Search results

This paper aims to report on a post-confinement reflection (not post-COVID-19) resulting from a series of online forums that took place during the peak moments of the pandemic, with the intention of raising awareness and mobilising tourism agents for the development of tourism planning and tourism intelligence, taking advantage of the period of stagnation of the tourism industry. The project was named “Tourism in flight mode: Thinking together the post COVID-19 tourism”.

The project was based on the sharing of information and experiences in virtual forums where participants from all over the world had the opportunity to explain how the pandemic was influencing their work/business, the regional or national tourism activity, GDP and jobs and how they and their regions were preparing for the recovery of tourism. On a biweekly basis, virtual forums were organised, with participants from three continents and 12 countries. The results were contextualised by carrying out a review of the most recent literature and authors’ tourism know-how in the field.

The results of the discussions allowed for an identification of new potential successful tourism products and new proposals for the design of basic pillars for destinations planning.

This paper offers practical recommendations for public administration and others on dealing with unexpected crises in the tourism sector and how to respond through the development of new and adapted products and approaches to tourism.

This paper creates awareness in public administration and other agencies about the opportunities and the needs for this “new era”.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the importance of a sound and participatory strategic planning process for the management of tourism at national and regional levels and its contribution to the sustainable development of destinations.

The case study presented in this paper is based on an academic/industry project, launched to support the practical learning of strategic tourism planning and the strategic management of tourism destinations by MBA students. The Open Academy of Tourism, a partnership between the Institute of Tourism, and the Portuguese National Association of Tourism Regions, was created to support the development of strategic plans for Portuguese tourism regions, while allowing students to test and fine tune a model for strategic planning and managing tourism destinations. To better understand the applicability of this model, 13 case studies based on the same number of strategic plans were developed.

The paper reveals that the effective management of any tourist destination can be enhanced by following a carefully developed tourism strategy which contemplates the involvement of all stakeholders. It also demonstrates that academia can work closely together with public tourism organisations to develop meaningful plans of action for destinations.

The paper highlights the potential and importance of strategy development in tourism, while alerting for the need of a clear vision and leadership of the process to improve success.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of tourism on the local environment

Presents a case study of tourism being developed in Portugal

It is widely acknowledged that tourism can advance economic relationships between different countries and regions. Analysts therefore naturally assume that its effect on the global economy is considerable. For some reason, much less attention is afforded to how tourism stimulates economic growth on a more localized scale. But that should not detract from its importance in this respect. Indeed, tourism's impact on places and the people that inhabit them can be massive. Tourism often provides an economic lifeline. However, not all communities are able to fully exploit the opportunities and benefits that tourism activities might bring. Many simply lack the vital knowledge or resources.

Need to forge close working relations between partner organizations. Increase the focus on quality and measures used for its evaluation.

Promotes increased community participation in developing tourism activities. Can help increase awareness of environmental protection and enhancement.

This article presents a systematic framework with a meta-analytic approach to finding various antecedents, consequents and moderating effects of trust in financial services.

A meta-analysis of 165 articles was performed, which generated 272 observations in a cumulative sample of 86,968 respondents.

The results of this meta-analysis demonstrated seventeen antecedents of trust constructs and four consequents. Most of these relationships were meaningful and consistent. The authors also found some significant moderators related to culture (individualism, masculinity and long-term orientation) and context (innovation index and device type).

This meta-analysis reviewed the relationships found throughout the theoretical framework about the trust construct in financial service contexts, identifying new paths for future research. Some limitations, such as the non-use of qualitative studies and the selection of concepts, exist in the secondary data and should be noted.

The present study can assist financial system managers in decision-making because the findings from the meta-analysis are more consistent than those from traditional primary surveys.

This research tested the impact of antecedents, consequents and moderators of trust in the financial services sector and presented significant results using a meta-analytic review. This meta-analysis contributes to the marketing literature by offering a set of empirical generalizations, including relationship coefficients and fail-safe calculated numbers (FSN).

The purpose of this meta-analytic study is to investigate the possible influence of food shape abnormality on consumer’s willingness to buy fruits and vegetables. This research also investigates some possible moderators (methodological, cultural, socio-economic and contextual) that could influence the direct effects.

This study applied the meta-analysis approach to understand the effect of food shape abnormality on willingness to buy fruits and vegetables. In this research, 16 empirical articles were examined, with a total of 54 effect sizes.

The results showed consistent negative effects between food shape abnormality and consumers’ willingness to buy fruits and vegetables. This study also found significant effects related to culture (Hofstede’s cultural dimensions) and to socio-economic (Human Development Index) moderators. The findings demonstrated that cultures with higher power distance levels promoted stronger effects in the relationship between abnormally shaped food and willingness to buy. Additionally, related to social–economy aspects of a nation, the negative effects between abnormally shaped food and willingness to buy are stronger in countries with low human development rates.

Public policymakers can benefit from the main findings by implementing interventions strategies and education campaigns based on different cultural dimensions. In cultures characterized by high levels of aversion to uncertainty, social communication campaigns can build trust and provide the consumer more knowledge about abnormally shaped fruits and vegetables, whereas in cultures characterized by low levels of masculinity, related to higher levels of sustainability, local producers can benefit from the “local food” positioning to sell abnormally shaped fruits and vegetables.

This research advances studies about consumer behaviour in relation to food waste, highlighting factors beyond aesthetic issues, such as a nation’s culture and its economic context. These results open the way for new work in this area.

This article presents a fuzzy cognitive map for the evaluation of innovation in organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model to evaluate the innovative capacity of organizations based on fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM), particularly for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). The specification of the innovation evaluation model based on FCM was carried out with the “Intelligent Decision Support System” methodology. It is a six-step methodology: selection of experts, definition of concepts and relationships, model design, inference, interpretation and decision.

Our approach yielded good results in three case studies, effectively determining the level of innovation in an organization. The fuzzy cognitive maps demonstrated a high level of accuracy, with an accuracy of 82% in the Colombian case studies and 92% in the global case studies. These results highlight the effectiveness of the model for quantitatively assessing levels of innovation within organizations. Furthermore, the study revealed the most influential and essential innovative activities/variables within organizations, contributing significantly to the improvement of their operations and competitiveness.

It is important to automate the definition of the relationships between the concepts of the context and of our FCM. It is also possible to improve the behavior of the FCM by analyzing the variables with a greater impact on the level of innovation and very dynamic in the context since they are the variables to be observed in real-time to follow the evolution of the innovative behavior of an organization.

The study found that innovative activities emerged as an influential factor in organizations, essential to improving their operations and competitiveness. Our model can help in identifying areas that require improvement to impact positively organizations. By improving innovation assessment through the FCM model, organizations can anticipate higher profitability because innovations are often closely tied to revenue generation and cost savings. The tool can determine the necessity of new products or services, improve operational processes or enter new markets.

The previous results in the literature show that although there are relevant advances on this topic, there is not enough knowledge to provide clear guidelines for evaluating innovation and improving performance in an organization using intelligent systems. Also, previous works have not defined a framework for evaluating innovation in MSMEs based on FCMs. They also do not use the data of an organization to assess the key characteristics related to innovation. This work applies FCM to automate the evaluation of the process and the capacity for innovation in an organization. These are the main differences between our approach and previous studies.

Increased competition and the constant need for companies to differentiate make markets more competitive and consumers more demanding when making purchasing decisions. Consequently, companies recognized the importance of marketing and economics, which has gradually replaced its transactional practices, focused essentially on a single transaction, with relational practices, in which the customer is considered an integral part of the process. Creating long and profitable relationships has become a business priority and the use of tools such as customer relationship marketing (CRM) has become crucial. With the increasing importance of health and wellness tourism, thermalism has become a very competitive product wanted by tourists who need treatments that are not available in their country due to lack of availability or because they are quite expensive. Since tourism is integrated in the services sector, a set of relational marketing strategies can be applied to establish and maintain relationships with tourists. Therefore, it is important to understand how relational marketing can improve health and wellness tourism. Based on a combination of theoretical and practical research, this chapter explores the dynamic system and mechanism of innovation and development of relational marketing strategies in specific contexts of tourism (i.e. health and wellness tourism) considering cross-border (i.e. Northern Euroregion of Portugal and Galicia). From an interdisciplinary perspective, the chapter presents insights for marketing and tourism (health and well-being) and for the economic development of territories (i.e. cross-border regions).

The concept of smart city has recently become more topical in academic and policy discussions. This idea is considered a complex, non-consensual subject since its definition has not yet been agreed upon by most authors in the relevant fields. The need to identify and measure smart city indicators has also given rise to many different evaluation procedures. However, the available frameworks have yet to overcome challenges in structuring and measuring all the evaluation parameters of the cities in question. Thus, methods still need to be developed and applied that can structure criteria used to assess smart city success.

This study sought to show cognitive mapping's tangible usefulness as an expedient tool for strategic analysis, using smart cities as a complex object of study. To this end, various cognitive maps were constructed and compared using the Strategic Options Development and Analysis (SODA) approach.

Cognitive mapping's advantages and limitations in the strategic visualization research context are analyzed and discussed.

The authors know of no prior work reporting comparative analysis of this methodological approach in the same research context.