This book explores how digital platforms in the realm of tourism and hospitality have shaped social and material worlds. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with hosts and guests, the book analyses the impacts of platforms on the scale of the city, the home, and the everyday life of individuals. The book first situates platforms within the broader history of digital developments in tourism and questions what is essentially new about these socio-technical formations? The following chapters demonstrate how platforms have affected urban housing, challenged the tourism sector, and transformed understandings of hospitality and home. This is illustrated through a case-study of Airbnb’s development and impact in Sofia, Bulgaria. The final chapters of the book reflect on the political dimensions of datafication processes and digital systems of measurement that underpin the platform’s workings, showing how the platform economies of tourism benefit their users in highly uneven ways.
In post-pandemic Europe the topic of 'overtourism' is back on the policy agenda of many cities, towns and villages. How to deal with the negative effects of tourism on places and people? This edited volume brings together inspiring perspectives and detailed case studies from all over Europe to better understand the phenomenon of overtourism. Based on the challenges lying ahead, the book makes a call for tourism policies that are more balanced and argues for more interdisciplinary research.
This open access book provides an extensive overview of the usage of information and communication technologies in the tourism and hospitality industry. It presents the proceedings of the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT)’s 30th Annual International eTourism Conference, which assembles the latest research presented at the ENTER2023 conference. The enclosed papers cover various topics within the field, including augmented and virtual reality, website development, social media use, e-learning, big data, analytics and recommendation systems.
The Routledge Handbook of Tourism Geographies, 2nd Edition, offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of the recent developments; conceptual, theoretical and empirical debates; and critical issues in this field of study. Reflecting on and building from its original aim of rethinking geographical approaches to tourism, the volume explores contemporary tourism contexts and concepts, as marked by the present era of polycrises, setting out renewed and reoriented perspectives on tourism geographies into the mid-2020s. Across its diverse range of contributions, the Handbook navigates the complexities of tourism as a shifting construct, situating tourism geographies within the socio-spatial, economic and environmental implications of tourism, leisure and mobilities in the new contexts of global change, ecological transition and digital transformation. The volume aims to provide a nuanced and detailed analysis of established and emerging discourses and debates within tourism geographies, underscoring the field’s inherent criticality and ideal positioning for understanding and catalysing complex global and local scenarios in contemporary tourism, leisure and mobilities. Written by leading scholars in the tourism geographies field, this text is an invaluable resource for students, researchers and scholars working in the areas of tourism, geography and related disciplines, encouraging dialogue across areas of study.
This book deconstructs the ‘sharing’ marketing narratives surrounding Airbnb and similar platforms. It provides a conceptual analysis of the ‘sharing economy’ and accommodation sector and furthers the ongoing discussion surrounding Airbnb and the social sustainability of city tourism. The volume analyses the touristification of neighbourhoods in the context of broader economic and ideological shifts, thus bridging the gap between academic and social debate. It presents four different city scenarios of potential future developments and evaluates the effects of different regulatory responses, giving readers an understanding of the forces and factors at work and envisioning the ultimate consequences of current developments. The book will appeal to students and researchers in tourism and hospitality studies, futures studies and urban planning, as well as to policymakers and strategists in the hospitality and tourism sectors.
The first authoritative overview of tourism studies published post-COVID-19 The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Tourism remains a definitive reference in this interdisciplinary field. Edited and authored by leading scholars from around the world, this state-of-the-art volume provides a comprehensive critical overview of tourism studies across the social sciences. In-depth yet accessible chapters combine established theories and cutting-edge developments and analysis, addressing a wide range of current and emerging topics, issues, debates, and themes. The second edition of the Companion reflects the complexity of the changing field, incorporating new developments, diverse theories, core themes, and fresh perspectives throughout. New and revised chapters explore the organization and practice of tourism, pressing health, economic, social, and environmental challenges, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism and the tourist industry, empowerment, placemaking, mindfulness and wellbeing, resident attitudes towards tourism, Chinese outbound tourism, public transport, long-distance walking, and more. Covers the full spectrum of tourism studies, including its connections to geography, sociology, urban studies, sustainability, marketing, management, globalization, and policy Outlines exciting new and emerging approaches, theoretical foundations, and major developments in tourism studies Offers perspectives on major topics including the role of tourism in the Anthropocene, global and local change, resilience, innovation, and consumer and business behavior Sets an agenda for future tourism research and reviews significant issues in theory, method, and practice Features new contributions from an international panel of younger scholars and established researchers With a wealth of up-to-date bibliographic references and extensive coverage of the tourism-related literature, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Tourism, Second Edition, is required reading for undergraduate students, postgraduate researchers, lecturers, and academic scholars in tourism studies, tourism management, tourism geography, tourism theory, sociology, urban studies, and globalization, as well as professionals working in tourism and hospitality management worldwide.
The chapters in this volume provide tools and evidence useful for deep understanding of tourists’ buying, consumption, and being through examinations of consumers’ self-descriptions of personal markers of their trip configurations.
This book employs an interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral lens to explore the collaborative dynamics that are currently disrupting, re-creating and transforming the production and consumption of tourism. House swapping, ridesharing, voluntourism, couchsurfing, dinner hosting, social enterprise and similar phenomena are among these collective innovations in tourism that are shaking the very bedrock of an industrial system that has been traditionally sustained along commercial value chains. To date there has been very little investigation of these trends, which have been inspired by, amongst other things, de-industrialization processes and post-capitalist forms of production and consumption, postmaterialism, the rise of the third sector and collaborative governance. Addressing that gap, this book explores the character, depth and breadth of these disruptions, the creative opportunities for tourism that are emerging from them, and how governments are responding to these new challenges. In doing so, the book provides both theoretical and practical insights into the future of tourism in a world that is, paradoxically, becoming both increasingly collaborative and individualized.
The first book to present a new conceptual framework which offers an initial explanation for the continuing and rapid success of such 'disruptive innovators’ and their effects on the international hospitality industry. It discusses all the hot topics in this area, with a specific focus on Airbnb, in the international context.
This book considers what the transition into the Asian Century means for some of the most urgent issues in the world today, such as sustainable development, human rights, gender equality, and environmental change. The book critiques Anglo-Western centrism in tourism theory and calls on tourism scholars to make radical shifts toward more inclusive epistemology and praxis. From the British Century of the 1800s to the American Century of the 1900s to the contemporary Asian Century, tourism geographies are deeply entangled in broader shifts in geopolitical power. In the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, the significance of shifts in tourism geographies and the themes addressed in this volume are more urgent than ever. That the world faces increasing turmoil is abundantly clear. Yet, amidst the disruption to the everyday, it is hope and compassion, but also political-economic restructuring that is needed to reset the tourism industry in more sustainable, equitable, and ethical directions. In no uncertain terms, the pandemic has forever changed the tourism industry as the world once knew it. This book, therefore, sets out to collectively build on the momentum of the inclusive scholarship that Critical Tourism Studies-Asia Pacific is renowned for, while also asking readers to pause and reflect on the possibilities and challenges of tourism in a post-pandemic Asian Century. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Tourism Geographies.
