This study investigates how female participation on corporate boards influences ESG score in firms operating in the tourism sector, specifically within the hospitality, leisure, and airline industries. Anchored in Upper Echelons Theory and Institutional Theory, the model examines institutional quality and national gender equality as moderating factors capturing interactions between internal governance characteristics and external contextual conditions. Panel data from 292 firms, obtained from Thomson Reuters and complemented with indicators from the World Bank and the United Nations, were analyzed using fixed-effects regressions. The results show that board gender diversity is positively associated with ESG performance and that higher gender equality significantly strengthens this relationship, whereas institutional quality has no significant moderating effect. These findings suggest that, in tourism, a sector highly dependent on reputation, stakeholder trust, and social legitimacy, sociocultural factors play a more decisive role than formal institutions. The study offers theoretical and practical implications for sustainable governance.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is becoming an integral part of travel planning. This fundamental transformation is changing the definition of travel decision delegation, calling for fresh research into responsible AI in tourism. Drawing on agency theory, trust theory and decision delegation framework, this study conceptualises five responsible AI characteristics (reliability, fairness, trustworthiness, accountability, transparency) as evaluative signals for travellers to assess GenAI across three decision delegation levels, i.e., attribute set, choice set, and final decision. Using a multi-method approach, we analyse data collected from 421 travellers. Findings suggest that reliability and accountability are consistent drivers of delegation across all levels, whereas trustworthiness is a threshold condition that becomes significant at the attribute level. We also found that excessive transparency can lead to cognitive overload and reduce willingness to GenAI decision delegation. Our findings encourage future research into responsible AI development in understanding system complexity, algorithmic explainability and traveller delegation confidence.
Despite considerable research, tourists with disability continue to experience barriers when travelling. This study uses a qualitative scoping review approach to synthesise existing literature on the experiences of tourists with disability and travel providers drawing on 177 articles. Most studies investigated perspectives of tourists with disability, used samples from the Global North that had signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability, and were published in high-ranking journals. A conceptual model of determinants of travel experiences from the literature review, framed by the Customer Journey Model is developed. For tourists with disabilities, this model outlined factors affecting perceived ability to travel, information searching, evaluation of alternatives, during-trip experiences, and post-trip reflections. For tourism providers, the model outlined themes of capacity to serve, deciding to engage, information provision, service delivery, and post-trip reflections. Gaps in the literature are identified and an agenda is proposed for future work.
While numerous studies highlight the positive effects of parent–child travel interactions on individual behavior, few explore these experiences from the parents' perspective, particularly with respect to the formation of pro-environmental behavior and its relevance to promoting broader societal green transformation. This study applies intersubjectivity theory, using natural tourist sites in China as a case study, with parents as research subjects. Data were collected via questionnaires and analyzed using PLS–SEM and fsQCA. The PLS–SEM results indicate the following. (1) Except for the lack of a significant positive impact of emotional experience in parent–child interactions on ecological reflexivity, all the other hypothesized paths are validated. (2) Cognitive experiences influence ecological reflexivity differently on the basis of travel decision-making styles. The fsQCA results revealed three distinct patterns driving parents' PEB, with ecological reflexivity as a key determinant. This study provides theoretical insight into the link between interpersonal interactions and tourist behavior, refines parent–child tourism research, and provides empirical evidence to promote PEB within families.
This study investigates how individual and group relative deprivation shape resident–tourist engagement in rural villages, and whether life satisfaction and tourism support attitudes mediate these relationships. A self-administered survey was conducted with 406 residents in seven rural villages in Wuyuan, China. Structural equation modeling (AMOS) and mediation tests (PROCESS) were used to examine nine hypotheses. Results show that both individual and group relative deprivation are negatively associated with resident–tourist engagement. Life satisfaction and tourism support attitudes positively predict engagement, but neither mediates the deprivation–engagement relationships, indicating that deprivation exerts a direct detrimental effect that is not offset by these positive attitudes. The study extends relative deprivation theory to rural tourism and enriches social exchange theory by incorporating perceived inequality and social comparison. The findings suggest that addressing perceived unfairness is critical for reducing resident–tourist tensions and supporting sustainable rural tourism development.
Tourism as a disruptive force raises concerns about cultural sustainability, particularly in socially conservative destinations. Yet sustaining traditional cultural orders in such contexts may perpetuate the marginalization of women. Drawing on evolutionary economic geography, this study frames cultural resilience as an internal mechanism through which societies reconfigure norms toward greater equity. Using ethnographic-oriented methods and two rounds of interviews (2022, 2024), it traces the transformation of the burqa, a traditional face mask worn by women on Qeshm Island, Iran. Findings show that while women had already begun abandoning the burqa before tourism's arrival, its emergence created opportunities to redefine the item. Once a compulsory symbol of modesty, the burqa was reimagined as a canvas for art, entrepreneurship, and cultural expression. This case contributes to debates on cultural resilience and sustainability by showing how women embraced tourism's disruptive forces to sustain culture through adaptive renewal rather than resistance.
Tourist experiences are profoundly shaped by contexts of war and armed conflict. This study examines business war volunteer tourism – a newly conceptualized form of travel involving business leaders who journey to conflict-affected regions delivering humanitarian aid and services. Employing interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore the business war volunteer tourist experience, three macro-level themes emerged: (1) the “whys” – carrying a deep sense of responsibility and care, (2) the internal – harnessing core values and reconstructing contextual realities, and (3) the external – exercising agency within crisis environments. These themes are synthesized through a Möbius strip metaphor, illustrating the seamless interplay between internal and external experiences, bound by the enduring weight of care and responsibility. The findings contribute to tourism literature by demonstrating the distinct and generative contributions of business war volunteer tourism and highlighting how the relational and emotional complexities of such travel are anchored in interconnections of past, present, and future.
This study introduces an AI-driven time series forecasting framework to enhance the prediction of hotel offer prices, defined as the publicly listed prices posted on online travel agencies (OTAs) for future stay dates. Unlike traditional models centered on internal demand or realized average daily rates (ADR), our approach focuses on supply-side pricing decisions and leverages large-scale publicly available pricing data. Specifically, the proposed framework integrates historical posted prices and advance booking prices observed at multiple lead times, complemented by temporal, calendar-based, and event-related variables. Using more than 815 million OTA price observations from 53 hotels over four years (2019–2022), we develop a separate predictive model for each property using a walk-forward one-step-ahead autoregressive approach based on XGBoost, with periodic model recalibration to adapt to evolving market conditions.Additionally, an XAI method (SHAP) is applied to provide a post-hoc interpretation of the model's predictions by quantifying the contribution of each predictor to the forecast. Results show that both historical and advance booking prices—particularly the price from the same weekday of the previous week and the price posted for the same weekday of the following week—are among the most influential predictors of future posted prices. Moreover, based on RMSE, hotel category significantly affects forecasting accuracy, highlighting heterogeneity in pricing dynamics across properties. Overall, the findings demonstrate that publicly available historical and forward-looking offer prices effectively capture market conditions and support accurate AI-driven forecasting of hotel pricing decisions, with direct implications for revenue management systems operating in dynamic and uncertain environments.
This study aims to explore how digital games drive tourists' on-site travel intentions through cultural identity and game satisfaction. The study adopted the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) and identity driven theories and used 11,820 Douban reviews of the domestic 3 A game “Black Myth: Wukong” for its analysis. Large Language Model (LLM) is applied for sentiment analysis, and relevant hypotheses are tested using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) and Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (FsQCA). The study found that learning motivation and cultural identity are the core factors driving tourists' on-site travel intention. Although game satisfaction does not directly affect tourists' on-site travel intentions, it shows an indirect effect through cultural identity. This study provides theoretical support for the integrated development of “game+culture and tourism”, while expanding the application of stimulus-organism-response models in digital culture scenarios, which is of great significance for game development and cooperation of culture and tourism industry.
This study examines the positive and negative aspects of multidimensional adaptation among international migrants in the hospitality and tourism sectors. Specifically, it investigates how psychological, sociocultural, and workplace adaptations affect workplace behaviors and country-level affective orientations. Personality traits, namely extraversion and neuroticism, are included as moderators of adaptation effects. Using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, the study first employs a quantitative approach to identify patterns in 222 survey responses, followed by qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews with 14 migrant employees, to provide detailed explanations and further insights. The findings indicate that psychological adaptation influences both countryphilia and countryphobia; sociocultural adaptation affects countryphobia; and workplace adaptation influences both productive and counterproductive workplace behaviors and countryphobia. Additionally, the moderating effects of personality traits on several pathways were identified. The findings yield nuanced contextual insights and offer practical implications for enhancing the inclusion of migrant workers in the workplace and the host country.
Short-form video has emerged as a dominant communication format in destination marketing, fundamentally reshaping how tourists perceive, evaluate, and engage with destinations across digital platforms. Although a rapidly growing body of research has examined the influence of short-form videos on tourist responses, existing studies remain theoretically fragmented, methodologically uneven, and contextually concentrated. This review systematically synthesises the eligible peer-reviewed literature on short-form video in tourism destination marketing, revealing that scholarly attention to this phenomenon has only gained substantive momentum since the early 2020s. Drawing on this body of work, the review integrates prior findings using the Theory–Context–Characteristics–Method (TCCM) framework to map the intellectual structure of the field and to identify dominant research themes, methodological tendencies, and underexplored theoretical and contextual gaps. The synthesis indicates that existing research primarily explains short-form video effects in tourism through content-related antecedents, including visual, narrative, technical, influencer, and destination cues. Empirically, tourist responses are predominantly captured in terms of attitudinal, emotional, behavioural, and destination-branding outcomes, with psychological mechanisms such as parasocial interaction, mental imagery, telepresence, flow, and perceived value playing central mediating roles. Contextually, the literature remains heavily concentrated on Chinese short-video platforms, with limited cross-cultural and setting-based diversification. Methodologically, prior studies rely largely on cross-sectional survey designs and convenience samples, highlighting the need for greater methodological breadth. Collectively, these findings are synthesised within a Theory–Context–Characteristics–Method based framework that clarifies the intellectual structure of the field and informs future theoretical, contextual, and methodological advancement in short-form video tourism research.
Narrative transportation serves as a key mechanism through which user-generated content, such as travelogues, persuades potential tourists to visit destinations. While established in general marketing, its application in high-intensity service contexts like tourism remains underexplored. This study conducts five experiments using travelogues to validate the narrative transportation pathway from empathy to peak experience to visit intention in tourism and extends it by incorporating mental simulation and place attachment induced by virtual tourism (PAIVT). The core mediation and serial mediation effects were confirmed across both high- and low-profile destinations, though with small effect sizes, suggesting a nonlinear “persuasion boundary” under high-intensity narrative conditions. Mental simulation moderates this relationship, showing homologous amplification. Text-photos with process simulation and text-videos with outcome simulation boost persuasion. Conversely, PAIVT reverses this pattern, triggering heterologous compensation where schema-incongruent pairings become more effective. The study offers significant theoretical and managerial implications for optimizing narrative persuasion in experiential services.
Using stimulus-organism-response theory and applying a mixed-methods approach, this study explores negative memorable heritage tourism experiences. An integrated model concerning the antecedents and outcomes of negative memorable heritage tourism experiences was developed based on literature and results of the interviews with 27 tourists. The model was tested using cross-sectional surveys. Data were gathered from 371 tourists and analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. Results indicated that tourism supports and resources, destination management, unexpected incidents, expectation, and negative emotions significantly influence negative memorable heritage tourism experiences, which subsequently affect tourists' recommendations and sustainable behaviors. This study broadens the knowledge of memorable tourism experiences by investigating negative experiences under the heritage tourism context, unveiling that negative experiences significantly contribute to memorable tourism experiences and could cause both positive and negative outcomes. It also provides practical insights to evaluate tourists' negative experiences, identify unmet needs, and optimize destination management and marketing.
This phenomenological study explores how creative venue design shapes visitor experience at Kyotographie, a city-wide photography festival in Kyoto, Japan. Employing auto-driving reflexive photo elicitation and paired interviews, the study collected visual and narrative data that captured what drew participants' attention across multiple exhibition sites. Thematic analysis identified three interrelated experiential dimensions – novelty, authenticity, and affective engagement - revealing how spatial and symbolic design mediates emotional and interpretive responses. Drawing on the experiencescape framework, the study positions historic and culturally significant festival venues as active experiential mediators rather than logistical backdrops. In doing so, it further refines theoretical understandings of novelty and authenticity as spatially mediated and context-dependent dimensions of festival experience. Situating contemporary photography within such venues fostered reflection, emotional resonance, and memorable encounters. Practically, the findings inform festival organizers, heritage planners, and venue managers by illustrating how creative venue strategies can support deeper engagement and sustainable cultural programming.
This study aims to examine the drivers and barriers to Gen-AI (ChatGPT) adoption among tourism and hospitality researchers, using Behavioral Reasoning Theory (BRT), and to identify context-specific factors that influence their adoption. The study employed a mixed-method design. It identified subfactors labeled “reason for,” including time savings, knowledge creation, cost reduction, and low complexity, and “reasons against,” such as ethical concerns, privacy issues, and information currency, regarding tourism and hospitality researchers' attitudes and their adoption of Gen-AI (ChatGPT). Additionally, the findings confirm that openness to innovation has an insignificant effect on reasons against adoption but a significant effect on reasons for adoption and on attitudes toward adoption intentions for Gen-AI (ChatGPT). Attitudes significantly mediate the relationship between reasons and intention. This research enhances understanding of researchers' attitudes and adoption intentions toward Gen-AI (ChatGPT) in academic research by applying Behavioral Reasoning Theory (BRT) and a mixed-methods approach that integrates reasons for and against adoption within a single framework.
This study conceptualizes and measures generative AI (GAI)-enabled travel experiences by explaining how interaction with GAI changes the travel process. Using a two-phase, mixed-method design involving qualitative interviews and large-scale surveys in South Korea, China, and the United States, the study develops and validates a multidimensional scale. The qualitative results of the study showed that GAI acts as an agent that produces four experiential outcomes: hyper-personalized experiences reflecting autonomous preference expression, effective experiences driven by improved confidence and reduced cognitive effort, expanded experiences enabled by broader access to information and possibilities, and deep experiences that foster rich engagement and co-creation. The quantitative findings show that GAI-enabled travel experiences increase satisfaction, which subsequently increases reuse intentions, loyalty, and word-of-mouth. Theoretically, this study advances understanding of the affective, symbolic, and utilitarian dimensions of GAI-mediated travel experiences. Practically, it provides tourism stakeholders with a measurement tool to design and evaluate GAI-driven services.
Digitalization enables distilled liquor heritage sites to attract potential tourists. This study adopted a sequential mixed-methods approach comprising qualitative and quantitative research methods to develop a scale for measuring value cocreation at digitalized distilled liquor heritage sites, and to evaluate the associated behavioral outcomes using the DART model. The DART model has been proven to advance an understanding of the value cocreation of heritage tourism from the tourist's perspective by examining its empirical links with three key constructs: recommendation, cultural cognition, and digital experience. Value cocreation could be contextualized in terms of active dialog, up-to-date and timely information, access to information and interaction, risk assessment, risk avoidance and effectiveness in the research field. Active dialog and transparency greatly improved tourist engagement and the digital experience, and the integrated online-offline channel increased tourist value cocreation. Practitioners should create a comfortable communication environment in both onsite and online settings to interpret the authenticity of heritage sites while simultaneously developing up-to-date promotional strategies. These strategies should be informed by frequent feedbacks from relevant stakeholders on promotional content (e.g., interpretive video clips, websites, or holograms).
This study employs a mixed-methods approach to examine overtourism from a residents' perspective in Barcelona, a city where protests against overtourism have become increasingly common. It identifies four key dimensions shaping perceptions: crowding, lack of security, pollution, and price increases/gentrification. Crucially, the findings frame overtourism as a social phenomenon that goes beyond visitor numbers and physical congestion, encompassing broader socio-economic, political, and environmental dynamics. The study further highlights how age, political views, education, and economic dependence influence residents' attitudes. Results show that overtourism is socially constructed and context-dependent rather than defined by quantitative thresholds alone, challenging traditional carrying capacity models. In doing so, the study advances the academic conceptualization of overtourism and opens new avenues for research that examine it as a complex social phenomenon.
