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Digital technologies and the practices that follow, from reviews and recommendations on websites to content on social media platforms characterised by real-time connectivity are now inseparable from tourist experiences. Further, the technological, and infrastructural configurations that underpin digital practices in tourism are increasingly impinged upon by non-human actors (such as algorithms and data governance and regulatory measures). This special issue considers the ways in which data in the form of content, digital infrastructures and algorithmic governance shape and transform knowledge generated within and about tourism destinations and the populations who inhabit them. We focus on digital technologies as part of emerging media technologies to emphasise the material and regulatory assemblages that are increasingly inseparable from automated processes that facilitate the collection and appropriation of data on behalf of digital platform corporations. Emerging media technologies in the tourist encounter consider such engagements across different sensory exchanges, where tourists experience other places, landscapes, weather, people, sights and knowledge. Significant issues related to the role of digital technologies such as the inequalities they may perpetuate through the platformization of tourist destinations, the impacts of 'smartness' and the ways in which digital infrastructures are embedded in wider geopolitical relations of territorialization and contestation have been increasingly recognised in tourism geographies, yet comparative regional studies are still limited. We establish a research agenda to call for further, comparative research into the unfolding consequences of the role of digital infrastructures and algorithmic governance in the shaping of tourism destinations and the practices that follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2022, Thailand became the first country in Asia to decriminalize the possession of cannabis. Despite the government's unwillingness to legalize recreational cannabis or promote cannabis tourism, a recreational cannabis industry fueled by tourism quickly emerged on a large scale in just a few months after decriminalization. Through the tourism worldmaking theory, the article seeks to show how cannabis tourism has taken shape in a semi-legal context following the decriminalization of cannabis in Thailand. Through a qualitative methodology combining document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and active participant observation, it is shown that following legislative changes, a recreational tourism industry has rapidly developed alongside the medical cannabis industry in which an array of cannabis products and services for tourists have emerged in the country's major tourist destinations, transforming the tourism landscape of these places. Cannabis tourism has grown rapidly despite legal restrictions and government rhetoric aimed at preventing recreational cannabis tourism. The article aims to show that after opening Pandora's box through the decriminalization of cannabis, cannabis tourism has developed on its own where many market-driven actors capitalized on this new economic opportunity following years of loss of income due to the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a consensus that the global tourism system needs to undergo decarbonization and achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century. However, given the anticipated growth in the most energy-intensive subsector of tourism, air transport, achieving this goal seems unlikely. This paper focuses on the role of distance in the global geography of tourism, against evidence that National Marketing Organizations (NTOs) often seek to attract visitors from all over the world. The analysis of data for a sample of 12 NTOs in Europe, the USA and Canada reveals that the number of markets targeted varies between six and 33, with significant differences in the average distance to markets (<4,000 to 8,000 km), as well as emissions per arrival by market (0.2 t CO2 to 2.5 t CO2). For the countries studied, the 17% of the most distant arrivals cause 62% of the emissions. Results also show that more distant markets are more sensitive to disruptions such as COVID-19. These findings have relevance for destination marketing that point to new climate change related roles for NTOs such as rebranding, demarketing, market segmentation, and communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of public funding in transforming tourism pathways in sparsely populated Arctic destinations, comparing Northern Sweden and Finnish Lapland. Our theoretical framework considers destination path plasticity and moments of change through the lens of geographical political economy to understand patterns of uneven development. This perspective helps explain how regional development funding driven by multi-scalar political priorities and global markets set structural conditions for tourism. We present a spatial analysis of public funding between 2007 and 2021 for private firms and public projects, complemented by document analysis and expert interviews. We find that public funding in Finnish Lapland has largely reinforced 'Arctification' and export-driven tourism in a few locations. In Northern Sweden, it has focused more on redistributing resources to micro-businesses and broader socio-economic development in lagging regions, yet with limited impacts on changing dominant tourism pathways. Public projects improved knowledge creation and networking among public and private actors but were largely unable to consolidate emerging pathways in the long run. Overall, regional development funding supported incremental change around existing pathways and had limited transformative effects in response to shocks or disruptive moments due to the rigid nature of funding programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic explored its likely effects on the tourism sector including the nature of recovery. Viewed through the lens of Evolutionary Economic Geography, this paper examines the preferences of four stakeholder groups for future tourism development in Northern Devon. Specifically, it reports on their views from 2021 and 2022 of three potential scenarios which were elaborated before the pandemic, and it explores whether COVID-19 was a trigger event for a change in trajectory. There was consistent support for the most sustainable trajectory, which represented the continuation of the existing arc of development, not a fundamental change in direction triggered by COVID-19. Not only does this finding contribute a retrospective critique of early opinions on possible COVID-induced change, it suggests an alternative view of the role of trigger events in destination evolution. The pandemic offered space for reflection on tourism development, as a form of 'mindful continuation' of transformation, not a 'mindful deviation' identified in some previous studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban slums, especially in the Global South, have become popular attractions for tourists interested in sites off the beaten track and more authentic encounters with local culture. This practice has drawn attention from the media and extensive academic research, pointing out its controversial character due to the uneven power relations between hosts and guests and the commodification of poverty to turn it into a tourist attraction. Though acknowledging this pitfall, this work takes a different approach. We argue that tourism has agency in co-producing meanings and values in the process of making and consuming slums as tourist places. Within this process, the cultural capital of slums may find new avenues of legitimization. We critically analyze how discursive practices may valorize and legitimize slums as spaces for cultural production and consumption and the role of tourism in ordering, valuing, and visualizing vernacular cultural landscapes. The paper examines the case of favelas in Rio de Janeiro open to tourist visitation. Using as sources 79 articles from virtual media outlets (a mainstream, hegemonic newspaper, and a popular grassroots publication), official social media accounts, and tourism policies, we leverage Foucauldian discourse analysis and scrutinized the data, drawing insights on three categories of legitimization: authorization, rationalization, and moral evaluation. Our main findings show that tourism is often portrayed as a justification for securitization policies, as well as for fiscalization and formalization processes. Tourists were perceived to have authority in evaluating and valorizing slums' cacophonic landscape beyond the evaluations of hegemonic social and political elites, which makes for a potential avenue of legitimization. However, in employing a more critical scope, two questions resonate: (1) who benefits from the valorization of slums' cultural capital and, (2) who decides on the social validity of emergent cultural elements? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological developments over the last two decades have allowed researchers to employ advanced tracking technologies to collect high-resolution spatial and temporal data. Despite the extensive use of these technologies in tourism research, they have not yet been applied to the existing indicators of tourism demand. The current paper aims to fill this lacuna, proposing the use of tracking technologies to measure tourist activity in destinations and, in particular, extreme conditions such as tourist saturation and overtourism. It introduces a new index for tourism demand, the Intensity-Density Index (IDI), based on high-resolution data in time and space. After presenting an overview of the common indicators for measuring tourism demand, the most common indicators, the Tourism Intensity Rate (TIR) and the Tourism Density Rate (TDR), are calculated twice, using traditional methods and advanced tracking technologies. The second calculation is based on a unique survey conducted in Israel between 2015 and 2017, which included some 3,000 tourists whose activity in the destination was documented entirely on a national level and at high resolution. Finally, the methodology for calculating high-resolution (HR) indicators using GPS data is presented, resulting in the IDI. Advanced tracking technologies' use in calculating the IDI not only helps present tourism activity more accurately in terms of time and space but can also be applied in tourism management to serve as a tool for effective planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surfing ecosystems—surf breaks and their surrounding areas—can provide multifaceted benefits, including support for tourism industries, personal and social wellbeing and shoreline protection. Previous research has predominantly concentrated on quantifying direct expenditures, sidelining non-market values, and failing to consider the interactions between multiple ecosystem components. To address these gaps, this paper provides a review of key principles of environmental economics and natural resource management in relation to surfing ecosystems. We examine how the value of surfing ecosystems can affect (and be affected by) factors related to environmental sustainability, tourism demands and economic development. We propose a novel framework for characterizing the values of surfing ecosystems and conducting economic assessments, based on six main features: (i) surf breaks, (ii) surfing resources, (iii) surfing ecosystems, (iv) economic values, (v) economic valuation, (vi) equity and sustainability. This structured approach may serve to improve decision-making processes concerning environmental changes that impact surfing ecosystems, including tourism management plans and environmental regulations. Our study aligns with broader global initiatives to better account for ocean-based values and support sustainable, nature-based tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the world's first and largest operational spaceport for orbital and human launches, stands out for its historical significance in the space heritage but remains largely unknown to the wider public. Using a qualitative case study research approach, this study explores how post-Soviet Baikonur heritage is commodified and interpreted by various stakeholders, identified through snowballing sampling who are directly or indirectly involved in Baikonur space heritage and museums, as well as extensive content analysis of policy documents, historical and documentary accounts, tourist brochures, museum websites and multimedia digital environments from the Baikonur cosmodrome. The research shows that tangible and intangible heritage play a key role in the commodification of Baikonur visitor experience: Baikonur historic buildings and memorabilia preserved, presented, and used for visitors. Particularly, intangible dimensions such as site atmosphere and spectrality reinforce the originality of the Cosmodrome and the perceived authenticity of the site. This study contributes to advancing the literature and practice of the nexus between authenticity, collective memory and tourism development related to a unique international space heritage site in Kazakhstan. It enhances the political and societal understanding of the role of space heritage in the post-Soviet region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seasonal fluctuation amplitude and its distribution structure are two indispensable aspects to characterize seasonality, whereas the latter is that can be easily ignored in previous studies. By using a model of Lineal Programming and GeoDetector, this study explores the spatial-temporal characteristics of rural tourism in 33 Chinese cities, and the results indicate that for cities with the roughly similar fluctuation amplitude, the more dispersed the fluctuation distributes, the weaker the seasonal level. The intensity of rural tourism seasonality shows the characteristics of strong spatial heterogeneity and dependence, decreasing from west to east and from south to north. According to the differentiation degree between peak and off season, four main types are identified for the studied 33 cities, which further makes clear the development direction of rural tourism market. This study also suggests that both natural and social factors affect seasonal spatial differentiation, and their interaction greatly enhances its own influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of the tourism industry in regional contexts has attracted significant interest from tourism geographers, in which the evolutionary economic geography (EEG) approach has been of interest over the last decade. Recent research on EEG has emphasised the role of institutions and particularly legitimacy in new path development, claiming that legitimacy is crucial for the development of emerging industries. Against this backdrop, this paper explores the role of legitimation and delegitimation in the development of the sharing economy in Innlandet, a tourism region in Norway. The article poses two research questions. How is the legitimacy of Airbnb expressed by key tourism stakeholders in a tourism region in Norway? Moreover, how can the shifting roles of legitimation and delegitimation among key stakeholders in the tourism industry inform the literature on new path development? These issues are explored in qualitative interviews with respondents from four key tourism stakeholder groups: consumers, Airbnb hosts, incumbent firms, and regional industry and policy actors. The findings reveal legitimacy issues mainly related to regulatory and normative ambiguities, described by biased regulations that result in economic leakages to other regions and countries and concerns about decreasing local value creation in the region. These findings indicate that the sharing economy lacks legitimacy among the stakeholders. The article concerns the role of legitimation and delegitimation in new path development processes, arguing that delegitimation prevents transformative changes and path development processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sustainable tourism development agenda is widely criticised for being co-opted to serve continual economic growth, driving environmental devastation and social inequalities. In response, calls for a fundamental paradigm shift have become louder. Subsequently, a novel approach has emerged, regenerative tourism, which belongs to a long lineage of regenerative development approaches drawing from Western science and Indigenous perspectives, knowledge systems and practices. The paper develops a conceptual framework consisting of five design dimensions and seven practice principles based on practitioner consultations and an appraisal of the theoretical and practical dimensions of regenerative tourism. Consequently, the conceptual framework offers practical guidance for tourism stakeholders working towards regenerative futures. Arguably, this is the most comprehensive review of regenerative tourism to date and contributes to scholarship through its examination of the transformational potential of the regenerative tourism paradigm and related approaches. Supplemental data for this article is available online at at http://doi:10.1080/14616688.2022.2044376. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Article title: Sweet or profitable home? Migrants' intention to return for tourism employmentAuthors: Yuangang Zhang, Yameng Hao, Yingzhi Guo and Lu LiuJournal:Tourism GeographiesDOI:http:10.1080/14616688.2023.2251442When this article was originally published online, the Figure 1 and Figure 2 captions were unintentionally interchanged by the typesetter. The figures with appropriate captions are provided below.PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 1. Location of study areas.PHOTO (COLOR): Figure 2. Conceptual model. [Extracted from the article]

Potential to identify and cultivate forms of post-capitalism in tourism development has yet to be explored in depth in current research. Tourism is one of the world's largest industries, and hence a powerful global political and socio-economic force. Yet numerous problems associated with conventional tourism development have been documented over the years, problems now greatly exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Calls for sustainable tourism development have long sought to address such issues and set the industry on a better course. Yet such calls tend to still promote continued growth as the basis of the tourism industry's development, while mounting demands for "degrowth" suggest that growth is itself the fundamental problem that needs to be addressed in discussion of sustainability in tourism and elsewhere. This critique asserts that incessant growth is intrinsic to capitalist development, and hence to tourism's role as one of the main forms of global capitalist expansion. Touristic degrowth would therefore necessitate postcapitalist practices aiming to socialise the tourism industry. While a substantial body of research has explored how tourism functions as an expression of a capitalist political economy, thus far no research has systematically explored what post-capitalist tourism might look like or how to achieve it. Applying Erik Olin Wright's 2019 innovative typology for conceptualizing different forms of post-capitalism as components of an overarching strategy for "eroding capitalism" to a series of illustrative allows for exploration of their potential to contribute to an analogous strategy to similarly "erode tourism" as a quintessential capitalist industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite existing in practice, as well as in other social science and policy literature, narcotourism has not appeared in tourism journals, and its full scope remains unarticulated. This paper aims to introduce narcotourism to a broad audience of tourism scholars, provide its conceptual foundations, and guide subsequent tourism scholarship on this topic. Looking beyond writings that have previously focused on the consumption of drugs during travel and tourism experiences, this paper presents a conceptual framework distinguishing six different tourism-related activities encompassed by the term narcotourism: consumption-oriented narcotourism, production-oriented narcotourism, acquisition-oriented narcotourism, dark heritage narcotourism, narcotrafficker tourism and emulatory narcotourism. This framework describes the hallmark characteristics of each form of narcotourism, identifies linkages between these forms of narcotourism and other areas of tourism scholarship, and concludes by suggesting a future research agenda for narcotourism. Given a long history of association between tourism activities and drug consumption, shifting legal dynamics regarding drug use, insights emerging from related disciplines, and narcotourism's coexistence alongside myriad forms of tourism already explored by tourism scholars, this paper provides a timely foundation for future research on narcotourism within tourism studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical approaches to tourism knowledge production and representation alongside critical approaches to tourism as a lived experience outside academic circles (its impacts on places, peoples and economies) are not new in tourism. However, propelled by a 'critical turn' and by an overall critique of positivist research, debates concerning the meanings and implications of 'the critical' in tourism have gained momentum and more visibility in the last fifteen years. As an attempt to organise and critically assess the growing body of knowledge on criticality, we conducted a bibliometric analysis of critical studies published in tourism journals, books and book chapters in four languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian) in the last 43 years (1977–2020). Four main aspects of criticality in tourism were assessed, namely the main critical approaches mobilized, the areas/topics of interest, authorship and the emancipatory outcomes pursued. The review shows that a) the word 'critical' in tourism is mobilised within a multiplicity of different and not clearly defined approaches, beliefs and terminologies alongside diverse understandings of criticality; b) a significant nexus exists between criticality and sustainability; c) Western universities plays a dominant role in propelling critical scholarship; and d) limited explanations are provided on how participatory and emancipatory practices are sought and achieved. Based on the outcomes of our review, critical research in tourism should not stop debating the meanings associated to the term 'critical', challenge traditional capitalist discourses of sustainability with alternative theories (such as regenerative tourism), consider postcolonial/decolonial perspectives, and provide more details on how emancipation and participation are supposed to be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary society is characterized by intense mobility and the prevalence of visual culture, where representations are more important than experience. In that context, images are central to the tourist system, for they have the power to create expectations that motivate movements. This process is part of a cycle in which representations only take the value that society assigns to them and their meaning is constantly changing. There is a historical connection between tourism and such representations, from oral testimonies to digital photography and video. Be they captured or purchased, images are disseminated by visitors, thus perpetuating the cycle of production and diffusion of spatial representations. Such images ought to show how 'special' the visited location is. Because heritage items are usually unique, their images can be ideally suited to be representative of a territory and serve to entice tourists. Through numerous representations, a heritage artefact becomes a tourist attraction, and can become a territorial-synecdoche, formed by the strong association of an element (the referent) to an object (the territory). This can be such that referent becomes a substitute for the territory in the collective imagination. In tourism, an inductive territorial-synecdoche is easily accomplished through visual products, while a deductive synecdoche occurs through written texts. The danger is that such representations operate as a territorial-synecdoche by reducing the complexity of the tourist territory to a few icons, areas or experiences. Generally, in tourist destinations the infrastructure and services concentrate in certain areas, and those lying outside tourism's influence remain 'invisible' for visitors and governments. Therefore, the use of heritage items to represent places, although seemingly innocuous, may lead to the construction of a territorial-synecdoche with tangible adverse effects on other territories. Spatial representations not only shape tourist itineraries but also configure their territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weather conditions are important determinants of tourism demand. After reviewing the main contributions of previous research on the role of climatic variables in tourism demand functions, we explore different modelling alternatives to introduce temperature and rainfall in a gravity model. The dataset used comprises interregional tourism flows by Spanish residents from 2011 to 2015. We first estimate a benchmark model with both temperature and rainfall at the destination expressed in levels, and then consider some extensions to this model. In particular, special attention is paid to analyzing whether the sensitivity that tourists may have to weather factors can change across seasons. Other modelling issues examined include the relationship between climatic variables at the destination and at home, the influence of weather in previous periods (lagged values of temperature and rain), the variability of the weather variables (captured by the standard deviation of these variables), or whether the effect of temperature varies with the climatic characteristics of the region. Our empirical results confirm that spring and summer tourism in Spain is more sensitive to weather conditions, that the number of domestic overnight stays in Spain is strongly influenced by changes in the difference in temperature between tourists' home and destination regions, that the estimated parameters of lagged weather variables are higher than those corresponding to the travelling months, that temperature variability in the destination region reduces tourism demand, and that the effect of temperature on destination choice for residents in moderate-climate regions is lower than for residents in other types of regions. 天气状况是旅游需求的重要决定因素。本文在回顾了以往关于气候变量在旅游需求函数中的作用的研究成果后, 我们探索了在重力模型中引入温度和降雨的不同建模方案。使用的数据集包括2011年至2015年西班牙居民的跨地区旅游流量。我们首先用水平表示的目的地温度和降雨量来估计基准模型, 然后考虑对该模型的一些扩展。特别要注意的是, 游客对天气因素的敏感性是否会随着季节的变化而变化。研究涉及的其他建模问题包括目的地与客源地气候变量之间的关系,天气的影响在上一时期(以温度和降雨作为滞后值),天气变量的变异性(这些变量的标准差),或者温度随地区气候特征而变化的效应。实证结果证实, 西班牙春季和夏季旅游对天气状况更为敏感,国内在西班牙过夜游客量受游客客源地和目的地温差的显著影响,天气滞后变量的估计参数高于相应旅行月份的同期值,目的地地区温度变化减少了旅游需求,温度对中等气候地区居民目的地选择的影响小于其他气候类型地区居民。 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a follow-up to the study 'A mindful shift: an opportunity for mindfulness-driven tourism in a post-pandemic world', which was published in Tourism Geographies. The original paper advocated that, during a major crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the focus could be put on (more) mindful tourists as a driver of mindful change for the global tourism industry. In this follow-up study, we discuss the mindfulness-based approaches as feasible, low-cost solutions to reduce negative psychological effects in many tourism settings as well as a strategy to ensure the tourism industry's pro-longed sustainability during and after the pandemic. We start with the underlying mechanism of mindfulness practices as a technique to cope with the pandemic and, from a managerial standpoint, discuss the different roles of mindfulness within the envisioned courses of tourism development in a post-COVID-19 future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a considerable body of research focusing on food tourism, the academic community has been slow to consider the cultural potential of this highly topical phenomenon. To address the research gap, cultural globalisation is discussed as the theoretical perspective that proves helpful in explaining the application of food in destination marketing and how this, in turn, affects the conceptualisation of the 'local', the 'global' and the 'glocal' in an urban context. Taking the city of York, England, as a case study, through a qualitative content analysis and semi-structured interviews with food tourism stakeholders from public and private sectors, it is considered how the increasing use of food as a cultural artefact in urban destination marketing is influenced by the various forces of cultural globalisation. It is shown how cultural homogenisation, heterogenisation and glocalisation influence both the cultural landscape of York, as well as in how food (global, local and glocal) is presented and marketed to visitors. Knowledge of these specific characteristics and peculiarities of food allows tourism professionals to develop urban destination marketing that is socially and culturally informed which may help to reinforce the destination's uniqueness and difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing use of sanctions as a post-Cold War foreign policy instrument, there is limited research on sanctions in a tourism context despite their substantial impact on destinations and tourist flows. Although there is significant research on sanctions in political science, international relations, economics, and public policy, very few studies explicitly examine the effect of sanctions on tourism. This study therefore examines the intricate geopolitical relationship between sanctions and tourism via a scoping review of relevant literature. Each of the four main types of sanctions that were identified: financial, sectoral, diplomatic and individual, have different implications for tourism at various scales. The findings show that tourism is profoundly affected by sanctions impacting tourism and hospitality businesses and destination image, severely restricting international travel, and disrupting financial investment and supply chains. More comprehensive sanctions may lead to substantial economic and personal hardship in destinations as well as indirect effects including decline in the value of currency and inflationary pressures. Nevertheless, despite the development of smart and targeted sanctions they rarely affect the coercive capacity of the targeted government and induce political behavioural change. Resistive economies can develop in response to sanctions in which domestic tourism assumes greater significance as a result of reductions in international mobility. Some destinations facing sanctions also focus on specific international markets from non-sanctioning countries as well as a country's diaspora. Overall, the study of sanctions deepens knowledge of the interrelationships between geopolitics, foreign policy and tourism and its ramifications for destinations. Significant gaps in knowledge for future research include the role of domestic politics in influencing sanctions policy, the selection of tourism as a specific target for sanctions, and the development of destination adaptation strategies to sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has halted mobility globally on an unprecedented scale, causing the neoliberal market mechanisms of global tourism to be severely disrupted. In turn, this situation is leading to the decline of certain mainstream business formats and, simultaneously, the emergence of others. Based on a review of recent crisis recovery processes, the tourism sector is likely to rebound from this sudden market shock, primarily because of various forms of government interventions. Nevertheless, although policymakers seek to strengthen the resilience of post-pandemic tourism, their subsidies and other initiatives serve to maintain a fundamentally flawed market logic. The crisis has, therefore, brought us to a fork in the road – giving us the perfect opportunity to select a new direction and move forward by adopting a more sustainable path. Specifically, COVID-19 offers public, private, and academic actors a unique opportunity to design and consolidate the transition towards a greener and more balanced tourism. Tourism scholars, for example, can take a leading role in this by redesigning their curriculum to prepare future industry leaders for a more responsible travel and tourism experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With international arrivals surpassing 1.5 billion for the first time in 2019 the long-term evolution of tourism demonstrates prolific path dependence with a decade of growth since the global financial crisis. This latest period of unfettered international tourism development has come to an abrupt end as the impact of COVID-19 has brought the sector to a near standstill. As the world grapples with the realities of the global pandemic there is an opportunity to rethink exactly what tourism will look like for the decades ahead. Key concepts in evolutionary economic geography, especially path dependence/creation and institutional inertia/innovation, show variations in pathways for travel and tourism in a COVID-19 world. A path that leads to transformation in tourism can be realized if sufficient institutional innovation occurs on both the demand and supply side of tourism that can foster the emergence of new paths. COVID-19 presents a once in a generation opportunity where the institutional pump is primed for transformation. Whether that leads to a radical transformation of the tourism sector remains to be seen, but the imprint it will leave on both the demand and supply of tourism will have long-term, incremental impacts for years to come and ultimately move us closer towards the transformation of tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sustainable development model has largely failed to address the social and environmental challenges of the 21st century. True sustainability will only occur when it is valued as a part of the taken-for-granted daily life of individuals and cultures across the globe. This has not yet happened because humanity has not evolved a global consciousness quickly enough to match the global advances in telecommunications and transportation technologies that have created a socially and economically ever-shrinking planet. Travel and tourism contributes to the expansion of global consciousness, although only in a haphazard and unintentional manner. The COVID-19 pandemic is a result of planetary time-space compression and is forcing an expansion in human consciousness that will make humankind better able to address global problems. There will still be considerable diversity on the planet, as now, but the pandemic will stimulate growing numbers of people, businesses and governments to adopt new ways of thinking, behaving and operating that are more closely aligned with the goals of sustainable development. This could be further enhanced if travel and tourism were to adopt the expansion and awakening of global conscious as a fundamental and transformational value in the products and experiences that it offers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining transformational festivals can offer conceptual resources for a transformation of tourism into a more responsible and sustainable practice. By thinking together two usually distinct scholarly treatments of "transformation"—those of transformational tourism and those of transformational festivals—the COVID-19 pandemic can itself also be treated as a spatiotemporal threshold for the transformation of the travel industry. This approach can also help deconstruct the mechanisms that sustain deleterious aspects of tourism's guest-host divide. As borders reopen and mobility and recreation recommences, the capacity of transformational festivals—both within and beyond their highly porous time-spaces– to transform their participants offer lessons for the blurring, if not the outright obliteration of the demarcation between guests and hosts. The creative and pro-social responses of members of one such transformational festival culture—Burning Man– to this and past crises are presented as examples for how values such as participation and civic responsibility may help people overcome shared conditions of hardship, and support more sustainable tourism practices in the post-COVID-19 world. Such subversive inter-subjective inversions may bring the recognition, in-itself, and production, for-itself, of a shared humanity of co-creators and participants in not just ephemeral, but accretive transformational social and environmental projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropogenic geographic studies in tourism should consider the liminality of the experience. Tourism by definition means a temporal and/or spatial movement takes place. How the tourist interacts and behaves during this transitory experience is a logical progression into human leisure behaviour. Several recent international gatherings of geographers provide the foundation to explore liminality in tourism and we build on those papers in this special issue. The papers are varied in geographies, yet have a central theoretical basis in all things liminal. Invited papers in this special issue are founded on the research presented at two international geography conferences in sessions devoted to tourism. The American Association of Geographers meeting in Boston, Massachusetts in 2017 and the Royal Geographic Society with the Institute of British Geographers in Cardiff, Wales in 2018 gathered geographers from around the world to study this theme. The following papers give the most comprehensive geographic review in tourism to date and we encourage additional dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andalusia has become one of the main destinations for British residential tourists, attracted by leisure, a mild climate and the search for a better lifestyle. Prompted by its interest in selling houses, the real estate industry has devised an image of the Andalusian landscape that is, to all intents and purposes, partial and biased. The purpose of this research is to assess the importance of the elements and features that characterise this particular vision of this Spanish region, paying particular attention to more rural inland areas. For this, an empirical study has been conducted based on content analysis of real estate websites targeting British buyers. This study has revealed that: (i) the misrepresented and romantic projection of the image of Andalusia still persists to a certain extent. Among the main elements and attributes that characterise the landscape are all those that emphasise the region's sublime, picturesque and exotic nature; other main landscape qualities and unique areas, specifically, any that today enjoy natural or cultural legal protection due to their heritage value, are less important in this cultural construction; (ii) the various parts of Andalusia are treated unequally. Malaga province and the rest of the Baetic Mountains are much better represented than other areas (the Guadalquivir Valley and the Sierra Morena mountains). This imbalance sometimes results in a distorted construction of the territory. This way of conceiving Andalusia puts Malaga at the heart of the region, and the further from the Costa del Sol, the more peripheral the regions become; (iii) the complexity of the landscape as a cultural expression is reduced to a set of simplified features that can be easily digested by a social group focused not on experiencing, but on consuming the landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, there has been noticeable rise in popularity of all-inclusive holidays. This growth has coincided with the propensity in many destinations to develop tourism enclaves, which can either be purpose-built gated resorts physically isolated from their surrounding community or appear in the form of cruises, which have emerged as a particularly popular form of travel. In this explorative paper, we focus on the marketing of all-inclusive holidays, specifically those occurring in enclaves (including cruise ships). We investigate to what extent the geographic location of the tourist enclave is an important consideration for the travel industry. In other words, when it comes to all-inclusive holiday products, do the place-based attributes on offer at the destination and the actual location of the holiday matter from the perspective of those who are creating and selling the travel packet? An explorative study of Scandinavian tour operators shows that the local setting of the holiday is in fact a secondary consideration compared to the services and facilities on offer. Thus, there is an overriding tendency to downplay the destination's place-based attributes and it does not seem so important where the all-inclusive resort is located as long as it is well connected to the market and promises a comfortable holiday to the consumer. Tourism enclaves in the context of placelessness are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current Issues in Asian Tourism: Edited by Chris cooper and C. Michael Hall (2020). The I Current Issues in Asian Tourism, vol.2 i , planned for 2021, makes it possible to talk about the continuation of work in this direction. I Current Issues in Asian Tourism i stands out among them for its coverage of a range of issues, from cases of solo female tourist or travellers in their gap year, their characteristics and patterns of behaviour, to tourism market diversification and regionalization. [Extracted from the article]