While environmental sustainability inherently relies on long-term strategies, how the time frames of sustainability goals shape tourist engagement remain unclear. Drawing on temporal motivation theory, this research examines the temporal paradox in tourism, the tension between the distal goals sustainability requires and tourists’ preference for the present. Across nine studies, distal goals consistently elicited lower engagement than proximal goals across attitudinal measures, provider choice, and willingness to pay a premium. The effect was driven by reduced perceived immediacy. The research further identifies two boundary conditions, local framing and communication of progress, that mitigate the paradox by restoring immediacy and enhancing engagement for distal goals. These findings offer providers a framework for communicating long-term sustainability while maintaining the immediacy needed to drive tourist engagement.
Extant research has identified positive and negative consequences of greenwashing, creating a paradox because the phenomenon is inherently deceptive and detrimental to environmental and societal well-being. This study examines these paradoxical consequences across micro-, meso-, and macro-level stakeholders in the travel industry, as perceived by employees. Using a three-stage qualitative design with employees ( N = 68), the study demonstrates that greenwashing is a self-sustaining, multilevel phenomenon driven by paradoxical cognition among employees, organizational stakeholders, and regulators. Together with structural entrapment and paradoxical actions, these dynamics create a paradoxical engine that sustains greenwashing, while deception remains hidden from external stakeholders, who process green claims peripherally. Participants further indicate that deterrence requires stakeholder engagement with these paradoxes and mechanisms promoting central processing of environmental claims. The study proposes a multilevel framework for deterring greenwashing in the travel industry and advances paradox theory by explaining its persistence across interconnected stakeholder groups.
Amidst China’s social individualization and shifting gender attitudes, women’s solo travel has emerged as a practice that challenges traditional gendered spatial norms. Grounded in an interpretivist paradigm, this study adopts a qualitative approach integrating online textual analysis, auto-ethnography, and in-depth interviews to systematically explore the psychological growth trajectories of urban youth Chinese female solo travelers. The research constructs a three-stage cyclical model to depict and reveal the internal mechanisms through which solo travel fosters women’s sustained psychological growth via risk reappraisal, self-empowerment, and psychological capital cultivation. Theoretically, the study advances understanding of gender, space, and travel by specifying how solo travel transforms risk perceptions from “threat avoidance” to “challenge assessment” and builds self-efficacy through attributional shift, cognitive reappraisal, and accumulation of a mental evidence base. Practically, the findings inform the design of gender-sensitive tourism services, safety communication strategies, and social-media-based support systems that could usefully and meaningfully enhance women’s well-being.
Stated preference methods are widely applied in tourism research, yet their validity depends on respondents perceiving surveys as policy consequential. This paper examines how such perceptions shape willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimates for redesigned tourism supply. Using a discrete choice experiment with 927 French residents, we estimate a latent class hybrid choice model that incorporates policy consequentiality as a latent construct. Results show that stronger beliefs in consequentiality increase engagement with choice tasks and reduce opt-out behavior, but also heighten cost sensitivity, yielding lower WTP estimates. These findings reveal that perceived consequentiality acts as a boundary condition for truthful preference revelation in private-good tourism settings, where product redesign requires coordinated stakeholder decisions. Ignoring consequentiality perceptions may lead practitioners to overestimate tourists’ WTP and make suboptimal pricing, product development, and investment decisions. Destination managers should therefore clearly communicate respondents how their survey responses will inform future tourism planning.
Using the Avoid-Shift-Improve framework, this study examines how demographic factors and psychological, behavioral, and attitudinal drivers are associated with tourists' low-carbon decision-making across mobility, consumption, and accommodation. Survey data were collected from 416 young Finnish travelers, and analyzed using correlation tests, repeated-measures ANOVA, and cluster segmentation to examine cross-domain and cross-strategy variation. Findings show that demographic factors have limited influence, whereas psychological, behavioral, and attitudinal drivers motivate sustainable choices. Shift dominant mobility decision-making, Avoid emergence in consumption, and Improve are most common in accommodation. Three adopter groups are identified as strong, moderate, and weak, reflecting different levels of engagement. Theoretically, the study advances low-carbon tourism research by empirically operationalizing Avoid-Shift-Improve as a domain-sensitive decisional framework. Practically, the findings support segmented policy and marketing strategies, emphasize benefit-oriented sustainability communication, and underscore the need for context-specific interventions to facilitate broader adoption of carbon-neutral travel choices.
Cultural differences often entail risks and uncertainties, making anxiety a common experience among cross-cultural tourists. To address the limited theoretical attention to this issue, our study draws on data from 33 interviews to explore the content dimensions and formation mechanisms of cross-cultural travel anxiety. The findings identify four content dimensions: functional adaptation anxiety, behavioral transgression anxiety, travel safety anxiety, and social relationship anxiety. These responses are influenced by a combination of factors, including cultural environmental differences, information transmission, cognitive bias, defensive barriers, and personality traits. The core category of the cognitive construction of risk and integrative instability integrates the identified factors. It clarifies the underlying mechanism by which cross-cultural travel anxiety forms, with the proposed visual framework contributing to a clearer, integrated theoretical structure. Overall, this study advances the theoretical understanding of cross-cultural travel anxiety and provides managers with actionable implications for preventing and mitigating such negative emotions.
This study conceptualizes Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) pivotal role in shaping the tourism industry’s contribution to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), presenting AI as a transformative force capable of significantly accelerating SDG progress by enhancing sustainable tourism practices. Accordingly, we adapt and apply the FATE framework to propose a structured approach and insight into the responsible implementation of AI in the tourism industry to achieve SDGs. Specifically, the proposed framework postulates that harnessing AI’s potential responsibly requires deliberate integration guided by the principles of fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics. Through a systematic literature review and the synthesis of interdisciplinary knowledge, this study establishes foundational insights into the intricate relationships between AI, tourism industry, and sustainable development, providing a theoretical lens and practical considerations for stakeholders aiming to leverage careful implementation of AI toward achieving SDGs.
This study examines how health and sustainability principles shape tourists’ everyday lifestyles and vacation choices across three destinations. Cluster analysis identifies a substantial consumer segment inclined toward healthy and sustainable lifestyles. The findings suggest that sustainable consumption has evolved into a broader lifestyle that links environmental concerns with community engagement, social justice, personal growth, and well-being. Results from a discrete choice experiment show that this segment does not place a significantly higher premium on vacation attributes related to health and sustainability than other segments do when choosing a vacation, suggesting that these features have become a baseline expectation rather than a distinguishing factor. Results further indicate that destinations recognized for their established sustainability practices are more positively evaluated by this lifestyle-inclined group. Key implications include promoting sustainability as an integrated strategy to enhance quality of life and encouraging destinations and tourism providers to incorporate health and sustainability into experience design.
Phygital experiences are becoming prominent in tourism, yet their impact on visitor engagement, particularly in relation to multisensory stimulation, remains underexplored. Grounded in dual-process and optimum stimulation level theories, this study aims to understand how hedonic and functional aspects of phygital experiences influence visitor engagement, satisfaction, and visit intentions and assesses how varying combinations of sensory stimuli moderate these relationships. Data was collected through scenario-based experiments with 413 participants, each exposed to one of six videos representing distinct levels of sensory richness. SEM-based results indicated that both emotional and technological dimensions significantly enhance visitor engagement, which positively influences satisfaction and intention. Multi-group analysis revealed that the strengths of these relationships vary according to the degree of sensory stimulation. Specifying sensory synergy as the coordinated, congruence-based integration of modalities, the study advances dual-process and optimum stimulation level theories in phygital tourism and offers practical guidelines for designing sensory-balanced, human-centered experiences.
Dark tourism visits to atrocity memorials produce simultaneous distress and profound meaning, yet mediating psychological mechanisms remain inadequately theorized. This study introduces ethical scrutiny-a temporally and functionally delimited specification of post-visit moral-evaluative cognition, not a wholly independent construct-within an integrated framework of Cognitive Dissonance Theory, Emotion Regulation Theory, and Moral Psychology. A three-wave longitudinal design (N = 385) at Auschwitz-Birkenau employed Covariance-Based Structural Equation Modeling and Random-Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Model. Moral reflection prospectively predicted ethical scrutiny (beta = .350), enhancing cognitive fulfillment alongside emotional engagement. Both educational and voyeuristic motivations activated cognitive reappraisal as adaptive regulatory pathways; the ethical ambiguity of voyeuristic motivation at this site is explicitly preserved and unresolved by these data. Random-Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Model revealed 55% to 63% of variance reflecting stable between-person dispositions; within-person discomfort suppressed recommendation intention. All findings are site-conditioned; cross-spectrum generalizability requires independent empirical demonstration.
Sustainability in tourism has largely emphasized harm reduction, yet destinations increasingly seek net-positive social and ecological outcomes. The psychological orientation that predisposes travelers to pursue such regenerative actions, often requiring time, effort, or sacrifice, remains under-specified. We introduce the Regenerative Travel Mindset (RTM), a dispositional, trait-like belief system specified a priori and composed of three dimensions: positive impact intentionality (a deontic belief that travel should improve places), community reciprocity (commitments to fairness and co-agency with host communities), and long-term stewardship (future-oriented responsibility beyond the trip). Across ten studies (total N = 2,541), we develop and validate an 18-item RTM scale. The scale demonstrates excellent reliability, discriminant validity in relation to adjacent constructs (biospheric values, environmental locus of control, growth mindset, and dispositional optimism), and four-month test-retest stability. RTM predicts high-impact regenerative behaviors, for example, choosing surplus-positive trip packages, supporting restoration levies and conservation-linked pricing, paying price premiums, and allocating donations to community-led ecological projects. An experimental narrative intervention causally elevates RTM, which in turn increases willingness to pay, perceived authenticity, and policy support. Practically, the scale enables traveler segmentation, message framing that activates stewardship and reciprocity, product design embedding hands-on restoration, and policy communication that builds acceptance for conservation instruments. Theoretically, the work extends mindset theory to a moralized, domain-specific context and offers a validated diagnostic tool to advance regenerative tourism.
Last-chance tourism (LCT) involves visiting destinations threatened by environmental change or human activity before they disappear or transform. Although vulnerability-focused media messages can raise awareness of threatened places, they may also increase visitor pressure. Using a pre-test/post-test experiment, this study examined how LCT appeals influence visit intentions for two cultural heritage sites with different awareness levels: Venice (higher awareness) and Hasankeyf (lower awareness). The results show that LCT appeals moved the last-chance motive from the lowest-ranked to the second-ranked priority in both groups, indicating motivational activation. However, this activation translated into higher general visit intention only for the lesser-known destination, while foreseeable visit intention remained unchanged for both destinations. Theoretically, the findings show that destination awareness conditions whether motivational activation converts into behavioral intention. Practically, the results suggest that vulnerability messaging should be used cautiously and, where appropriate, framed as conservation-oriented communication rather than as a simple invitation to visit.
This study investigates how host-guest interactions drive sustainable innovation in small tourism businesses (STBs) amid rural destination evolution. Grounded in the value co-creation theory and the tourism area life cycle framework, the research draws on 40 in-depth interviews and field observations (2018-2024) to explore how STBs and guests collaboratively generate innovations. This study indicates that STBs can strategically leverage host-guest interactions to navigate contemporary challenges in various stages of development. Findings highlight the pivotal role of value co-creation-encompassing co-production and value-in-use. Specifically, co-production integrates resources from STBs and guests to foster innovative operational practices, while value-in-use leverages relational dynamics to tailor context-sensitive offerings. These insights challenge passive views of resource-constrained STBs in sustainable innovation. It advances theoretical understanding of businesses' sustainable innovation, value co-creation theory, and tourism area life cycle framework. It offers practical guidance for STBs and destination management organizations within evolving rural destinations.
To address the limitations of concepts such as aura, invented tradition, and emergent authenticity in explaining how authenticity evolves, this study proposes the concept of "activation" to elucidate the interplay between cultural continuity and adaptation. Using Zhouzhuang, an ancient town in China, as a case study, this research accomplished three research objectives: (1) uncovered the dimensions of activation via interviews; (2) analyzed the internal "signifier-signified" structure of authenticity symbols to reveal the mechanism through which activation balances cultural adaptability and continuity; and (3) developed a framework that integrates activation with existing concepts to provide a multifaceted account of authenticity's evolution. The framework offers actionable guidance for heritage management, including delineating "green zones" of acceptable adaptation and "red lines" that safeguard core cultural meanings, thereby supporting the revitalization of endangered traditions, managing commercialization and cultural innovation within clear boundaries, engaging younger audiences, and sustaining cultural vitality.
Hard adventure tourism, characterized by high risk and physical challenge, is a recognized context for personal transformation. However, the process through which this transformation occurs, particularly the synergistic interplay between the social context of the subculture and embodied experience, remains underexplored. This ethnographic study, employing participant observation and in-depth interviews with 23 hard adventurers, investigates this process. Our findings reveal that self-transformation unfolds through three distinct phases of the self: (1) the controlled self, developed as the subculture disciplines the body through rigorous preparation; (2) the radial self, performed and validated through shared bodily practices within the subcultural group; and (3) the fragmented self, sustained by the subcultural community that keeps the embodied identity alive. The study demonstrates that the hard adventure subculture actively shapes, gives meaning to, and reinforces the very embodied practices that drive personal change, with transformation strengthening both the self and social bonds.
This research investigates how businesses can design effective and ethical Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) appeals in tourism marketing. We introduce a four-dimensional framework that identifies content (trip desirability and social presence), source (from social connections vs. businesses), style (explicit/direct or implicit/indirect in expressing FOMO), and orientation (focusing on missing personal growth opportunities or social comparison) as critical design elements. Four experiments show that FOMO messages that are rather explicit/direct or that compare people socially can backfire, making tourists feel uncomfortable and less positive about the business. Conversely, messages highlighting the potentially missed personal growth opportunities are more likely to create positive reactions. Integrating insights from past FOMO and tourism marketing research with ethical design principles and consideration of emotional well-being, our work theoretically adds to the underexamined domain of business-generated FOMO appeals and provides actionable guidance for developing FOMO-based strategies that foster engagement without compromising tourists’ autonomy or well-being.
This paper examines how biodiversity risk influences liquidity in global tourism firms and how institutional environments shape this relationship. Using a panel of 1,247 firm-year observations across 27 countries from 2000 to 2022, we find that biodiversity risk is positively associated with firms’ cash holdings, consistent with a precautionary liquidity motive under ecological uncertainty. Dynamic panel data specifications confirm persistence in cash policies. We further observe that business regulations and the freedom to enter markets significantly strengthen this relationship, indicating that institutional quality amplifies firms’ precautionary responses to biodiversity risk. These findings are robust across alternative specifications, subsamples, and liquidity measures. Theoretically, the paper extends the precautionary motive for cash by incorporating biodiversity risk and institutional moderation. Practically, the results highlight the importance of regulatory design and market structure in shaping how tourism firms manage liquidity under environmental pressures.
While natural disasters have the potential to disrupt tourism demand, evidence on their impacts is mixed. This study positions governance quality as a central factor in explaining these divergent outcomes, examining its moderating role in the relationship between natural disasters and inbound and domestic tourism. Using panel data from OECD countries, we show that governance quality reduces, and in many cases reverses, the negative effects of disasters on inbound tourism, with effects persisting into the following year. In contrast, domestic tourism increases upon disasters in countries with low-governance quality. This moderating effect for domestic tourism is evident only for geological disasters, suggesting that governance matters for sudden-onset events. Overall, our results indicate that governance quality reshapes the tourism-disaster relationship, sustaining inbound tourism when strong and resulting in increased domestic travel when weak, underlining the differential effects of governance quality across inbound and domestic tourism.
