Serena Volo

• PhD in Tourism Marketing
• Professor (Associate) at Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

The shift from packages to independent travels has significant consequences for the Chinese tourism market. This review systematically examines past studies focusing on the characteristics and behaviours of outbound group and independent Chinese travellers to identify the factors that have driven the shift of travel mode. Using an adapted version...

Coordination among tourism firms operating within a destination is essential to enhance competitiveness and to face market changes. This study aims at investigating the constituent dimensions of coordination among tourism firms, by systematically reviewing past studies from top tourism and hospitality journals. Using an adapted version of the PRISM...

Purpose The aim of the study is threefold: understanding the interconnections amongst visual and verbal multimodal communication strategies used in food discourse; identifying the themes of celebrity chef's food discourse with respect to pro-environmental behaviour; and providing a methodological framework to visually analyse food-themed videos. D...

Collaboration, creativity, and self-efficacy are extremely important skills for students pursuing careers in management; these skills can empower them to overcome setbacks and obstacles. Pedagogical approach based on digital art collaborative learning can enhance students’ skills as they experiment with novel perspectives. Within management educati...

Travel restrictions and social distancing imposed to curb the spread of the new coronavirus have been strongly hitting tourism since March 2020. Tourism forecasting literature addressed the effects of shocks in contexts characterized by a predictable route to recovery. COVID-19 is without precedents. In this article, monthly overnight stays for the...

Purpose This study aims to explore US hotel guests’ privacy concerns with a twofold aim as follows: to investigate the privacy categories, themes and attributes most commonly discussed by guests in their reviews and to examine the influence of cultural proximity on privacy concerns. Design/methodology/approach This study combined automated text an...

COVID-19 disrupted international tourism worldwide, subsequently presenting forecasters with a challenging conundrum. In this competition, we predict international arrivals for 20 destinations in two phases: (i) Ex post forecasts pre-COVID; (ii) Ex ante forecasts during and after the pandemic up to end 2021. Our results show that univariate combine...

This chapter provides an informed review of service management in the E-Tourism Era. The core of the chapter focuses on three aspects of service management that have significantly been reshaped with E-Tourism: customerprovider interaction, customer relationship management, and service recovery process. These three relevant areas are herein analyzed...

Tourists' emotions have a pivotal role in tourists' cognitive evaluations and behavioral responses. Fleeting but powerful, emotions are associated with individuals' biological makeup, shaped by their experiences and related to personal mental associations. The aim of this contribution is twofold: to broaden the depth and breadth of the emotion disc...

This study investigates luxury hotel guests’ online reviews to explore how ratings, language and sentiment differ according to guests’ culture of origin. The study considers three large cultural groups (Asian, North American, and European) examining hotel guests in their reviews to identify the most recurring themes in association with luxury touri...

Highlights This research note discusses visual methods in tourism research. Different paradigms can be used to harvest the value of visual big data. The opportunities offered by Instagram visuals and metadata are discussed.

Museums, art galleries and artists were able, even during the challenging lowdown months, to stay active in keeping contacts with their audiences. The Getty Art Challenge was one of the most successful of such initiatives. Endurance and passion for art drove the initiative and the outcome that is available on Instagram is evidence of the interrelat...

This chapter aims to provide a brief evolution of the overtourism concept, highlights its enables and its impacts, and then discusses the resulting managerial challenges. The chapter provides a perspective on overtourism based on a review of selected literature on the topic and its related areas. The findings discuss the diverse approaches so far p...

Purpose This paper aims to discuss the evolution of tourism data and critically debates future perspective for producers and users of tourism data. Design/methodology/approach This paper provides a perspective on tourism data based on selected literature. Findings Industry developments, technological changes and novel methodologies have influence...

Il ruolo degli indicatori è centrale nella pianificazione e valutazione delle prestazioni aziendali, delle performance delle destinazioni e degli impatti dell'industria turistica di una nazione. Il ruolo degli indicatori turistici nel misurare il raggiungimento degli obiettivi e nell'anticipare gli scenari futuri è stato ampiamente riconosciuto dag...

Purpose The aim of this paper is twofold: to provide empirical evidence of the knowledge-sharing process within virtual communities interested in war heritage sites and to compare user-generated content (UGC) in virtual communities with destinations’ official communication about war heritage sites to identify, original and consumer-oriented narrat...

In the era of value co-creation, meaningful tourists’ experiences are the result of individuals participating in the creative process. The emotions that tourists raise during their vacation have a pivotal role in their final cognitive evaluations and behavioral responses: only truly personalized and unique co-creation experiences are going to thriv...

Composite indicators are useful tools to synthesize and monitor multidimensional phenomena. The aim of this paper is twofold: to offer the methodological foundations to build composite indicators in tourism and to evaluate a set of currently available composite indicators. Tourism destination competitiveness indicators constitute the object of this...

Tourism statistics are key sources of information for economic planners, tourism researchers, and operators. Still, several cases of data inadequacy and inaccuracy are reported in literature. The aim of this article is to propose a methodology useful to improve tourism statistics: a modified version of the Coarsened Exact Matching. The methodologic...

The mobilities paradigm has always permeated second homes movements as these forms of dwellings are infused by their consumers´ sense and usage of space and time. However, second home research could benefit from a more critical and integrative approach of analysis. The effect of second homes on destinations´ long term identities, market dynamics an...

This study investigates the contribution of tourism to the well-being of island residents. Recent literature on eudaimonic well-being informs the research. A phenomenological approach was used during the field research carried out in small island destinations: the Aeolian Archipelago (Sicily, Italy). Three themes were identified from data analysis....

This research note highlights the relevance of tourism’s natural system of interdependencies in the context of innovation creation. The lack of studies on tourism inter and intra-sectoral interdependencies and on their role in innovation creation is emphasized. Then recent developments in the study of interdependencies and their role in generating...

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this paper is to provide a long-term perspective on destinations’ ability to enhance movie productions. A longitudinal approach is used: a destination film production history is analyzed through a holistic case study. Different cinematic periods were identified and post-release marketing activities documented and discussed....

Tourism statistics are key sources of information for economic planners, tourism researchers and operators. Still, several cases of data inadequacy and inaccuracy are reported in literature. The aim of this paper is to propose a methodology useful to improve tourism statistics: a modified version of the Coarsened Exact Matching. The methodological...

THIS PAPER IS NOW PUBLISHED IN TOURISM MANAGEMENT: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261517716301522 Composite indicators are a useful tool to synthetize and monitor multidimensional phenomena and in the last decade they are pervading several domains of tourism studies. This study includes a systematic review of destination compet...

This Tourism Economics Special Focus presents a selection of papers, refereed and revised for publication, presented at the Consumer Behaviour in Tourism Symposium 2011 (CBTS2011). The Symposium was organized by the Competence Centre in Tourism Management and Tourism Economics (TOMTE) of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. Founded in 2008,...

Statistics that accurately represent the evolution of tourism activity are needed for tourism research and planning. Monthly accommodation statistics provided by the Chilean Statistical Institute show a negative trend despite considerable growth in the number of foreign visitors. This paper proposes a methodology to create sample weights to overcom...

Tourism-related tragedies will likely increase as will the rapidity, detail and reach with which they are communicated to the public. There is a need for a conceptual model for evaluating the time course of travellers' post tragedy perceived risk and travel avoidance. The present communication proposes such a model.

Studies on second home tourism in Italy have focused mainly on statistical estimations of tourist flows in small destinations where the prevalence of second homes is suspected to account for a significant fraction of the destination's domiciles or a significant amount of tourism activity. These studies, however, have generally overlooked the charac...

This paper addresses the need for an understanding of the evolution of international and domestic tourism in Sicily, in particular, the relationship between seasonality patterns and the development of the tourism sector. Annual tourist arrivals and overnight stays data were studied using univariate methods. It is concluded that Italian and internat...

The present study evaluates the value of tourists’ blogs as a research data source by using them to evaluate the tourist experience and to assess their influence on the decision-making process of prospective tourists. The blogs of 103 tourists visiting South Tyrol, 32 written in English and 71 written in Italian, were analyzed using textual and ima...

Despite considerable research on the topic of ‘tourist experience’, its contribution to tourism theory and its exploitation for the purpose of creating practical benefits for marketing practices, remain unclear. The present study reviews the existing literature and then presents a novel approach to interpreting experience in tourism by: (a) integra...

Tourism statistics are one of the key sources of information for economists, public officials and tourism decision-makers. The aim of the present paper is to describe and critique the methodological difficulties encountered when approaching statistical studies in tourism. The case of hidden tourism in island communities is used to illustrate that i...

The present paper addresses the issue of communicating tourism crises, with a special focus on the role of the destination marketing organization's Web sites. The risks and impact of the avian flu on the mobility of people, and consequently therefore, on tourism has been addressed. Selected tourism destinations crisis communication strategies were...

The present paper reviews the innovation literature related to tourism and examines the twin problems of operational definitions and measurement of innovation in the tourism sector. A conceptual model is then proposed by which the most relevant aspects of innovation and the most relevant aspects of the “tourism experience” can be integrated concept...

This study was conducted to determine the effect of ancestry on perception of Sicily as a tourist destination. Central Florida students’ perception of Sicily was explored using a combination of qualitative and quantitative design with a sample of 276 students. While all respondents perceived Sicily as a tourist destination rich in scenery, culture...

This study analyzed the effects of the combined psychological characteristics of risk-taking and sensation seeking on the travel behavior and preferred tourist activities of young adults on leisure trips. The results of this cross-cultural study, which was conducted among 1,429 students at 11 universities located in 11 different countries, found th...