possibly increased conflict in an era of escalating demand, reduced public funding and growing threa...

Since the mid-twentieth century, small islands have emerged as important tourist destinations, whether as island-states (Barbados, Fiji), island dependencies (Guadeloupe, Jersey) or state-islands (Okinawa, Cozumel). A longstanding core–periphery narrative holds that small islands are geographically and economically marginal entities fated to spawn...

Compassion is defined and identified in this paper as a powerful and universal motivator for actions that could help attain sustainable outcomes and enable aspirational forms of sustainable tourism, including just tourism, hopeful tourism and enlightened mass tourism that have not yet demonstrated real-world traction. Despite its potential, compass...

This chapter investigates how local residents in community-based tourism (CBT) situations within the periphery/semi-periphery interface perceive the relationship between CBT and ‘development’. Qualitative research methods using a grounded theory approach were applied to examine perceptions of 55 local residents living in three CBT case study sites...

As a knowledge domain, contemporary indigenous tourism is framed in reference to cultures conventionally recognized as ‘indigenous,’ and engages this almost exclusively from a supply-side perspective. This paper reimagines indigeneity and indigenous tourism as embracing also the other 94% of global population. From a utilitarian perspective, this i...

Low-priced tour packages are mass tourism power projection sites where providers attempt to restrict tourist power. This study adopts a hybrid design that incorporates dual analytic autoethnography and blog analysis, sharing not only the authors’ experiences and insights into the negotiation between supplier attempts to disempower tourists and reci...

The profile of the " Western " ecotourist is becoming increasingly clear as a result of concerted research efforts in this area. In contrast, little is known about the characteristics of Asian protected area visitors and their relationship with ecotourism, despite the rapid growth and large numbers of such consumers. Such knowledge is essential if...

Sustainable tourism is a widely used term that has accumulated considerable attention from researchers and policy makers over the past two decades. However, there is still an apparently wide gap between theory and practice in the area. Recent scholarly research has tended to focus on niche areas of alternative tourism rather than address the broade...

This article describes a research agenda for investigating the relationship between tourism and the Chinese Dream, informed by the G20 First East-West Dialogue on Tourism and the Chinese Dream held in late 2014 on Australia’s Gold Coast. Six themes comprise this agenda, including (1) clarification of the “Chinese Dream” construct, (2) connections b...

Shani and Arad (2014) claimed that tourism scholars tend to endorse the most pessimistic assessments regarding climate change, and that anthropogenic climate change was a “fashionable” and “highly controversial scientific topic”. This brief rejoinder provides the balance that is missing from such climate change denial and skepticism studies on clim...

This final response to the two climate change denial papers by Shani and Arad further highlights the inaccuracies, misinformation and errors in their commentaries. The obfuscation of scientific research and the consensus on anthropogenic climate change may have significant long-term negative consequences for better understanding the implications of...

Shani and Arad (2014) claimed that tourism scholars tend to endorse the most pessimistic assessments regarding climate change, and that anthropogenic climate change was a “fashionable” and “highly controversial scientific topic”. This brief rejoinder provides the balance that is missing from such climate change denial and skepticism studies on clim...

After reviewing volunteer tourist motivations generally, 804 domestic visitors to two National Parks in Australia's Gold Coast region were surveyed to identify the motivations and barriers that would either facilitate or inhibit participation in a range of 20 hypothetical volunteering and “quasi-volunteering” site enhancement activities, both on- a...

The potential for resident attitude surveys to reduce the negative community impacts of tourism is constrained by their emphasis on closed-ended cognitive statements requiring simplistic numeric responses. This paper explores ways to obtain and analyze open-ended survey outputs from 791 residents in order to develop effective prescriptive recommend...

•First peer reviewed publication to link tourism to the Chinese Dream.•Tourism/Dream relationship contextualized by enlightened mass tourism.•Nine-cell matrix positions three tourism modes against three relationships.•Framework for investigating sustainable tourism “with Chinese characteristics”.

The littoral pleasure periphery (LPP) is a major and expanding spatial feature of Brazil that is dominated by almost 200 specialised coastal resorts, beachfront metropolises and beachfront cities. It is notable in an emerging economy context for the extent to which domestic forces have influenced its development, including not just favourable geogr...

The notion of the periphery and its relationship to tourism is one that has been a source of debate for many years. The concept of a periphery obviously raises the question of peripheral to what, while the term is often used in a relatively negative context with respect to levels of development and/or influence on central government decision-making...

Award programmes facilitate recognition and reward of innovative practices creating industry benchmarks for world-class standards. Growing recognition and adoption of sustainability practices and corporate social responsibility charters amongst hotels internationally is nudging the sustainability paradigm. However, comprehensive empirical data, det...

The ‘small is beautiful’ school of tourism, inspired at least indirectly by Schumacher, has a long pedigree rooted in the Grand Tour and some forms of pilgrimage, but found compelling contemporary expression since the early 1980s under the guise of ‘alternative tourism’ (AT) (Dernoi 1981; Gonsalves 1987; Holden 1984). Perhaps it was the rapidity wi...

Tourism is affected by social, political, economic, technological and environmental changes at all scales. Population growth, redistribution of wealth, geopolitical changes and conflicts, rising fuel costs, climate change and its consequences, new technologies and work patterns, and all forms of social fashion influence who wants to travel where, f...

Protected areas in Vietnam and other developing Asian countries are being subjected to growing ecological stress due to increases in the number of domestic and international visitors. The latter in large part are alleged to adhere to a widely recognised biocentric Western construct of the 'ecotourist' that should minimise the attendant environmenta...

Social media are revolutionizing the way that destinations are being portrayed and perceived, yet remain underresearched in tourism. Netnographic analysis of 7,187 international comments on a YouTube video depicting an antitourist incident in the Maldives revealed two opposing social representations of the social-mediatized gaze. The first is hegem...

The application of Butler's tourism area life cycle model to the Korean literary village and hyper-destination of Kim Yujeong yields a basic pattern of conformity, although the staggered and overlapping sequencing of indicators suggests the presence of successive exploration, involvement, and development “tendencies” rather than stages. Apparent co...

Contentiously-themed events are a growing but under-researched element of the destination product mix. A survey of 880 adults on Australia's Gold Coast revealed diverse attitudes toward Schoolies Week, an annual high school-leaver celebration characterised by extensive partying and drinking. Most sampled residents are either ‘conditional supporters...

Critical Discourse Analysis of 206 South Korean peer-reviewed academic journal publications and interviews with managers and volunteers of ecotourism sites extracted from these articles indicate the existence of a distinct, endogenously informed South Korean construct of ecotourism. With regard to the three core criteria of ecotourism, “nature-base...

Cluster analysis of survey responses from 804 visitors to national parks in Australia’s Gold Coast hinterland indicated variable proclivity to participate in diverse site enhancement activities. The “enthused” (8%) are willing to engage in focused activism such as planting trees, and incidental activism such as opportunistic litter removal. Willing...

Using resolution-based dialectics, sustainable tourism is contextualized as an evolving synthesis arising from the need for the capitalist-based mass tourism thesis and the ethics-based alternative tourism antithesis to amalgamate because of internal contradictions that limit their contribution to development. That this synthesis is skewed to mass...

We used analytical auto-ethnography to explore the package tour experience of overseas Chinese in China. Soft power and hard sell both emerge as integral aspects of this sellscape. Soft power capitalizes on participant motivations of cost, culture, curiosity and consumerism and is manifest in high quality and low cost facilities and services. Hard...

Sustainable Tourism as a paradigm of development originated from the convergence of several streams of thought nearly three decades ago. It has tended to follow a ‘smaller is better’ theme but there are significant questions about the saliency of this theme in a 21st world characterized by change, contentiousness, conflict and uncertainty. Sustaina...

Peeters’ well-considered rejoinder emphasises the utility of a systems approach for framing the planning and management of sustainable tourism that takes into account global as well as local impacts. All five factors that are alleged to facilitate sustainable tourism are necessarily dynamic and speculative, and hence contestable, and more attention...

An emotional landscape (or emoscape) of resident reactions toward a widely circulated video of a Maldivian service sabotage incident was constructed using commentaries collected from social media. Emotions were overwhelmingly oppositional towards the incident, encompassing visceral emotions such as shock and sadness, reflective fight responses incl...

Protected areas in Vietnam and other developing Asian countries are being subjected to growing ecological stress due to increases in the number of domestic and international visitors. The latter largely adhere to a widely recognised biocentric Western construct of the ‘ecotourist’ leading to particular management and product development implication...

An investigation of Francis Beidler Forest, South Carolina, was conducted to identify the psychographic characteristics of visitors. Results from 976 survey respondents revealed the expected dominance of venturers (35%) and near-venturers (54%), and additionally a small but distinctly centric third cluster (11%). Venturesomeness was associated with...

The formulation of alternative tourism as an ideal type in the 1980s implied various positive quality-of-life (QOL) outcomes, focused mainly on community empowerment. Evidence from farm-based tourism, volunteer tourism, and community-based ecotourism, however, indicates that expected QOL benefits are not always realized and that ideal-type characte...

Celestial ecotourism is a neglected and hitherto unrecognised subsector that is dominated by the observation of nocturnal ‘megacaela’ (mega-skies). Observatories are the single largest component in terms of visitation, while aurora-viewing is the most articulated as a specialised commercial tourism (though not necessarily ecotourism) industry. Give...

This is the first study to investigate the source of visitor first awareness of a low profile attraction. Questionnaire responses from 976 walk-in visitors to South Carolina's Francis Beidler Forest reveal word of mouth (WOM) as the most important source, followed by regionally placed brochures and local highway signage. Sample segmentation indicat...

Four categories of contemporary tourism heritage were identified in this exploratory study of Las Vegas (Nevada, USA) and Gold Coast (Queensland, Australia) based on location, originality and scale: (1) in situ representations that memorialize tourism and related phenomena through plaques, statues and/or festivals, (2) ex situ original items displa...

This opinion piece contends that tourism's expanding engagement with climate change, as it is currently unfolding, is not necessarily conducive to the interests of tourism sustainability. Inherent unpredictability, long-term timeframes, lack of directly tangible consequences or clearly identifiable villains, issues with credibility and vested inter...

The sustainable ancillary resource management (SARM) practices of US-based birding festivals are investigated. A questionnaire completed by organisers of 108 of 135 identified festivals (80%) revealed several normative SARM practices such as signage re-use and container recycling, and a large number of innovative practices undertaken by one or more...

Visitor loyalty is necessary to generate a virtuous cycle of people—park symbiosis, but knowledge about loyalty expectations is insufficient. A survey of 300 repeat visitors to South Carolina’s Francis Beidler Forest, a private protected area, yielded a hierarchical pattern of loyalties, with positive overall place identity attitudes and positive i...

This paper assesses the evolution of the relationship between tourism and indigenous peoples. Based on published work on indigenous tourism in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, a six-stage model of evolution has been proposed. The model begins with (1) pre-European in situ control, characterised by high local control and indigen...

Contemporary discourses on sustainable tourism aspire to be comprehensive through their emphasis on interrelated environmental, economic, and socio-cultural dimensions of sustainability, yielding so-called 'triple bottom line' outcomes. A more comprehensive approach, however, requires consideration of the geopolitical context that facilitates these...

This article is a commentary on Jim Butcher's paper entitled "The Mantra of 'Community Participation' in Context". It is argued that Butcher rightly points out how community-based tourism (CBT) has maintained its status as orthodox in some academic and non-profit quarters despite its numerous flaws and contradictions which, as also correctly noted,...

In-depth interviews with 19 owners of exceptionally successful US-based conventional travel agencies revealed negative public perceptions of travel agencies to be the main external threat facing the sector. Misplaced faith in Internet-based cybermediaries, unqualified travel agents, negative mass media coverage and failure to attract young entrants...

The credibility of contemporary ecotourism is threatened by the global dominance of a model that minimally fulfils the three core criteria – nature-based attractions, learning opportunities, ecological and sociocultural sustainability – that characterise this sector. A more rigorous 'comprehensive' model is better capable of fulfilling ecotourism's...

A symbiotic approach to park management holds that visitation offers benefits both to visitor and park (as through the beneficial activism), and hence should be encouraged. Accordingly, factors that constrain visitation to a park should be identified and mitigated, especially as they apply to local residents whose daily behavior is likely to affect...

An analysis of opportunities and constraints reveals potential for a limited ecotourism sector in Saskatchewan dominated by an intraprovincial market. A framework is proposed which augments the existing inventory of individual ecotourism sites by taking into consideration the variable spatial context within which these sites occur. Encompassing the...

To address the dearth of literature on the relations between local residents in urban areas and nearby higher-order exurban protected areas, this study examined the perceptions of Columbia (South Carolina) residents toward Congaree National Park. Mail-out survey results from a random sample of 455 adult residents showed positive overall attitudes t...

An historical examination of Antigua's tourist industry reveals the existence of a "planation' model of tourism developed applicable to some peripheries. The pre-tourism phase of the model is characterized by the dominance of plantation agriculture, and by the status of tourism as a negligible agent of landscape change. Agriculture and tourism temp...

IntroductionFactors Impeding the Attainment of Sustainable TourismConclusion

In September 2007 an international group of 35 experts on sustainable tourism met in Helsingborg, Sweden. They reviewed past progress in the subject and ways forward in the 21st century circumstances of climate change and rapidly increasing travel demand. They sought to develop an international research agenda on sustainable tourism as well as high...

In-depth interviews with owners of 19 exceptionally successful US-based travel agencies were analyzed using a ground theory approach to reveal customer service excellence, employee enrichment and effective networking as three core perceived strengths that comprise a theme of 'relationship building'. The latter is supported by a theme of 'facilitati...

The ecotourism literature is focused on market segmentation, ecological impacts of wildlife viewing, and community-based ecotourism, but there has been minimal attention to critical areas such as quality control, the industry, external environments or institutions even as the components and parameters of ecotourism are being extended. This imbalanc...

New Hampshire's Old Man of the Mountain illustrates the concept of attraction residuality, wherein a destroyed iconic tourist site is reinvented as a residual attraction through a process of selected ex situ reconstruction and memorialisation. Various mechanical and social reproduction strategies characterise the latter component, including the con...

This paper contends that the adoption of practices affiliated with sustainable tourism is neither broad nor deep within the conventional mass tourism industry, and that, at least in the more developed countries, this veneer sustainability on the supply side mirrors the pervasive veneer environmentalism that characterizes the demand side of tourism....

Yes Yes

In May, 2003, hikers in Franconia Notch State Park in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, USA, observed that the Old Man of the Mountain, the state's iconic 12m granite rock face symbol and primary tourist attraction, had collapsed due to centuries of geological weathering and disintegration. While the sudden and unexpected loss of a regionally i...

This chapter highlights the strengths and weaknesses of cluster analysis for those considering its application as a market segmentation technique. The first section considers the nature and philosophical underpinnings of cluster analysis. The second section discusses the method's application to the Lamington ecotourism market study (Queensland, Aus...

Analysis of core criteria of ecotourism suggests two “ideal types” based on the level of sustainability outcomes. The minimalist emphasizes superficial learning opportunities focused on charismatic megafauna, while its sustainability objectives are site-specific and status quo-oriented. The comprehensive model adopts a holistic and global approach...

Ecotourism emerged as a nature-based manifestation of alternative tourism, which is still regarded by some academics and practitioners as the most legitimate manifestation of this sector. While an analysis of the three core criteria of ecotourism points to the suitability of high order protected areas as ecotourism venues, modified spaces also have...

The distinctiveness of the urban-rural fringe as a tourism venue, which merits recognition of exurban tourism as a distinct subfield, is based on a unique product amalgam that includes theme parks, tourist shopping villages, near-urban protected areas, factory outlet malls, golf courses and touring. In addition, the market is characterised by blurr...

A cluster analysis involving 1,244 visitors to six popular recreational sites in the hinterland of Australia's Gold Coast revealed diverse attitudes toward tourism development and product integration in this urban-rural fringe, although biocentric tendencies and a desire to maintain the hinterland in its present condition were dominant in all clust...

This book looks at the economic, social and environmental consequences of nature-based tourism, and its effects on land managers. It discusses the importance of links and partnerships, as well as the conflicts, between commercial tourism interests and land management agencies. The book includes 15 technical chapters drawn from the Fenner Conference...

The relative lack of new thinking and writing in the area of alternative tourism since the early 1990s remains something of a mystery to this reviewer, given the early promise of that model to redress the systemic and widespread problems associated with conventional mass tourism. This may in part owe to the emergence of the ``sustainable tourism''...

The rapidly expanding ecotourism field has spawned a rich run of academic and popular publications over the past decade. Among the most recent of these is this collection of almost 200 case studies compiled by the prolific and peripatetic Ralf Buckley of Griffith University, Australia. Arranged by region, the case studies include examples of ecolod...