Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is increasingly used to produce images of places, yet how users negotiate representations of real locations remains understudied. Building on the tourist gaze, we propose the AI gaze: a technologically mediated way of seeing place that is co-produced through negotiation between users and the socio-technical assemblage underlying GAI. Combining semantic image analysis, interviews, and 523 prompts from 36 participants in Poznań and Birmingham, we show that these images reinforce stereotypical tropes, lack diversity, and include visual glitches. We argue that the AI gaze is distinct because of how agency is distributed: the GAI-assemblage seemingly resists attempts to align images with human understandings of place, while also enabling users to remix and challenge stereotypes.
This study explores the intersection of mindful community and the co-creation of experiences between tourists and locals within the context of agritourism. Utilizing a comprehensive ethnographic methodology, field observations and interviews were conducted at three coffee farms in the Philippines and two tea farms in China. Our qualitative analysis identifies two interlocking components of mindful community: value-in-use (i.e., mindfulness, emotional place attachment, spontaneous culture conservation, social responsibility, and environmental sustainability), and co-production (i.e., open innovation, quality of life and well-being, and community resilience). This study advances value co-creation theory by clarifying how experiential evaluation and collaborative practice jointly generate value in agritourism. Lastly, the study offers practical implications for agritourism destination management and sustainable community development.
Rapidly growing cruise ship tourism in northern regions has been a double-edged phenomenon, bringing monetary benefits to otherwise limited economic futures but also undesirable environmental impacts such as air pollution, wastewater discharge, and noise. This paper examines responses from five northern communities to these challenges, using a polycentric governance lens characterized by multilevel and overlapping decision-making centers. This study adds to a growing body of empirical research on how polycentricity is practiced, finding that affected communities display a variety of institutional adaptations in response to authority fragmentation. European destinations have stronger collaborative arrangements and higher legitimacy to address environmental impacts relative to US case studies, which rely more on conflictual approaches, but both are significantly impacted by locally experienced effects.
This study investigated the extent to which the social and environmental features of tourism destinations could support senior tourists' walking, and the emotions and responses evoked. Semistructured face-to-face interviews were conducted with 29 senior tourists who visited Macao (China). The results revealed that enhancing the usefulness, safety, and comfort of the physical environment; improving the aesthetics of architecture and decoration; and providing interesting visual stimulation and a friendly atmosphere would encourage senior tourists to walk more. Perceived walkability evoked positive emotions and led to more movement, longer times spent on the streets, increased spending, and recommendations to others. This study highlights the importance of person–environment fit to promote walking. Practical implications are offered.
Dark rides are popular, archetypal theme park attractions, yet empirical research on their visitor experience remains limited. This study provides a quantitative exploration of Cornelis and Strijbosch's (2024) dark ride experience model, which describes how immersion, emotions, cognitions, and attentional switching (driven by switch factors of motivation, opportunity and ability) shape overall evaluations. Using self-report data from 770 visitors across nine dark rides at a Western European theme park, collected with a purpose-built post-experience survey, we tested 15 derived hypotheses. Results offer partial, context-bound support: switch factors, immersion, and positive emotions consistently predicted overall evaluations both directly and indirectly, whereas findings on cognitive engagement and negative emotions remain inconclusive. Implications for future dark ride research, design and development are discussed.
