Purpose This conceptual paper aims to introduce awe as a fundamental emotional mechanism in fashion tourism. It elaborates on how fashion-related practices evoke awe through four distinct forms of vastness and how this leads to tourists’ change and growth. Design/methodology/approach This paper follows a typology-development approach for conceptual papers by synthesizing insights from fashion tourism, experiential consumption, transformative tourism and awe research. By synthesizing these insights, this paper bridges key gaps in the literature, proposes a conceptual model of awe in fashion tourism and suggests a research agenda on theory, contexts and methods to advance the marketing and management of destinations and fashion brands. Practical implications are provided. Findings This paper proposes that sensory, collective, temporal and narrative vastness serve as appraisals of the emotion of awe in fashion tourism. Awe then triggers four core psychological mechanisms of transcendence: intrapersonal, interpersonal, transtemporal and transpersonal, which lead to fashion tourists’ change and growth. Originality/value This study investigates the important emotion of awe in fashion tourism. It develops a typology of perceived vastness (sensory, collective, temporal and narrative) that explains how fashion-related practices exceed tourists’ ordinary experiences in destinations. This paper advances fashion tourism theorizing beyond pleasure-based accounts by positioning awe as a conceptual bridge between curated fashion-related experiences and fashion tourists’ change and growth. This paper also extends transformative tourism (mainly focused on volunteering, nature and pilgrimage) by explaining another trigger related to awe-inspiring experiences. In addition, it offers a structured agenda for future research.
Purpose This study aims to examine whether large language models (LLMs) can improve tourism demand forecasting accuracy compared to established statistical and machine learning approaches. Design/methodology/approach A systematic out-of-sample comparison is conducted using monthly tourism arrival data from Eurostat for eight European source markets. Benchmarks include optimized seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA), exponential smoothing (ETS), Prophet, Random Forest and seasonal naive models. Three LLM families are evaluated as zero-shot forecasters. Robustness is assessed across a pre-COVID stable period, a future period beyond LLM training cutoffs and an older model test. Findings LLM-based forecasts demonstrate consistent performance advantages over all benchmark models across countries and evaluation periods. In the main post-COVID period, LLMs achieve mean MASE values of 0.67–0.85 compared to 1.56 for ETS, 2.67 for SARIMA, 3.04 for Prophet and 4.32 for Random Forest. The LLM advantage persists in the pre-COVID stable period (LLM MASE 0.85–0.90 vs SARIMA 1.71 and ETS 1.31), indicating that the benefit extends beyond structural-break contexts. Robustness tests using an older LLM model and forecasts for a future period beyond LLM training data indicate that data contamination does not explain the observed performance patterns. Prompt ablation analysis reveals that providing contextual information (country identity and date labels) is the most beneficial design choice, while seasonal and shock hints offer no consistent improvement. Diebold–Mariano tests show directional evidence favoring LLMs in 31 of 32 pairwise comparisons, though limited test sample size (14–23 observations per country) precludes individual-country statistical significance at conventional levels. Research limitations/implications The analysis focuses on monthly national-level arrival data and zero-shot prompting. Future research should examine alternative frequencies, destination-level data, fine-tuned or retrieval-augmented LLM designs and hybrid approaches combining LLM outputs with statistical model adjustments. The limited test sample size (12–24 monthly observations per country) restricts statistical power for individual-country significance tests, though the consistency of directional advantages across all countries provides compelling qualitative evidence. Practical implications LLMs offer a scalable decision-support tool for destination management organizations with near-zero implementation cost via API access. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study provides the first multicountry European benchmark comparing LLM-based forecasting with optimized statistical and machine learning models across multiple evaluation periods, with systematic robustness controls for data contamination.
Purpose This paper aims to develop the multi-level eco-emotion activation framework (MLEAF) to address the fragmented understanding of how ecological emotions, like “flygskam” (flight shame), shape travel decisions within tourism systems. Design/methodology/approach A scoping review was conducted following Joanna Briggs Institute and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines and analysed 67 peer-reviewed publications using descriptive quantitative techniques and inductive thematic synthesis. Findings The MLEAF sees the eco-emotions as operating simultaneously across individual, social and institutional levels, connected by feedback loops and resistance mechanisms. It explains why flygskam drives change in some tourism contexts but has no effect in others and shows that the value−action gap is a result of the system rather than individual failure. Practical implications The framework shows that “flygskam” does not have to be a choice between sustainability and tourism survival. When emotional awareness is backed by social norms that value sustainable travel and by infrastructure that offers real alternatives, tourism can be transformed instead of declining through mode switching, slow tourism and better accessibility. Originality/value The MLEAF is the first integrated conceptual framework that explains how eco-emotions activate, move across levels and either lead to change in tourism systems or fail to do so. It gives tourism policymakers, destination managers and industry practitioners a basis for coordinated interventions that support both environmental and tourism objectives.
Purpose This study aims to explore psychological ownership of nature among local recreational hunters in villages surrounding Dana Biosphere Reserve in Jordan and how this feeling of ownership is reflected in their environmental responsibility. Design/methodology/approach Using a snowball sampling technique, this study recruited a sample of local recreational hunters and conducted semistructured interviews to obtain in-depth insights into their experiences and perspectives. Findings The findings reveal that hunters exhibit a strong sense of PO of nature, expressed through key dimensions of self-identity, possession and belongingness. This sense of ownership is associated with more responsible behavior. Participants demonstrated various environmentally responsible behaviors, including sustainable hunting practices, adherence to regulations and encouraging sustainable behavior among fellow hunters. Originality/value This study makes a novel contribution by investigating recreational hunters’ PO and demonstrating its role in fostering pro-environmental behavior. The findings indicate that hunters demonstrate a strong sense of PO, which in turn encourages environmental responsibility. Overall, this study is among the few scholarly efforts to apply PO theory in the context of outdoor recreation in general and recreational hunting in particular.
Purpose This paper aims to examine how branded retail environments become embedded within tourism as symbolic travel anchors. It introduces the concept of brand pilgrimage to explain how digitally mediated retail spaces become ritualised tourism destinations through youth influence, omnichannel engagement and family travel planning. Design/methodology/approach An inductive qualitative design was adopted using three semi-structured focus groups with 12 tweens (aged 9–12) and follow-up interviews with six parents. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis to explore how branded retail experiences become integrated into family tourism practices. Findings Brand pilgrimage operates through an interconnected process linking algorithmic visibility, anticipatory ritualisation, household negotiation, in-store performance and memory circulation. Omnichannel ecosystems generate desire before travel, while tweens influence destination evaluation and itinerary planning through digitally mediated engagement. Retail visits become performative and socially meaningful experiences that extend into post-visit sharing, reinforcing future travel aspirations. The findings also reveal variation in participation, highlighting differences between active and passive engagement and gendered patterns of anticipation and performance. Originality/value This paper introduces brand pilgrimage as an analytical framework for understanding how youth-led, platform-mediated practices may position branded retail environments as components of contemporary tourism systems. Rather than proposing a universally applicable model, this study identifies the conditions under which branded retail environments may become travel anchors within family tourism.
