Advances in Hospitality and Leisure, Volume 20: Volume 20

Climate change continues to be one of the major threats to tourism development, with coastal destinations particularly vulnerable to impacts such as extreme weather events, rising sea levels, hotter temperatures and the loss of ecosystem diversity. While the environmental and economic impacts of climate change are widely acknowledged, less research has identified the impacts on the destination community. This paper explores the concerns about climate change in a small coastal community and how responses to this threat by the destination's local government authority may affect its long-term social sustainability. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 government representatives and community members in the Livingstone Shire, Queensland, Australia. Thematic analysis identified several key themes including infrastructure, collaborative planning, climate impacts, response to climate change, vulnerability and achieving long-term social sustainability. This research makes an important contribution by proposing a theoretical model that demonstrates how achieving long-term social sustainability requires destination planning through stakeholder collaboration and community consultation and takes into account several dynamic factors at the destination level. The model also has practical implications and can be adopted by destination communities to encourage long-term planning that maintains and enhances social sustainability as part of a destination-wide response to climate change.

This study explores how the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the tourism industry's vulnerabilities and consequently leads to a paradigm shift towards adaptability, digitalization, diversification and closer collaboration with governmental and international entities. It encompasses a diverse range of industry involved parties, examining the responses and adaptations of various tourism entities to the pandemic's challenges. Through qualitative data analysis, including network analysis and word clouds, this study furnishes viable strategies that emphasize cultural sensitivity, environmental stewardship, technological integration, conservation-focused tourism and public–private partnerships. The study identifies key forthcoming challenges, including the standardization of environmental impact assessments, the promotion of eco-certifications, responsible tourism initiatives and the ethical treatment of wildlife, which will shape the future trajectory of sustainable tourism.

This study aims to evaluate how positive experiences affect satisfaction and brand loyalty toward specific brand products for travel services by collecting 489 structured questionnaires from those patronizing seven world-renowned brand travel agencies in Taiwan. As for data analysis, it uses a structural equation model (SEM) to examine causal relationships among the proposed constructs. This study suggests that marketers of brand products utilize this consumer mentality, pursue the meaning of symbol development strategies for products and appeal to more consumers to boost consumption. In addition, offering a positive experience and ensuring satisfaction is a valid strategy for creating brand life cycle advantages for travel services.

This research utilizes the Panel FMOLS (fully modified ordinary least square) and DOLS (dynamic ordinary least square) techniques to analyze the influence of tourism on the level of female employment across several sectors, including agriculture, services and industry, in Central Asia (CA) nations from 2000 to 2021. It finds a significant positive correlation between economic development, trade openness and female employment. Conversely, the increase in tourist arrivals and the urbanization process have a positive and statistically significant effect on the unemployment rate. Based on the findings of the sectoral study, it can be seen that tourism has a statistically significant positive influence on the level of women's work within the service and industrial sectors. Conversely, the association between tourism and women's employment in the agriculture sector demonstrates a statistically adverse effect. The study's results suggest that authorities should prioritize implementing initiatives aimed at enhancing tourism throughout the countries in CA.

This study identifies factors that affect customers' satisfaction with restaurant service and their intention to return to the restaurant. It also compares the significant service factors influencing customers' satisfaction and intention to return before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Customers' dining experiences are measured with the sequential critical incident (SCI) method, which records customers' direct feedback after visiting a local restaurant. In this method, customers report critical incidents they have encountered and rate their overall satisfaction with their dining experience and their intention to return. The results show that before the COVID-19 pandemic, front-line employees' service quality had more influence on customers' satisfaction and return intention. After the pandemic, however, customers have been less influenced by employees' service provisions, such as order and waiting time. Instead, they must consider other attributes such as meals and extra services.

Weather and climate have a strong impact on tourism. However, because meteorological forecast information is considered a public good, people often overlook its market value. This study uses the contingent valuation method (CVM) to evaluate the economic value of a stargazing forecast system and assessed whether such a system would increase the public's willingness to stargaze. The results demonstrate that the economic value of the proposed stargazing forecast system is NT$ 0.2–2.5 billion, and the total value was 0.27–3.5 billion when protest responses are excluded. In addition, a stargazing forecast system could increase the public's willingness to engage in stargazing, indicating that both the system and meteorological information have a tremendous nonmarket value. Accordingly, this study suggests that the government could develop a stargazing forecast system and partner with famous stargazing destinations to popularize stargazing to propel the growth of the tourism industry.

This paper applies the directional distant function and the meta-frontier to analyze the efficiency and technology gap ratio (TGR) of 20 publicly traded restaurant companies based on the stock market of the United States (US) from 2009 to 2016. The efficiency scores and TGRs are first computed by restaurant types (i.e. quick-service and full-service) and then by marketing strategies (i.e. single-brand and multi-brand). There are three major findings. First, employee utilization has the greatest room for improvement, and restaurant owners and managers should prioritize the improvement of this input. Second, the average TGR of quick-service restaurants (QSRs) is higher than that of full-service restaurants (FSRs), indicating that the inputs of FSRs need to be adjusted in comparison to QSRs. Third, the average TGR is higher in restaurants with a multi-brand strategy in comparison to a single-brand strategy, and the inputs of multi-brand strategy restaurants need to be adjusted accordingly.

This study compares the motivation, perceived crowding and satisfaction differences among local climbers in three Asian countries. The study population consists of mountain climbers from Taiwan's Yushan, Japan's Mount Fuji and Malaysia's Mount Kinabalu. The study involves 3,112 respondents from Mount Fuji, 192 from Mount Kinabalu and 391 from Yushan. The results from the Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) show significant differences among climbers on the three mountains concerning climbers' motivation, perceived crowding and satisfaction. Social factors are the most significant motivators, with climbers on Mount Kinabalu, representing the most salient motivation for mountain tourism. For perceived crowding, climbers on Mount Fuji perceive congestion on the trails, mountaintops, restrooms and mountain huts and regard those services as unacceptable. Concerning satisfaction, services provided by mountain huts are the most significant, with the highest satisfaction recorded at Yushan's mountain huts. The study findings may be used as a reference for relevant tourism stakeholders and guide future research directions.

This paper analyses how regenerative tourism practices can advance the environmental resilience of island destinations by minimizing tourism's negative impact and moving towards net-positive outcomes. The urgency of the research study is evident in the natural and anthropogenic dangers and disasters already faced by most destinations and the increasing need for environmental resilience. The economic dependence of many island destinations on the tourism industry means ways to mitigate climate change without threatening the tourism industry are vital. This explorative study argues the concept of regenerative tourism with its focus on co-creation is an effective and implementable strategy to give more back than taken and renew and regenerate the destination. The example of New Zealand (NZ) with a thematic analysis of semi-structured in-depth interviews with expert stakeholders in the NZ tourism landscape focuses on environmental pressures impacting environmental resilience and the role of regenerative tourism practices. The data show a move from a mainly short-term economic focus to a concentration on and awareness of the need to develop long-term environmental resilience through stakeholder collaboration and regenerative policies. These findings although specific to NZ provide insights for other island destinations through the clear benefit to both visitors and residents of an increased focus on the aim of net-positive rather than net-zero in improving the environment.

This study compares holiday planning in Switzerland (CH) and Uruguay (UY). Summer vacations are one of the most important times of the year for families with children who decide to travel, as national school schedules determine the holiday period. Although the objective situation in the holiday planning period differs in the two hemispheres in terms of the phases of the pandemic, this research study aims to evaluate whether the same is true for subjective aspects such as pandemic risk, obstacles to travel and willingness to travel. This study compares these subjective aspects by surveys applied to both countries during the planning period of the summer holidays, using logistic regression, denoting the country as the dependent variable.