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While the notion of external referencing has been undertaken across a range of disciplines, its adoption in a tourism setting remains largely fragmented. This project applies a ‘floating classroom’ as part of a virtual Community of Practice (CoP) to enable tourism policy and planning educators to perform a benchmarking exercise for maintaining teaching quality despite geographical separation and social distancing mandates. Virtual CoPs can help maintain teaching quality at a time when universities are increasingly required to uphold international standards of excellence and as the coronavirus continues to make face-to-face interactions risky. The CoP enabled mutual support and knowledge sharing for the design of teaching approaches, materials, and authentic assessments. The paper was limited to three educators teaching similar courses in Anglophone institutions and reports the results of a one-off study. But findings will assist educators interested in maintaining or enhancing teaching quality over the course of the pandemic and post-COVID-19 futures.

This paper explores the developments of domestic medical tourism for Australia's Sunshine Coast. Most studies have characterised medical tourism to be an outbound phenomenon, where affluent tourists select mostly developing destinations for elective surgeries due to cost, quality or faster access to treatments. However, studies concerned with domestic medical tourism remain highly implicit. Employing a case study perspective of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, this research explored the potential for domestic medical tourism to be conceived. This research found that while most stakeholders considered the region to be well-suited for medical tourism, three issues presented some barriers to its development. The three issues were residents' access to hospital facilities, lack of cooperation and hostile attitudes between practitioners. This research shows the contested battlegrounds of domestic medical tourism initiatives, and how the development of a multi-stakeholder involvement model of medical tourism can bring desired outcomes to fruition.