This study analyses how renewable energy transitions, intertwined with rural revitalisation, evolved into energy tourism at a hot spring (onsen) tourism destination in rural Japan, where onsen water has long been part of local culture and everyday life. Using social practice theory, the study demonstrates how geothermal energy was integrated into tourism not by introducing disruptive new infrastructure but by building on traditional onsen practices, such as bathing, snow melting, and building heating. Our results reveal that traditional onsen practices were reinterpreted as sustainability initiatives and assembled into a coherent form of geothermal energy tourism. This process enabled the onsen village to link renewable energy transitions to rural revitalisation through destination branding, while preserving local culture and livelihoods. The study advances tourism planning by illustrating how renewable energy transitions and rural revitalisation can emerge through continuity and adaptation within long-standing, locally embedded tourism practices, leading to a form of energy tourism.
People often neglect children in conversations around making tourism, hospitality and events greener. In Ghana children are not involved in matters that affect them. Most methods are claimed to be "adult" methods. This study demonstrates why children should be viewed as active participants in creating sustainable futures by utilising the concept of childism, a method of thinking that contradicts adult-centered thinking. This study examined reports, studies, and policies. This study advocated for the national tourism policy to set objectives that are relevant for children. Ghana's tourism, hospitality and events industry and other stakeholders have to engage children as partners in the sector, rather than simply as passive observers. Involving children through formal channels of engagement, such as advisory boards and youth-led initiatives, will not only enhance the industry but will also help to create more equitable and sustainable outcomes for children in Ghana.
This study examines how overtourism reshapes residents' everyday mobility and experiences of urban space in Barcelona's most touristified neighbourhoods. Drawing on the Walk-along methodology, 44 interviews were conducted in G & ograve;tic, Barceloneta, and Sagrada Familia to explore how tourism pressure is experienced, negotiated, and embodied in daily life. Findings show that residents adapt their mobility practices through temporal, spatial, and modal adjustments aimed at avoiding congestion and overcrowding. These adaptations reveal processes of displacement from public space and a deterioration of everyday coexistence between residents and visitors. The impacts of overtourism are unevenly distributed, reflecting differences in neighbourhood contexts and residents' social conditions, particularly age, care responsibilities, and length of residence. The findings also indicate that experiences during the COVID-19 tourism slowdown shaped perceptions of the return of mass tourism. The study highlights the role of everyday mobility as a lens for understanding the uneven socio-spatial consequences of overtourism.
Low-carbon tourism initiatives frequently generate stakeholder conflicts, even when sustainability goals are widely shared. This study examines how such conflicts arise and propagate in heritage tourism, using Quanzhou Ancient City, China, as the focal case. Findings show that government officials, tourism operators, residents, and tourists hold divergent cognitive, emotional, and behavioural orientations toward low-carbon policies. These divergences become visible as interlinked interlinked structural, value, relationship, information, and interest conflicts. Within China's vertical-departmental (tiao-kuai) governance system, participants described conflicts as interacting across governance arenas and stakeholder relationships. This study contributes a process- grounded framework of triggering, inducement, manifestation, and transmission for explaining conflict emergence, intensification, and circulation in sustainable heritage tourism.
The rapid growth of short-term rentals (STRs), including peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation, has led to more Airbnb hosts adopting professionalized service strategies. New forms of hosts have emerged with the most prominent categories being professional and non-professional hosts. Although previous research has referred to these two distinct groups, it is notable that no research has explicitly managed to distinguish their service practices and differences. The current study aims to examine the differences in hosting services between professional and non-professional hosts. Drawing insights from a Mediterranean destination (i.e. Cyprus), semi-structured interviews were conducted with Airbnb hosts (31 hosts were contacted and 24 participated in the interviews). By employing the Resource Based View theory (RBV) and conducting content analysis, the study proposes a new conceptual framework that outlines the service strategies and resource allocations of both host types. The findings indicate that professional hosts predominantly leverage a broader and more structured bundle of resources to pursue efficiency-oriented and standardized practices, whereas non-professional hosts rely more on intangible and human resources (e.g. local knowledge and personalized interaction) to deliver authenticity and relational trust. Furthermore, the current study offers theoretical implications on peer-to-peer accommodation regarding professional and non-professional hosts demonstrating how Resource-Based View theory can be meaningfully extended beyond firm-centric settings to encompass micro-entrepreneurial actors. Finally, several practical implications are provided for practitioners, policymakers, and the platform, enhancing the understanding of how to build a more sustainable hosting community.
Initially constructed for wine production and storage, the Rajac wine cellars represent a unique nineteenth-century complex in eastern Serbia, which has recently gained attention due to revitalization efforts. As there is a lack of empirical research on heritage preservation integrated with sustainable tourism development concerning this complex, the main objective of this study was to explore its sustainable development potential through the perspectives of key stakeholders. By applying a qualitative methodology involving seventeen semi-structured interviews with representatives of travel agencies and local entrepreneurs, the study identified current challenges and offered recommendations for the sustainable transformation of the complex into a heritage-based wine tourism destination. The interviews revealed shared concerns about deteriorating infrastructure, workforce shortages, and insufficient institutional support, emphasizing the need for stronger stakeholder governance and post-intervention support. This study contributes to linking heritage preservation with sustainable tourism governance in rural contexts, offering practical guidance adaptable to similar heritage destinations.
This study examines how host populations' emotional dispositional state influences perceptions of tourism-induced environmental damage, mediated by perceived intergroup threat and moderated by socio-economic factors. Drawing on dispositional affect theory and integrated threat theory, we used a mixed-methods design. Interviews with host residents (n = 22) explored emotional dispositions and perceived intergroup threat in environmental narratives, an experiment (n = 203) tested these patterns under induced affective states, and a survey of Omani residents (n = 1,265) examined the relationships at the trait level. Findings show that self-assured residents perceive less environmental damage from tourism, whereas self-doubting residents report greater environmental concerns. Income and education serve as socio-economic boundary conditions that moderate the association between dispositional tendencies and perceived intergroup threat, consequently influencing environmental impact perceptions. These results highlight the need to foster positive affect and address socio-economic factors to improve host-tourist dynamics and support environmentally responsible tourism development.
Natural resource conflict in protected ecotourism areas has received little research attention . Based on the Actor-Network Theory, this study examines the causes and consequences of the natural resource conflict in the Kakum National Park Area of Ghana based on in-depth interview data from residents, traditional leaders, personnel of the Forestry Commission and Ghana Heritage Conservation Trust. The findings revealed that the causes of the conflict reflect intersectional dimensions of social, economic and cultural issues that border on intra and inter-generational access to the natural resource, dispossession of land, deprivation of livelihood opportunities, lack of benefits from tourism and destruction of farm crops through human-wildlife conflict. The consequences of the conflict are both at the individual and communal socio-economic levels and manifest through increased poverty, food insecurity, out migration of youth from conflict communities and increased community infighting. The implications of these findings in the context of sustainable tourism are discussed.
This study investigates the nonlinear impact of tourism development on poverty reduction under different information and communication technology (ICT) regimes in 18 transition economies using an unbalanced panel dataset spanning 1995-2023. Poverty is measured through both infant mortality rates and household consumption expenditure to capture health and welfare dimensions. Conventional linear panel estimators provide preliminary evidence that tourism and ICT contribute to poverty reduction; however, the results are unstable across specifications, indicating the presence of nonlinear dynamics. To address this limitation, the study employs a Panel Smooth Transition Regression (PSTR) model, using government ICT expenditure as a threshold variable to identify regime-dependent effects. The findings reveal statistically significant ICT thresholds beyond which the poverty-reducing effects of tourism intensify substantially. In low-ICT regimes, tourism yields only modest welfare gains, whereas in high-ICT regimes, its impact on reducing infant mortality and increasing household consumption becomes markedly stronger.
This paper examines how tourism development in small island destinations can be planned to balance economic growth, community well-being, and environmental sustainability. It employs a participatory simulation, implemented through a role-playing exercise, to explore how stakeholders negotiate tourism trade-offs under constrained conditions. Drawing on simulation sessions and qualitative interviews conducted on Hai Tac and Phu Quy islands in Vietnam, the study analyses how planning-relevant actors prioritise economic, environmental, and social concerns. The findings indicate that although growth-oriented options often attracted support, environmental protection, trust, and visitation management remained central to participants' evaluations. At the same time, short-term economic priorities could outweigh longer-term social and ecological considerations. The PERMA framework was applied after inductive analysis as an interpretive lens for organising well-being-related themes. The study suggests that participatory simulation can support tourism planning by making stakeholder priorities, tensions, and trade-offs more explicit before decisions are institutionalised.
This conceptual paper rethinks the sharing economy in tourism by explaining why sharing-based tourism can generate access, connection, and opportunity while also producing commodification, inequality, social tension, and environmental pressure. Drawing on debates on platformization, trust, authenticity, sustainability, and post-growth tourism, the study introduces the Inner Sharing Economy in Tourism (ISE-T) framework. ISE-T conceptualizes sharing not as a linear progression or purely transactional practice, but as four relational orientations: transactional sharing, relational sharing, meaningful sharing, and conscious co-existence. These orientations may coexist, dominate, weaken, or be reactivated across commercial platforms, community-based tourism, non-profit hospitality exchange, and regenerative tourism. The paper contributes by shifting attention from platforms alone to the inner orientations through which sharing is understood, organized, and transformed. It also offers a diagnostic framework for redirecting sharing toward more relational, meaningful, and ethically conscious forms of sustainable tourism.
Resilience has become a key approach for the tourism sector to cope with increasing and deepening challenges in its operational environment. These changes include climate change, natural disasters and geoeconomic and geopolitical shifts. Ideally, resilience building can help the sector to undergo recovery transitions in a sustainable manner and, thus, adapt to future changes and shocks. This calls for increasing understanding, research, and policies focusing on recovery and resilience in tourism. This special issue discusses resilience building in the tourism sector with an aim to seek pathways towards a more sustainable development within the African tourism sector context. The articles cover cases from a wide spectrum of African countries and examine different facets of tourism development with a specific context of recovery cognizant of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Global South. It is concluded that resilience building requires more sustainable tourism-informed research, education, and the formulation of relevant policies and strategies within the pan-African development context.
Pro-environmental behaviour is typically explained through individual moral norms; however, little is known about whether-and through which mechanisms-children can shape parents' sustainable behaviour while travelling. This study proposes and tests a conceptual model that explores how parent model identity salience and perceived child judgment influence parents' moral obligation, pro-environmental behaviour, and willingness to sacrifice while travelling. Drawing on norm activation theory, the study investigates the psychological mechanisms through which parental roles and intergenerational perceptions shape sustainable actions. Survey data collected from 238 Turkish parents travelling with their children were analyzed using PLS-SEM. The results indicate that parent model identity salience has a significantly positive effect on both moral obligation and pro-environmental behaviour. Moral obligation positively predicts pro-environmental behaviour but does not significantly affect willingness to sacrifice. Contrary to expectations, perceived child judgment does not influence moral obligation or pro-environmental behaviour, yet it significantly drives willingness to sacrifice.
