Drawing on social contagion theory, this study conceptualizes value co-creation in group tours as a situational and episodic contagion process, operating in socially intensive yet temporally bounded contexts with limited normative stabilization. Across four complementary studies, including a field experiment and three scenario-based experiments, results show that tour guides' value co-creation behaviors significantly enhance tourists' value co-creation behavioral intentions. This effect is mediated by tourists' perceptions of a value co-creation climate, defined as a transient, interaction-based construct reflecting rapidly formed shared perceptions within a specific tour experience rather than a stable organizational climate. The perceived climate significantly strengthens tourists' participation behavioral intentions but does not significantly affect their citizenship behavioral intentions. In addition, trait cynicism negatively moderates the effects of tour guides' value co-creation behaviors on both perceived climate and tourists' value co-creation behavioral intentions. By demonstrating how contagion operates differently in short-term, experience-based tourism contexts, this study refines social contagion theory in guided tourism. Importantly, the findings suggest that tour guides function as critical leverage points for stimulating tourists' value co-creation behavioral intentions and perceptions of a value co-creation climate, offering actionable implications for guide training and destination management aimed at fostering sustainable tourism outcomes.
This study examines the sectoral impact of ESG ratings on the financial returns of global REITs, with particular focus on the hotel sector. Using a dataset of 5,241 firm-year observations of global REITs from 37 countries spanning 2001 to 2022, we examine the relationship between ESG scores and the financial performance of hotel REITs and compare it with that in other real estate sectors. ESG ratings are sourced from MSCI, while financial data is obtained from Bloomberg and Compustat via WRDS. The analysis reveals that hotel-focused REITs benefit more financially from ESG enhancements than REITs focused on other sectors. Investments in ESG significantly enhance financial returns for hotels, primarily through increased capital gains rather than operational income. This is consistent with the Resource-Based View, which conceptualizes ESG initiatives, such as energy efficiency, governance quality, and social responsibility, as firm-specific strategic capabilities embedded in hotel REITs' operating and asset management processes. By enhancing demand conditions and improving asset quality and valuation, these ESG capabilities translate into superior financial returns for hotel REITs, supporting the positive ESG-performance association, which is stronger than in other REIT sectors. These insights reinforce the sector-specific financial implications of ESG adoption.
This exploratory qualitative study examines the impacts of soundwalks - guided walks that foreground attentive listening to natural environments - on the tourism experiences of people with visual impairments in Damyang, South Korea. Grounded in Sensory Compensation Theory and Embodiment Theory, we conducted in-depth interviews with 10 purposively recruited participants, supplemented by non-participant observation during the soundwalk sessions; interviewing continued until thematic saturation was observed, and interview transcripts were analyzed thematically. Participants used natural soundscapes and optional assistive technologies to build mental imagery and environmental awareness. Interpersonal dynamics mattered: guide interpretation and peer exchange helped participants connect auditory and tactile cues to situated decisions, which we interpret as emergent cue-to-action moments that may support autonomy and competence. In this exploratory context, these moments are treated analytically as Self-Orientation Episodes (SOEs). However, prolonged narration sometimes constrained participant-led exploration, and some participants experienced sensory overload. For practice, we recommend alternating brief interpretation with planned silent intervals, offering opt-in technology choices so participants can regulate sensory intensity, and providing a short safety-and-orientation briefing that supports independent exploration. The study shows how sensory-inclusive program design can move nature tourism beyond visual-centrism.
This research investigates the representation of people with disabilities (PwD) in tourism marketing, evaluating social perceptions and their self-perceptions related to it. Aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals 3, 10, and 11, this study addresses the marginalization of PwD in tourism, recognizing their potential as regular customers if their needs are met. A qualitative research approach is employed, including a content analysis of marketing materials, two focus group discussions, and 10 individual interviews with people with seeing, hearing, learning, and mobility disabilities. The results indicate limited and inadequate consideration of PwD in tourism marketing, especially across different disability types. This insufficient representation and a lack of pertinent information negatively affect tourism companies' credibility and influence travel decisions. The study enhances understanding of social sustainability's role in addressing marginalization, calling for a shift toward a more inclusive tourism approach. Self-enhancement motivates individuals with disabilities to actively engage in tourism decision-making and product development, aligning industry efforts with their in-group perspectives. This direct co-creation is crucial, as it allows tourism service providers to leverage their knowledge and experiences, ensuring the development of truly needs-oriented accessible tourism. This transformation is achievable through co-creating tourism products and marketing materials, fostered by self-enhancement and collaborative identity.
Visual design serves as a key medium for value transmission in tourism cultural and creative products (TCCPs), yet how design elements combine to shape value perception and decisions within cultural-tourism contexts remains unclear. This study introduces a sensory-semiotic integration framework, proposing that congruent design-achieved through alignment between visual complexity and color saturation-guides tourists' perception of specific sustainability values (cultural or environmental) and thereby drives purchase decisions. Three experiments (including an incentive-compatible behavioral study) show that congruent designs (high-complexity-high-saturation and low-complexity-low-saturation combinations) enhance purchase intention and actual choice more than incongruent designs (high-low, low-high). This effect is jointly mediated through dual pathways by perceived cultural sustainability and perceived environmental sustainability. Further analysis reveals differentiated mediation: the high-high combination operates mainly via perceived cultural sustainability, whereas the low-low combination works primarily through perceived environmental sustainability, with perceived cultural sustainability playing a secondary role. Thus, congruent design can directionally guide tourists toward semiotically oriented value perceptions in context. The findings clarify the value-linking mechanism behind design synergy and provide theoretical grounding and actionable strategies for communicating sustainable value through systematic visual design in TCCPs.
Indigenous-based tourism can alleviate poverty, yet its socioecological trade-offs remain poorly understood. This ethnobiology study examines the Uro people of Lake Titicaca, historically marginalized fishers once confined to floating islands made of totora sedge, to illustrate how tourism reshaped their livelihoods and environments within a couple of generations. It reveals how the Uro strategically leveraged their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and biocultural diversity to achieve economic prosperity through tourism. However, while this partially preserved these resources, it simultaneously eroded them, reducing their TEK and biocultural practices to a curated "pastiche" for tourist consumption. Based on 221 semi-structured interviews, participant observation, archival research, and quantitative surveys, our novel methodological framework "injects" ethnography into an increasingly interdisciplinary collaboration, enriching our understanding of complex socioecological dynamics. Our initial team of ethnobiologists and local Indigenous researchers iteratively integrated ethnographic methodologies while expanding collaborations to include psychologists, anthropologists, ecologists, and tourism scholars. The resulting Injection of Ethnography and Collaboration framework facilitates reflexive discourse among researchers, expanding an originally narrow focus to broader collaboration and developing deeper insights into underlying socioecological dynamics. This framework unveils opportunities for ethnobiology and tourism scholars to engage in interdisciplinary collaboration to better understand the socioecological and biocultural effects of tourism.
Tourism is vulnerable to climate change, traditionally viewed as passively bearing environmental risks. However, can proactive climate governance transform this vulnerability into development opportunities? This study leverages China's nationwide "Climate Adaptation Pilot Policy" as a quasi-natural experiment. Using panel data from 278 prefecture-level cities spanning 2010-2022, we employ a Difference-in-Differences approach with comprehensive robustness checks. Our findings offer four key insights. First, the pilot policy significantly enhances urban tourism development, generating an economically meaningful average increase in tourism revenue for pilot cities-an effect that holds across a battery of validity tests. Second, the policy strengthens tourism competitiveness through two distinct pathways: substantive improvements in ambient air quality and the transmission of credible government green signaling. Third, policy benefits are unevenly distributed, with stronger effects in cities endowed with superior tourism resources. Fourth, well-developed tourism infrastructure significantly amplifies policy effectiveness. Together, these findings provide empirical evidence for the tourism co-benefits of climate governance, illuminating how cities can leverage proactive climate action to cultivate sustainable tourism.
In tourism-dependent economies, where pronounced occupational segregation exposes women to more flexible but precarious service roles, understanding gendered labor market responses to external shocks is crucial for designing inclusive resilience policies. This study examines how economic policy uncertainty (EPU), inbound tourism and immigration shape gender-specific labor market outcomes in Macau. Employing a Bayesian SVAR model with sign restrictions on five shocks (non-tourism business cycle, inbound tourism, uncertainty easing, domestic labor supply and immigration), we identify dynamic responses of labor force participation and unemployment for men and women over 2001Q1-2024Q4. Results show strongly procyclical effects transmitted through occupational segregation and secondary-earner dynamics: women exhibit more persistent LFP gains and unemployment relief from business-cycle and uncertainty-easing shocks, while men respond more strongly in the short run to tourism shocks; immigration produces asymmetric patterns favoring sustained female unemployment relief. These gendered dynamics hold in both full and pre-COVID samples, underscoring that labor market resilience and gender-inclusive policies are interdependent in tourism-dependent economies.
Tourism has long been regarded, both in theory and policy, as a potential instrument for alleviating regional income inequality. However, in the context of rapid digital economy development, its actual distributional effects have increasingly exhibited conditional dependence, necessitating the incorporation of digital contexts into theoretical frameworks. To this end, this study develops a nonlinear integrated analytical framework embedded within the digital economy, systematically elucidating how the digital economy reshapes tourism's impact on regional income inequality and its underlying mechanisms through spatial threshold effects. Using China's city-level balanced panel data and a spatial threshold model, the findings reveal that as digital economy development crosses a specific threshold, tourism's direct effect on regional income inequality shifts from mitigating to exacerbating inequality, and its spatial spillover effect transitions from a radiation effect to a siphoning effect, demonstrating pronounced spatial threshold characteristics. This structural transformation is primarily driven by the widening of the second-level digital divide (i.e. disparities in digital literacy and usage capabilities), while enhanced higher-level digital competencies (particularly digital application capabilities) further intensify this process. These findings provide theoretical foundations and policy implications for addressing the growing interregional divergence in tourism-derived benefits induced by digital divides in the digital era.
Despite widespread pro-environmental awareness, tourists' behaviors often fail to align with their intentions, creating a persistent intention-behavior gap in nature-based tourism. Drawing on social dilemma theory, this study reframes that gap as a weakening of conditional cooperation within shared-resource systems under perceived social loafing. Using a longitudinal field survey (Study 1, N = 263) and an incentive-compatible experiment (Study 2, N = 427), this study shows that perceived social loafing weakens the translation of pro-environmental intentions into actual behavior. This moderating effect operates through two parallel psychological defenses: powerlessness and moral disengagement. An anonymous donation task involving real monetary sacrifice further shows that the gap is most pronounced under high-cost conditions. These findings advance theory by framing the intention-behavior gap as a collective-action problem, clarifying the psychological mechanisms underlying behavioral withdrawal, and offering practical guidance for destination managers seeking to foster sustainable tourist behavior.
Circular waste challenges in tourism arise where global sustainability agendas meet the everyday realities of destinations facing seasonal pressures, uneven infrastructures and competing expectations of environmental care. This study examines circular-waste governance as a glocal process through which global circularity principles are translated into locally credible routines, responsibilities and governance arrangements. It adopts a two-phase design. Phase 1 maps research on coastal circularity from 2000 to 2026 and identifies five recurring legitimacy signals: fairness, low-friction routines, visible environmental gains, decision-embedded metrics and adaptive governance. Phase 2 examines these signals through interviews with 104 stakeholders across Vietnamese coastal destinations. The findings show that circular initiatives are judged through daily experiences of cleaning rhythms, infrastructural gaps, identity attachments and the perceived credibility of governing actors. The analysis identifies three legitimacy pathways through which circular measures consolidate, erode or fluctuate over time. Overall, the study highlights circular-waste governance as a legitimacy-mediated transition in which global principles gain practical force through local translation into credible routines and destination governance practices.
This research examines how individual-level power distance shapes deviant tourist behavioral intentions and how multi-layered social influences condition this relationship. Integrating Social Cognitive Theory, Moral Disengagement Theory, and the Theory of Planned Behavior, we propose that power distance increases deviant intentions by heightening uncertainty about the social costs of punishment and fostering favorable attitudes toward norm violations. Social influence is conceptualized as operating at situational, contextual, and structural levels, which amplify these cognitive processes. Evidence from four complementary studies (N = 1123) supports the proposed framework. Study 1 identifies power distance as a robust cultural antecedent of deviant tourist intentions. Studies 2A and 2B show that witnessing other tourists' deviance elevates intentions, with stronger effects among high-power distance individuals and variation across deviant domains. Study 3 confirms a sequential mediation pathway via punishment uncertainty and attitudinal approval, and demonstrates that subjective norms condition early risk appraisals. Study 4 incorporates county-level crime data, revealing that long-term exposure to permissive normative environments strengthens key cognitive pathways to deviance. Together, these findings advance a multilevel explanation of deviant tourist behavior and offer culturally informed insights for managing misconduct and promoting sustainable visitation.
Multiculturalism sustains the relevance of tourism ethical codes and calls for analysis beyond Western-centric paradigms. This study examines public and sustainable ethical codes issued under China's state-promoted "Civilized Tourism" policy within a context of normative pluralism. Using content analysis and moral language theory, it explores how ethical norms are framed and prioritised. Three findings extend existing debates. First, the concerns related to sustainability are embedded in everyday behavioural norms, featuring collective behavioural orientation and local discourse integration. Second, the codes aggregate deontic, virtue-based, and relational-role-oriented language, reflecting an integrated pluralist structure rather than a single philosophical typology. Third, "civilization" functions as a moral-governance hinge linking policy objectives with behavioural prescriptions. The findings clarify how ethical codes in China reflect a distinctive blend of normative types and policy priorities, providing a useful analytical reference for understanding how tourism ethics evolve in diverse cultural and regulatory environments.
The concept of "Antarctic ambassadorship" suggests that visiting Antarctica inspires tourists to advocate for environmental protection. However, its definition and measurement remain unclear, limiting the ability to assess the true impact of polar travel. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic literature review on Antarctic ambassadorship through the lens of Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) theory. This research provides two critical contributions to the field. First, it clarifies the meaning of "ambassadorship" by mapping the psychological transformation from biospheric values to a felt moral obligation to act, and subsequently to pro-environmental actions. Specifically, it shows how witnessing environmental threats (problem awareness), connecting one's personal footprint to those threats (ascribed responsibility), and believing that one can act to reduce them (outcome efficacy) are catalyzed by a deep emotional connection to the landscape, triggering a moral commitment to protect the region. Second, it proposes a novel framework that operationalizes ambassadorship behaviour by categorizing it into three distinct domains: sustainable living practices, everyday environmental activism, and political and societal engagement. By separating internal drivers from observable actions, our VBN-based framework resolves conceptual confusion and supports both empirical research on ambassadorship and the development of interventions that encourage verifiable environmental protection behaviours among polar region visitors.
