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Despite the broad conceptualization of shopping malls as placeless, malls increasingly serve as popular tourist attractions and yet remain significantly under investigated in the tourism literature. With this in mind, this study investigates tourists' lived experiences and their implications for understanding contemporary manifestations of place and placelessness. It focuses specifically on shopping malls in Seoul, South Korea and adopts a phenomenological perspective to address two research questions: first, are there particular features that give rise to tourists experiencing shopping malls as placeless? And second, notwithstanding placelessness, what is the appeal of Seoul's malls to tourists? Findings propose that malls can be understood as a negotiated reality between the forces that create placelessness and those that enhance the appeal of malls. The study affirms contemporary notions of placelessness as symbiotic with experiencing place; reaffirming space as a production of human intention where social and cultural changes manifest themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeking to contribute to ongoing investigations of diverse contexts of tourism consumption, the current investigation explores the meanings genealogical tourists attribute to their lived experiences and contextualizes those findings within larger social approaches to the human dynamics that drive contemporary tourism. Taking an interpretive turn, it proposes genealogical tourism as reflecting contemporary tourists' call for diversity of leisure interests and opportunities as well as their desire for a full range of varying intimacies, intensities, and complexities in their tourism lived experiences. In particular, it reveals tourism as a reflexive response to a sense of loss that underpins modern society, assisting in reaffirming both a generational sense of the self and a self-recognition that one has one's own perspective on the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Ever since Chinese immigrants began to move into big North American cities in the late nineteenth century, their ethnically segregated neighborhoods have been referred to as Chinatown and layered with negative and demeaning imagery. Through an analysis of the discourse circulating in neighborhood tours organized by the Chicago Office of Tourism, this paper illustrates how current tourism representations of Chicago''s Chinatown are constructed through a process of negotiation with the infamous past imagery of this ethnic enclave. The paper identifies two discursive themes that work to exoticize this neighborhood, while simultaneously attempting to render it familiar and comfortable for tourists. It is argued that such an analysis illuminates how the process of touristification is governed by an ideological shift toward diversity in the globalized city. Moreover, it also illuminates the ways that present tourism discourse, which is produced within an ideological milieu that is celebratory of diversity and multiculturalism and within a political–economic milieu that recognizes the marketability of diversity, draws upon traditional characterizations of Chinatown as Other, while reconstructing this Otherness in a way that appears friendly to tourists. It thus contributes to our understanding of how discourse about an ethnic urban enclave evolves with changing ideological and political–economic conditions, such that traditional imagery is both reinforced and revised. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this study, the economic efficiency of a sample of Portuguese hotels for the period 1998-2002 is analyzed with data envelopment analysis. The efficiency scores of the hotels analyzed are decomposed into technical and allocative efficiency by using outputs, inputs, and input prices. A range of managerial and economic implications arising from the study is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the political dimensions of American evangelical pilgrimages to Israel by using the methodological technique known as data triangulation. Based on evidence from primary and secondary data, the article illuminates (1) how tourism is used by pilgrims to promote their theological visions that have some political ramifications to the host country and (2) how the political circumstances in the state of Israel engender a noteworthy relationship between an extreme right party from Israel and the pilgrims. The findings regarding the political dimensions are organized around four functions achieved by using data triangulation. In so doing, this article attempts to provide new theoretical insights regarding the philosophical premises and the purposes traditionally related to the use of data triangulation in tourism research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]