In digital tourism, travelers frequently disclose personal data despite expressing privacy concerns (i.e. “privacy paradox”). Although mandatory consent explains some disclosure, tourists retain meaningful choice across many encounters. Existing research offers limited insight into how tourists actually navigate these decisions. Drawing on narrative interviews with forty experienced Chinese digital tourists analyzed via the Gioia methodology, this study reconstructs disclosure as a process and identifies five qualitatively distinct decision modes—risk-benefit analysis, anchoring-adjustment, habitual, peer-influenced, and social norms-driven. These modes are linked through two experiential trajectories, analytically reconstructed from participants’ retrospective accounts: a self-centered path from deliberate analysis toward habitual automation, and an other-centered path from peer mimicry toward normative internalization. Both outcomes arise from accumulated disclosure decisions, but only one constitutes privacy cynicism. The paradox is thus mechanistically plural, reframing privacy theory and platform design in tourism.
This study critically examines the ontological assumptions underlying artificial intelligence (AI) research in tourism and hospitality, with growing attention to agentic AI. Existing literature predominantly conceptualizes AI as a tool, limiting discourse on how tourism experiences and sociotechnical systems are co-constructed through human–AI interactions. To address this gap, this study adopts a multi-method approach, combining bibliographic coupling, large language model (LLM)-assisted extraction of theories and variables, and expert interviews. Drawing on digital humanism, transhumanism, and posthumanism, it investigates how assumptions about human–AI relationships are embedded in existing studies. The findings reveal that tourism AI research remains grounded in instrumental human-centeredness framework, conceptualizing AI as an instrument for assisting or augmenting human capabilities. However, industry practice reveals AI as hybrid assemblages entangled with human labor, platforms, and data infrastructure. This study calls for a more relational, multi-layered understanding of human–AI interactions and contributes a framework comprising 15 theoretical propositions.
This study examines how dependence on natural resources and ecosystem services shapes the strategic behaviour of nature-based tourism firms operating in changing environments alongside competing land uses. The study draws on resource-based theory, the natural resource–based view, and the natural resource dependence perspective. It uses semi-structured interviews with 25 micro and small firms in two UNESCO biosphere reserves in Finland to identify a classification of socio-ecological uncertainties differentiated by geographic scale and firm controllability and six strategic approaches organised into three clusters: securing the resource base, operating within ecological limits, and acting under uncontrollable uncertainty. Place-embedded capabilities enable firms to implement these strategic responses and maintain business continuity. These capabilities may also contribute to competitive advantage by sustaining resource-dependent tourism offerings. The study refines these theories by specifying place-embedded capabilities as a firm-level mechanism for engaging with shared natural resources, and provides a framework for navigating socio-ecological uncertainty.
Loneliness is a growing public health concern, particularly among older adults. Tourism research on healthy aging has largely centered on positive well-being; limited attention has been given to whether travel can alleviate loneliness. Drawing on longitudinal data from China and the United States, this study conceptualizes leisure travel as a form of activation and examines its relationship with loneliness among older adults. The findings indicate that greater participation in leisure travel is associated with lower levels of loneliness among this group over time. Travel also offsets age-related declines in daily social participation and the accompanying increase in loneliness, highlighting travel's activating role in later life. Leisure travel further serves as a compensatory resource for older adults with relational deficits. This mechanism varies across cultural contexts. By moving beyond the focus on positive emotion, this study demonstrates tourism's therapeutic potential for reducing loneliness and promoting well-being in aging populations.
