Search

Purpose Wine tourism has been growing considerably over the past decades. The literature highlights its relevance in the social, economic and cultural development of the regions where wine routes are located. However, few studies examine residents’ tourism impact perceptions and even fewer analyse the diversity of these perceptions. This study aims to fill this gap, examining this diversity according to the life-cycle stage of the wine route and residents’ involvement with wine and with tourism activities. Design/methodology/approach Data obtained from a questionnaire-based survey (N = 882) of residents from three wine routes of the Central Region of Portugal – Bairrada, Dão and Beira Interior – were used, with dimensions of perceived impacts tested for internal consistency via Cronbach’s α. T-tests and ANOVA tests were used to compare residents’ perceptions of wine tourism impacts according to the life-cycle stage of the wine route and residents’ involvement with wine and with tourism activities. Findings Generally, residents perceived that wine tourism generates more benefits than costs, with positive economic and socio cultural impacts standing out, while negative environmental and social impacts were perceived less. Some differences are observed according to the life-cycle stage of the wine route, with both the most and the least developed routes presenting more pronounced both positive and negative impact impressions in diverse dimensions. Also, a moderating effect (however not as pronounced) of working in tourism and (even less visible) of working in the wine sector is observed. Possible explanations of these findings and implications on wine route development are discussed. Originality/value This article analyses a subject of great relevance for the sustainable development of wine tourism destinations that has been little studied in the literature. Thus, relevant theoretical and empirical contributions are identified.

Purpose The right to tourism and leisure has become a crucial aspect of society. In that sense, through more accessible tourism, it is possible to improve travel conditions for people with disabilities (PwD). Nonetheless, barriers still exist, with the lack of information about accessibility conditions, as well as communication accessibility itself, representing some of the main obstacles. Information systems (IS) can help overcome these hurdles. However, it is verified, that methodologies to support the development of accessible IS are currently very scarce. Thus, this study intends to develop an accessible IS for accessible tourism and propose a roadmap to support the creation of accessible IS solutions. Methods To obtain the intended accessible tourism solution, an action research methodology was followed, which involved adapting already established frameworks, that combine Agile development and user-centered design techniques. Adjustments were made to incorporate accessibility, taking into consideration the requirements of the accessible tourism market. Results In this study, a web application named access@tour by action was created. This mobile solution is capable of improving information management within the accessible tourism market. From this experimental study, a proposal for a methodological roadmap emerged. This roadmap helps better understand how to develop accessible IS, by demonstrating techniques for gathering accessibility requirements and validating them. Conclusion The access@tour by action is a much-needed solution, to enhance accessible tourism conditions. The roadmap is adaptable and suitable for IS projects involving accessibility, regardless of the area. Both results provide a better perspective on how to integrate accessibility during the development of IS, possibly supporting future researchers in creating accessible solutions.

PurposeThe aim of this study is to identify the travel constraints of people with special needs (PwSN) and the strategies used to overcome them. The article also intends to analyze the differences in travel constraints and negotiation strategies according to the type of disability and/or special need.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative study was conducted in which a sample of PwSN (people with disabilities – mobility, sensory and cognitive – seniors and people with food allergies) were interviewed in depth.FindingsPwSN face a wide range of constraints when engaging in tourism activities. These constraints are very diverse and influence people with different intensity and have to be overcome using different negotiation strategies. However, differences in the constraints were observed according to the type of special needs.Practical implicationsOne of the most significant practical implications of this research is the need for raising awareness regarding human diversity among tourism stakeholders. It is critical to link sectoral policies that are reflected in the social and business reality, creating public–private partnerships to raise the sharing of knowledge, equipment and services. By addressing the constraints that prevent PwSN from traveling, the tourism sector can create more opportunities for them to participate in social activities, improving their quality of life and contributing to a more sustainable and inclusive industry.Originality/valueTraveling can present significant challenges for people with special needs, which affect the quality of their tourism experience. Despite growing academic attention to this issue in recent years, research in this field has primarily focused on specific aspects of disability. This study seeks not only to identify the barriers to travel faced by people with different special needs but also to explore the negotiation strategies used to overcome these barriers and the differences according to the type of special need.

BACKGROUND: In the tourism industry, people with disabilities (PwD) are frequently excluded from certain activities. The Internet is one of the most used information sources for planning tourism trips. However, the level of accessibility of information disseminated by the tourism industry through websites is still very low. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to explore the existence of diversity in Web accessibility in the tourism industry. METHODS: A systematic literature review method was used for the identification, selection, and evaluation of the published research on Web accessibility in the tourism industry. A set of 40 papers obtained from relevant scientific databases, and complemented with a snowballing effect, was synthesized and analyzed. RESULTS: Low levels of diversity of Web accessibility were found in the different tourism activities analyzed. The majority of studies published in this field are relatively recent and both manual and automated methods were employed. Web accessibility failures were mainly related to lack of connectivity with assistive technologies, complex layout, and navigation difficulties. CONCLUSION: The results obtained in this systematic literature review provide important contributions to increase knowledge of Web accessibility in the tourism industry. Moreover, practical and theoretical contributions can help Web developers creating more accessible tourism websites.

Although studies on food and tourism have gained terrain within tourism research, especially in the last decade, the connections of food tourism with rural territories have remained underexplored. This is particularly significant in the context of an increasing recognition that food should be understood as a distinguishing feature of rural tourism destinations, at the same time as displaying specific heritage and traditions as and contributing to the development of rural territories. The intention of this article is to shed light on the connection between food tourism and rural territories by exploring its potential through a systematic literature review on this untapped topic. Based on 73 articles focusing on those connections, the paper reviews and further explores what is already known on the topic, examining the different research methodologies and approaches used, as well as the dimensions analysed and results obtained. Research on the links between food tourism and rural territories seems to be geographically marked and particularly relevant in Southern European countries (such as Spain and Italy), as well as in North America (mainly the USA). Impacts on local development, together with production and commercialization strategies, are the main dimensions analysed by the articles, revealing indeed some of the potential virtuous bonds deriving from the connection between tourism, food and rural territories.

Despite the growing influence of air pollution on people’s behaviour, little attention has been given to visitors’ behavioural intentions towards air pollution episodes. Understanding visitors’ beh...

Air quality (AQ) is gaining considerable visibility within the tourism sector. However, despite several studies analysing the impact of tourism activities on the AQ of destinations, little is known...

Despite its dissemination in several areas, opinions about the sharing economy and collaborative consumption (CC) vary among researchers. Some believe that this is a ‘disruptive business model’ that will threaten current companies and their business (Guttentag, 2015: 1199). Others argue that it has emerged from the contemporary economy and will tend to grow as an alternative method of doing business (Botsman, 2010). These two concepts are discussed in this chapter. As an alternative form of tourism, following the tradition of bed and breakfast accommodation, the peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing practice is one of the most notable forms of CC (Belk, 2014a). The phenomenon reached such dimensions that it was considered one of the main disruptive forces in the tourism sector (Buhalis et al., 2020), calling into question the sovereignty of traditional accommodation chains (Pizam, 2014; Fang et al., 2016). This new type of accommodation, as well as the most popular platform that gives it life, Airbnb, will be the target of detail in this chapter. The chapter is structured in four sections. The introduction presents the relevance of the contents covered in the chapter. The second section adresses the new phenomenon of sharing and the different designations for it. In the third section, a discussion and an explanation of the P2P accommodation and its impacts are presented. Finally, the last section adresses the general conclusions of the chapter.

Accessible tourism is a very important growth market that should not be ignored by the tourism industry, not only due to legal obligations and social responsibility but also because of business opportunities. However, people with special needs face various constraints in accessing tourism products. The absence of accessible information is one of the main barriers that people with special needs face when they intend to travel. The Internet represents one of the most important information sources in tourism. However, a limited number of studies examine the use of the Internet in the accessible tourism market, specifically website accessibility. To extend knowledge in this field, this study aims to analyse the website accessibility of hotels and Pousadas de Portugal located in the Central Region of Portugal. A sample of 306 websites was analysed based on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, using automatic web diagnostic tools (AccessMonitor and TAW). This analysis was performed considering the A, AA and AAA conformance levels of WCAG. Findings reveal that the web accessibility level of the hotels analysed is low, with the ‘Perceivable’ and ‘Robust’ guidelines being the most critical. Moreover, there are differences in the web accessibility levels in terms of hotel category. Contrary to what was expected, the higher category hotels present the lowest level of web accessibility. These results can help hotel managers and web designers to improve communication with an important growth market – accessible tourism. This research was funded by the project ACTION – Accessible Tourism: Co-Creation of Tourism Experiences Through Web-Based Intelligent Systems, funded by FEDER, through COMPETE2020 – Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-030376), and by national funds (OE), through FCT/MCTES (PTDC/EGE-OGE/30376/2017). published

PurposeThis paper aims to present a framework to analyse whether information published on social media is accessible for people with disabilities (PwD), namely, visual and hearing disabilities, with an application to a music festival.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology used in this exploratory study consists of establishing a recommended framework to assess social media accessibility for PwD, especially for people with visual and hearing disabilities (PwVHD), and analyse, through an observation grid, if the information published on the official pages of the “Rock in Rio Lisboa” music festival on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube is accessible for this target audience.FindingsThe results indicate that, although the Rock in Rio Lisboa music festival is promoted as a festival for all, posts on social media are not accessible for people with visual and/or hearing disabilities and do not meet most of the defined parameters established in the proposed assessment framework.Originality/valueSocial media accessibility has not been analysed in previous research in the tourism context. This paper aims to fill in the void by establishing criteria and parameters that can serve as a basis for a framework for accessibility assessment in social media for PwVHD.

The increasing interest of consumers in rural provenance food products is known to meet concerns regarding authenticity, health, safety, and sustain-ability and to be based on knowledge and familiarity. Based on the results of a survey to 1553 customers of 24 urban specialty shops, located in three Portuguese cities, this study aims at identifying different segments of con-sumers of rural provenance foods according to the criteria they value when acquiring and consuming those products. From a hierarchical cluster analysis based on shopping preferences, three clusters were identified: The Influenced, choosing the products mainly by recommendation; The Provenance Seekers, privileging provenance and related qualities; and The All- embracers, considering a multiplicity of criteria when shopping. These clus-ters differ in terms of socio-demographic profiles, products bought, con-sumption behavior, familiarity with rural areas, and images of food products and territories of provenance. Results show the mutual influence of these dimensions on food preferences.

This chapter aims to fill the knowledge gap regarding the relationship between tourism and air quality, specifically in the Portuguese tourism industry, with a focus on tourist nationality. It examines whether this relationship differs according to tourist origin. This study uses an air pollutant, PM10, with a strong impact on human health that has been highly neglected in the literature. Despite the great use of CO2 in assessing the causal relationship between tourism and the environment, this is not the best indicator of air quality (AQ). This chapter presents results by applying vector autoregressive models (VAR) with monthly data for the period of 2007-2017, considering the nationality of tourists that visit Portugal. Results suggest that PM10 levels and tourism are negatively correlated (in the Pearson sense) with a link between them in the long run. This relationship is confirmed by the four methodologies tested. The negative relation in Pearson and cointegration results suggests that tourism can be affected by AQ in Portugal and may lead to better AQ.

PURPOSE This study intends to examine the web accessibility of three tourism supply agents (hotels, travel agents and museums). The results obtained contribute to observing whether there are differences in levels of web accessibility among these tourism supply agents and, based on the problems identified, suggest strategies to overcome these problems. METHODS To evaluate the level of web accessibility of tourism supply agents, two automatic online tools (AccessMonitor and TAW), which consider Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), version 2.0, were used. To identify differences among the supply tourism agents in terms of the level of web accessibility, statistical tests (ANOVA and Kruskal-Wallis) were used. RESULTS All the tourism supply agents analysed reveal considerable problems related to web accessibility. The perceivable and robust principles are the two principles of WGAG 2.0 with the greatest number of failures. However, differences among the supply agents analysed are observed. Museums present the highest level of web accessibility, while travel agents have the lowest. Therefore, it is necessary to implement improvements in tourism websites to overcome informational constraints that many people with disabilities (PwD) face in tourism activities. CONCLUSIONS Due to the central role of the Internet for people with and without disabilities, this study highlights barriers that should be eliminated to facilitate the travel decision-making process, especially for PwD. Consequently, it can contribute to a greater number of people being able to participate in tourism activities, improving their well-being and rehabilitation.Implications for rehabilitationThe participation in tourism activities contributes to improve health, quality-of-life and well-being of all people.For people with disabilities (PwD) to be able to travel, without constraints, access to online information needs to be provided.The identification of the level of web accessibility of tourism supply agents provides important guidelines to improve the websites, facilitating the travel tourism planning of PwD.If informational barriers to access tourism activities are eliminated, the participation of PwD in tourism activities will tend to increase, and consequently improvements in their well-being, health and rehabilitation will happen.

The present study intends to explore the relationship between tourism growth and air pollution at a regional level for five important tourism European destinations: France, Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Italy. Most of the studies found in the literature examine this relationship on a national scale and focus only on the CO2 pollutant, which is a greenhouse gas but not a critical pollutant in terms of air quality and human exposure. This research focuses on a regional basis (NUTS 2 classification) and takes into account the main critical pollutants in terms of urban air pollution (namely: NOx, PM10, and PM2.5), and considers 10 years, from 2009 until 2018. This work aims to investigate evidence of a tourism-induced Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) for the countries through the construction of five panels, one for each country, including different variables: the Gross Domestic Product, the energy consumption, and the number of nights spent at tourist accommodation establishments from both domestic and foreign tourists. The Levin-Lin-Chu unit root test proves the variables to be stationary, while the Pedroni cointegration test shows that they are integrated. The pooled OLS estimator is employed throughout the countries to check the relationship among the variables. Results reveal that the tourism-induced EKC hypothesis is not validated for any of the countries. The findings also show that in Portugal, Italy, and Greece, there is a negative relationship between economic growth and environmental pollution, while mixed evidence is found for France and Spain. Moreover, differences in the impacts of international and domestic tourists on air pollution are found: foreign tourists negatively impact emissions, while domestic ones increase them. This result is clear for Spain, Greece, and Italy. The Granger panel causality test is then conducted to see the causality among the variables.

This paper aims to analyse the factors influencing the impact of tourism trips on young visitors’ happiness using the Oxford Happiness Inventory (OHI). Multivariate regression analyses were...

To develop an accessible tourism information system, it is of utmost relevance to consider the requirements of all users. The aim of this paper is to examine the view of tourism supply agents (TSA) on the development of an information system for accessible tourism. To achieve this aim, a questionnaire to a sample of Portuguese TSA was administered to identify the type of data that these users are interested in introducing in the system and the information that they desire to obtain from it. Results show that TSA considered the creation of an accessible tourism information system important and also showed interested in being part of it. Regarding the information to insert and retrieve from the tourism information system, TSA showed interest in aspects related to the accessibility of tourism offers, as well as information related to the characteristics of the accessible tourism market. This research was funded by the project ACTION – Accessible Tourism: Co-Creation of Tourism Experiences Through Web-Based Intelligent Systems, funded by FEDER, through COMPETE2020 – Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-030376), and by national funds (OE), through FCT/MCTES (PTDC/EGE-OGE/30376/2017). published

This conclusion presents a general overview of the main contributions of this book on social tourism, as well a summary of the most important contributions of each chapter and a prospective overview of the challenges and approaches in the future.

This chapter analyses the social tourism programmes for seniors offered by the INATEL Foundation in Portugal over the years, and examines the benefits of participating in these programmes, as perceived by seniors. First, a literature review is presented concerning the relevance of social tourism programmes in overcoming some travel constraints for seniors and the potential benefits obtained by seniors from participating in these programmes. In the next section, the social tourism programmes offered by the INATEL Foundation are described in terms of their most important characteristics, demand for them and the benefits obtained from them by the participants (seniors). The chapter ends with the most important conclusions regarding contributions to developing social tourism initiatives to increase the participation of seniors in tourism activities and further research on this topic.

The present work aims to expand knowledge on user needs and the motivations of people with disabilities (PwD) in order to create a technological solution for addressing barriers in the accessible tourism market. For this, a user-centered design was followed, putting PwD at the center of the development process. This was obtained by identifying personas and scenarios contributing to a better depiction of the potential users, clearly describing their requirements and accessibility needs. For obtaining the characterization of personas, a comprehensive study in the area of accessible tourism, involving various tourism stakeholders was performed. The methods applied to collect the data were questionnaires, interviews and two focus groups with PwD. Two personas are presented in this article, illustrating the needs and motivations of two groups of PwD. In addition, two scenarios concerning the personas were also elaborated, showing how a technological solution can help the integration in tourism activities.

This chapter analyses children's participation in the social tourism programme promoted by the 'O Século' Foundation in Portugal. A literature review is first presented, which discusses both the constraints of poverty and social exclusion in childhood and the relevance of social tourism programmes in mitigating its effects and promoting social inclusion. The chapter then presents an analysis of 131 questionnaires and 132 drawings, collected during the 2014 summer holiday camps of the 'O Século' Foundation. Results are discussed in terms of children's motivations, satisfaction levels and perceived benefits from the social tourism programme.

The aims of this chapter are: (i) to identify the travel constraints of low-income families with children with disabilities (LIFWCD); (ii) to characterize the tourism experience of these families; (iii) to identify the benefits obtained from family trips; and (iv) to identify guidelines to develop social tourism programmes to promote the access of this market to tourism activities. To accomplish these aims, this chapter encompasses a literature review regarding social tourism initiatives, travel constraints and tourism experiences of LIFWCD and an empirical study. This empirical study was carried out with a group of Portuguese LIFWCD, specifically with parents, and with a group of social organizations that provide support to these families. The experience of the parents and their interpretation of their children's experiences are analysed, given their relevance in the travel decision-making process and during the trip.

This chapter describes how Tourism 4.0 is a concept that combines tourism and the fourth industrial revolution, and although the literature in this field is very scarce, this concept has been explored in some research projects, such as the government-sponsored research project in Slovenian tourism. People with various kinds of access requirements represent a combination of challenges and opportunities for the tourism industry. Tourism 4.0 set up the main goals of making tourism accessible to everyone at any time. Therefore, this new phenomenon may have an essential role in the development of accessible tourism. The adoption of technological components in accessible tourism enables the development of a new technological solution that can facilitate access to tourism products for disabled people, contributing to the development of accessible tourism. The new term Accessible@Tourism 4.0 is the answer to the role of the fourth industrial revolution in accessible tourism, emphasizing the effect of Industry 4.0 components in the tourism sector.

There is a clear need to address the technological effects of providing conditions for accessibility in tourism. Accessible tourism is becoming very important, and technology may be the tool which will surpass barriers to accessibility in tourism. New information technologies focus not just on the divulgation of information, but also on making sure everything is connected, which in the case of accessible tourism has significant value. Therefore, this chapter aims to share the results of a systematic literature review conducted on the topic of the impact of ICTs on accessible tourism. The research will be done via analysis of a range of bibliometric indicators present in the main academic and research databases. This approach will allow the characterization of the main technologies in the service of accessible tourism and an understanding of how they can enhance the quality of tourism experiences for people with disabilities.