Sebastian Filep

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University | PolyU · School of Hotel and Tourism Management

In recent years, tourism and positive psychology has developed as a humanist-inspired study of individual flourishing in tourism. This conceptual article aims to elaborate on epistemological foundations of tourism and positive psychology research and presents an overview of current trends and future directions for this field. The rapid rise of posi...

Research on tourists’ eudaimonic and hedonic wellbeing has grown exponentially in the tourism literature. The paper re-examines the conceptualization of psychological tourist wellbeing. While there is agreement that tourist wellbeing is multidimensional in nature, it is unclear what specific dimensions, or psychological domains, underpin tourists’...

Virtual reality is providing new opportunities for health and well-being, organizational learning, and tourism management. The study reported in this paper aims to examine whether engaging in a virtual reality tourism experience could function as a restorative intervention strategy to enhance mental well-being of employees in the workplace. The stu...

Travel has been identified as a significant contributor to psychological well-being. The recent COVID-19 global pandemic disrupted travel patterns and behaviours, thereby negatively affecting the psychological health and well-being of those involved. With accelerating technology use, multiple forms of virtual tourism have emerged as alternatives to...

Although repeat visitation is professed as a desirable phenomenon in studies on destination loyalty, there is limited explicit consideration of well-being as a psychological outcome for repeat visitors. Consequently, this research explores the intersection between repeat visitation and the well-being of repeat visitors to Fiji. Drawing from in-dept...

Destination personality, a set of human characteristics associated with a destination, is a vital factor in forming a unique image of a destination, ultimately affecting tourists' destination choices and travel decisions. Despite the recent attention to this topic in tourism research, destination personality remains an under theorized concept. This...

Positive psychology is a growing global research field of psychology that has flourished in the last two decades. Positive psychology suggests that the positive human future depends not only on minimising inextricable suffering but also on focusing on personal growth, well-being, and flourishing. Researchers in positive psychology have focused thei...

Generosity, a charitable and kind gesture towards others, was an integral aspect of hospitality in ancient times. The concept of generosity however has not yet been sufficiently examined in contemporary, commercial hospitality. In commercial hospitality, generosity can be facilitated through a generosity economy – an economy where generous acts are...

The paper examines emotions generated in potential visitors through the promotional imagery used in fright tourism, a form of dark heritage tourism. In fright tourism, an unusual combination of human emotions of fun and fear are experienced by tourists through activities such as haunted house visits and ghost tours. A modified model, based on Russe...

Despite a substantial history of research on the well-being of host communities at tourism destinations, the individual psychological well-being of local residents remains an underexplored topic. This study explores the psychological well-being of tourism host community members through a case study of Queenstown, New Zealand. By drawing on the self...

Reminiscing on memorable travel experiences is a common practice amongst many travellers. This study introduces positive psychology interventions-cultivation of character strengths and savouring strategies-to examine memorable and meaningful tourism experiences (MMEs). Although both interventions aim to increase well-being, little research has been...

Research on well-being has experienced exponential growth in tourism studies. However, knowledge about well-being of seniors in tourism is still limited, and thus conceptually underdeveloped, despite the growth of the ageing population and increased research focus on the subject. Consequently, the purpose of this review is to provide a holistic und...

The paper reports on a study which explored how a sense of love is experienced in diaspora tourist experiences. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with the Sierra Leonean community in London, England, accessing feelings and meanings of the tourists. Following thematic analysis, it was revealed that the emotion of love manifested its...

Quality relationships are fundamental to human well-being. Friendships are voluntary relationships between autonomous individuals that can shed light on how bonding and intimacy are experienced in tourism environments. Adopting a qualitative, humanist approach, this paper explores the topic of friendship in tourism. Through a thematic analysis of t...

This study examines the role of companionship in shaping memorable tourism experiences, traveller well‐being and behavioural intentions by drawing upon a conceptual framework of well‐being. Based on data collected from 430 respondents in Australia who had recent travel experience, the results from structural equation modelling (SEM) confirmed that...

The COVID-19 pandemic has seriously impacted the global tourism industry, effecting the livelihoods of millions of tourism workers and disrupting host communities. Current research in tourism management has focused on understanding the economic, social and political impacts of the pandemic. This professional perspective aims to examine operational...

Reflection is a form of deep thinking that is evident in everyday lives – private and professional – and this article offers insights for key parties about reflecting on research outcomes to ensure enhanced tourism impacts post-pandemic. Using a hermeneutic perspective on reflection, the authors reflect on research outcomes since the pandemic began...

The well-being of participants at major destination events has received little empirical attention in the literature. This paper explores LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & other sexual minority) event participants’ hedonic and eudaimonic well-being at the iconic Hangzhou Rainbow Marathon (HRM) in China. PERMA (Positive Emotions, Engagemen...

Whilst there is an increasing literature about managing local Indigenous values in land-based settings for visitor experiences there is limited knowledge around how Indigenous values contribute to tourism development in marine environments. This paper explores how Indigenous knowledge and practices are integrated into scuba diving tourism developme...

Sport tourism literature has paid limited attention to the psychological well-being benefits derived from participating in this form of tourism. This is especially the case for adventure sport tourism, which is characterised by travel to a destination to participate in an adventure sport event, such as competitive surfing or mountain biking. Throug...

Against the backdrop of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 3, good health and wellbeing, this paper reports on a study that examined how outdoor guides perceive their role in facilitating the psychological wellbeing of tourists who consume slow adventure experiences. These experiences, such as canoeing, stargazing or foraging, are cha...

Despite limited recent contributions, explorations of the human emotion of love are underexplored in tourism studies. Love can be defined as both companionship (such as friendship) and as passion (romance and sexual connection).The aim of this paper was to explore how the concept of love can be integrated into tourist motivation and satisfaction re...

This working paper examines the ways in which spiritual tour guides, those involved in shaping mystical or divine tourist experiences, facilitate or create the experiences for their tourist clients. To address this aim, in-depth, semi-structured online interviews were conducted with 11 spiritual tourism guides from various regions of the world. The...

This study explores the complexities of integrating indigenous knowledge and practices into a sustainable marine ecotourism development. The integration of indigenous knowledge is a means of enabling active participation from the local communities in marine ecotourism development whilst conserving the biodiversity and safeguarding cultural landscap...

Tourists are increasingly seeking personal development through spiritual, or mystical and divine, tourist experiences. Yet, spiritual tourism research is still largely in its infancy. This paper reports on a research study that aimed to investigate how spiritual tour guides manage and organise, or broker, spiritual tourists’ experiences. To address...

Citation: Parsons, H., Houge Mackenzie, S., & Filep, S. (2019). Facilitating self-development: How tour guides broker spiritual tourist experiences. Tourism Recreation Research. Recent research on co-created tours has suggested that guides broker tourist experiences in four domains: physical access, understanding, encounters, and empathy. However,...

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the concept of subjective well-being within the context of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. In 2015, the United Nations established 17 universal Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These SDGs encompassed the key social, environmental and economic dimensions that can universally impro...

Citation: Parsons, H., Houge Mackenzie, S., Filep, S. & Brymer, E. (2019). Subjective well-being and leisure. In W. Leal Filho, T., Wall, A. Marisa Azul, L. Brandli, & P. Gökcin Özuyar (Eds.), Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Good Health and Well-being, World Sustainability Series, Cham, Switzerland: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978...

Explorations of kindness and gratitude, a felt sense of thankfulness, are missing from tourism studies. Such explorations shed light on psychological value of relationships and social capital. We adopted a positive psychology theoretical lens to explore acts of kindness from strangers towards tourists and to understand how these acts are valued. To...

This study explores the institutional forces behind the uptake of corporate social responsibility in the Tanzanian tourism industry. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 40 managers of tourism businesses. We identify six main motivations for businesses’ engaging in corporate social responsibility: maintaining social legitimacy; influence...

In recent years, participation in flamenco, as a cultural art form, has gained momentum within Spain and internationally. Engagement in flamenco music and dance workshops in Spain has also become an increasingly significant tourism activity. Despite this trend, little research has looked into the nature of leisure experiences of flamenco. This pape...

Although contributions from the disciplines of sociology and anthropology have shaped the foundations of event studies as an academic field of inquiry, contributions from the discipline of psychology have played a minor role in the development of events scholarship. There is an opportunity for a further development of psychology of events as part o...

Academic examinations of visioning, the active imagination of possible futures, have been largely overlooked in tourism studies. While a significant tradition of research on visioning exists outside tourism, particularly within urban planning, there is a lack of knowledge on host community visioning processes in island tourism destinations and pote...

Much of the research on flourishing has adopted the PERMA model. A weakness of this model is that it neglects the impact of morality. In an attempt to redress this issue, the concept of ‘moral-flourishing’ is defined as flourishing of moral agents, noting that ‘being a moral agent’ refers to having morality as the most central aspect of one’s ident...

Based on the Aristotelian concept of Eudaimonia, Seligman has proposed the PERMA model of human flourishing. According to this model people will flourish by nurturing Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment (PERMA). The PERMA model may, however, be criticized on the basis of being value-neutral. The theoretical stu...

Estimates tell us that there are more than 1 billion tourists currently roaming around the planet.1 By the year 2050, one in two people on the planet is expected to be a tourist.2 Millions of travel movements every day affect millions of individuals, numerous societies, and environments in multiple ways. In the popular media and within the broader...

Tourism research on topics such as happiness, quality of life of tour-ists, and tourist well-being has flourished in recent years. This literature clarifies the subjective value of tourist experiences, provides new direc-tions for tourism branding and promotion, and opens doors to fresh re-search on the potential benefits of tourist experiences to...

This article examines the relationship between reported levels of happiness, satisfaction, and risk perceptions during holiday experiences. Empirical examinations of this relationship have received limited attention by researchers, yet examining this topic has theoretical and practical value. Specifically, the purpose of our study was to examine pe...

The purpose of this article is to highlight the implications of the indiscipline of tourism academia for a new generation of tourism academics. Generation Tourism is characterised by scholars with a multi-disciplinary education associated with a broad field of study and commonly considered to lack the advantages of a discipline-focused education wi...

Currently, there are no major models of savouring in leisure and tourism studies. This paper reports on an exploratory study that investigated how tourists reminisce about, or retrospectively savour, their holiday experiences. We aimed to identify which positive emotions are experienced by tourists when they reminisce about past holiday events and...

Positive psychology is a growing, global research field of psychology that has flourished in the last decade, but its tourism applications are underexplored. Researchers in positive psychology investigate topics such as well-being, happiness, optimism, humour, positive emotions, character strengths and similar topics that broadly relate to quality-...

Luganville is a developing dive tourism destination region (DTDR) in Vanuatu, which relies on tourism. This article reports on the shocks and stressors faced by Luganville's dive tourism sector and climate change's exacerbation of these. The study's methodology was based on rapid rural appraisal and case study principles, involving methods of semis...

Luganville is a developing dive tourism destination region (DtDr) in Vanuatu, which relies on tourism. this article reports on the shocks and stressors faced by Luganville's dive tourism sector and climate change's exacerbation of these. the study's methodology was based on rapid rural appraisal and case study principles, involving methods of semis...

Tourism is an engine of economic growth, but its capacity to contribute to good health is only starting to be documented. This paper describes a forthcoming research project with the Ethiopian immigrant community in the Australian state of Victoria. The project aims to discover if writing about positive holiday experiences that involve visits to fr...

Tourism is arguably one of the largest self-initiated commercial interventions to create well-being and happiness on the entire planet. Yet there is a lack of specific attention to the ways in which we can better understand and evaluate the relationship between well-being and travel. The recent surge of scholarly work in positive psychology concern...

Happiness is a concept with a long tradition in philosophy and is central to understanding the meaning of human life. Research on happiness has lately flourished in many social sciences. Yet in tourism studies this concept is underexplored. This lack of attention is surprising as tourism is increasingly seen in the literature as more than a break f...

This article applies models from the field of positive psychology in conceptualising and appraising visitor or tourist satisfaction. In particular, visitor engagement is explored using personal narrative essays as a means of assessing satisfaction. Twenty university study-abroad students participated in the study, writing reflective essays about th...

Dominant tourist satisfaction measures, typically tied to service quality, have recently received much criticism by senior tourism academics (Ryan, 1995; Kozak, 2001; Pearce, 2005). These prominent tourism scholars commonly refer to very similar problems of these measures: the unnecessary and inappropriate focus on expectations as a major influence...

This paper examines a newly created approach to exploring travel motivations, the Travel Career Patterns (TCP) model. Through an analysis of the TCP model, the authors advance travel motivation theory by making three contributions: a refinement of the definition of travel experience; the use and evaluation of essays as a qualitative tool for interp...

This paper examines a newly created approach to exploring travel motivations, the Travel Career Patterns (TCP) model. Through an analysis of the TCP model, the authors advance travel motivation theory by making three contributions: a refinement of the definition of travel experience; the use and evaluation of essays as a qualitative tool for interp...