Thalassotherapy, a health practice dating back to ancient times in coastal areas, is closely linked to the originsof tourism in several regions. This study aims to identify the impacts of thalassotherapy practices on touristdestinations. A systematic review was conducted from the perspectives of tourism and health. A total of 61documents were selected from the Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed databases. The PRISMA (PreferredReporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) method and the VOSviewer software were used forword analysis. The primary findings indicate that thalassotherapy activities in tourist destinations do notgenerate negative environmental impacts and contribute positively to the socioeconomic conditions of theregion. Health-related benefits include improved patient outcomes, enhanced quality of life, and increasedwork capacity. The study highlighted case studies from Greece, Spain, Croatia, and Japan. The co-occurrenceanalysis underscored the relationship between thalassotherapy and tourism development. This researchcontributesto tourism management by emphasising the inclusion of health benefits in assessing tourismdestinations, alongside environmental and socioeconomic impacts. A health-sector method was adaptedto improve systematic reviews in tourism, adding specific items. No economic evaluations were found inthalassotherapy projects despite evidence from case studies.
The influence of dynamic factors on the management of congestion in tourist infrastructure is widely studied in academic literature. The tourism sector is one of the most important economic engines in many countries, contributing to job creation, income generation, and cultural exchange. However, managing the load on tourist infrastructure is complex and requires accounting for dynamic factors such as seasonal fluctuations, changes in event intensity, and unexpected environmental or economic disruptions. This article analyzes how seasonality and events affect the load on tourist infrastructure and offers recommendations for managing these dynamic factors effectively. Traditional deterministic models often cannot accurately predict these situations because of high uncertainty and limited information. This study proposes a structured fuzzy decision-making model that allows for flexible assessment of both quantitative and qualitative indicators characterizing the load on tourism infrastructure. Fuzzy logic enables work with uncertain data, and the concept of organizational reflex allows quick adaptation to changing conditions through optimized management decisions. Theoretical modeling techniques revealed connections, and computer simulation examined these connections under different conditions using Spyder (a Python environment based on NumPy, etc.), which provides the necessary functions to perform calculations and visualize results.
Each local community has distinct traditions and customs that define its cultural heritage and make it recognizable. This paper examines how cultural heritage can strengthen and develop rural tourism. To do so, a model was developed to assess the extent to which cultural heritage is integrated into tourism activities in rural areas. The model includes seven rural households in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) engaged in rural tourism, along with ten criteria for evaluating them. Using multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM), the importance of the criteria and the selected rural households were first assessed through expert evaluation. The results of fuzzy LMAW (Logarithmic Methodology of Additive Weights) indicate that attractiveness (C9) and economic potential (C7) are the most important criteria for evaluating rural households. Ranking the rural households using the fuzzy RAWEC (Ranking of Alternatives with Weights of Criterion) method shows that the Ibrišimović household is the most successful example of integrating cultural heritage into rural tourism offerings. This research offers a new approach to valuing cultural heritage in tourism and aims to support the continued development of rural tourism in BiH through sustainable practices.
This study examines how travelers’ psychosocial factors translate into the intention to adopt GAI tools for travel planning. Accordingly, the study uses an extended TPB framework that incorporates sequential pathways from users’ prior experience with GAI, perceived attributes, and satisfaction, with perceived risk of GAI hallucination as a moderator. Data were collected from 310 travelers in Pakistan and analyzed using PLS-SEM in SmartPLS4. Findings revealed that travelers’ attitude significantly drives prior interaction, which in turn strongly predicts GAI’s perceived attributes, including anthropomorphism and personalization. These perceptions foster satisfaction and, consequently, build intentions to adopt GAI for travel planning. Crucially, this satisfaction-intention nexus is weakened in the presence of GAI hallucination. Theoretically, the study examines sequential rather than direct effects of psychosocial factors. Practically, developers and travel service providers should focus on designing advanced tools to improve customized online services, while policymakers must establish accuracy standards and verification mechanisms to mitigate hallucination-induced distrust.
This paper applies Richard Butler’s “Tourism area life cycle” (1980) (TALC) to examine the historical development of tourism in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland). The subsidiary aim is to reassess tourism development in Eswatini by updating Harrison’s “Development of tourism in Swaziland” (1995) for the period 1995–2022. The research used a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative data from the Eswatini Tourism Authority with qualitative interviews with tourism employees, tourists, and locals. The findings reveal that tourism development in Eswatini followed a different trajectory between 1995 and 2022 than the one described in Harrison’s (1995) work. The industry initially went through the involvement stage, then the development stage, and, more recently, the stagnation stage, with attempts at rejuvenation. Although these findings differ from Butler's (1980), they extend TALC debates by showing how political shocks, source-market dependency, and domestic tourism resilience shape trajectories in ways the model does not anticipate, with implications for its application in Global South destinations.
