Annals of Tourism Research最新文献

Dark events are organised events linked to death, disaster and suffering, and this conceptual study provides a new framework that can be used in their analysis. The framework has been developed through a theoretical synthesis of concepts from the domain theory of thanatology, and the method theories of dark tourism, dark leisure and collective memory. Six concepts of value for research into dark events are identified: commercialisation; approaches; public sphere; deviant behaviour; experiences; presence of death. The conceptual framework establishes a coherent conceptual footing for dark event research, and highlights links to established theories and methods that can be of value to future researchers in this novel area. Finally, we present an agenda for future research into dark events.

Online travel agencies usually offer rewards and incentives to encourage high-quality reviews. Will these incentives compel tourists to strive to earn certain rewards and affect review quality? We collect data from Ctrip wherein tourists can earn 80 points by posting a review with ≥ 50 characters, which requires more keystrokes. This research context features a quasi-experimental setting and a regression-discontinuity design to infer the causal effects of incentives on reviewing behavior. Regarding effort management, the results reveal that tourists manage their effort to earn rewards more quickly at the review-length cutoff. With respect to review quality, results show that incentives lead to a 30 % reduction in review usefulness at the cutoff. Additionally, effort management is severer among experienced tourists.

This paper adopts Ming and Shi (“名”与“实”, or naming/saying vs gaining/doing) as critical Chinese hermeneutics to understand stakeholder coopetition in destination development. Through an ethnographic case study in an ancient town in China, three internal coopetitions are identified: Ming overriding Shi (以名乱实), Shi overriding Ming (以实乱名), and one Ming overriding another Ming (以名乱名). Three external coopetitions are also discussed: legitimating Ming with external Shi (以实正名), enhancing Ming in compliance with external Shi (名副其实), and replacing old Ming with new Ming (以新名替旧名). These Chinese hermeneutic strategies are contrasted with Western interpretations to shed light on intercultural understandings of destination stakeholder coopetitions.

Emojis have been widely used in social media travel experience sharing as a communication tool to create a positive atmosphere. However, existing research has paid less attention to how the use of emojis in travel experience sharing affects the decision-making of potential travelers, especially based on the premise of emoji-text combination. Based on this research gap, we explore the matching effect between emojis and travel experience sharing. We found that (1) in desirability (feasibility) sharing, the use of emotional (semantic) emojis increased the perceived usefulness of travel posts more, with emotional arousal (processing fluency) playing a mediating role; (2) emoji replications had a significant moderating effect; and (3) in desirability-emotional emoji matching, with the increase in the number of replications, the perceived usefulness increased in an inverted U shape. This study enriches the literature on emoji and travel experience sharing, and is of great significance for platforms and destinations.

In the recent years the tourism sector has been hit by a number of uncertainty events. This paper studies how uncertainty impacts on the tourism markets and on the destinations price and promotion decisions. We consider a two-stage model with two reference destinations and product differentiation. Specifically, we distinguish between traveling and production costs/inputs uncertainty, and between informative and persuasive advertising. We found that uncertainty tends to increase prices as destinations pass uncertainty to consumers. However, in order to minimize the negative effect of higher prices in their bookings, destinations tend to intensify their promotion efforts. Altogether, uncertainty typically affects more consumers than destinations, which in most cases see their profits increase because of the increase in prices.

Polar tourism is continuously diversifying in order to provide unique experiences to travellers. One of the ways in which this currently happens is by increasingly integrating scientific activities into tourism expedition cruises. While there are mutual benefits of combining science and tourism, this does not mean that the production of joint expeditions is seamless and unproblematic. We apply a practice theory approach to analyse the practical and organisational implications of combining tourism and science practices during two enactments, with a seven-year's interval, of the unique Scientific Expedition Edgeøya Svalbard (SEES), organised by The Netherlands. Our results demonstrate that irregularly organised combinations of different sets of practices require higher levels of adaptivity, communicability and reflectivity to be reproduced successfully.

This study introduces an innovative framework that harnesses the most recent transformer architecture to enhance tourism demand forecasting. The proposed transformer-based model integrates the tree-structured parzen estimator for hyperparameter optimization, a robust time series decomposition approach, and a temporal fusion transformer for multivariate time series prediction. Our novel approach initially employs the decomposition method to decompose the data series to effectively mitigate the influence of outliers. The temporal fusion transformer is subsequently utilized for forecasting, and its hyperparameters are meticulously fine-tuned by a Bayesian-based algorithm, culminating in a more efficient and precise model for tourism demand forecasting. Our model surpasses existing state-of-the-art methodologies in terms of forecasting accuracy and robustness.

Tourism ads that feature human images have a significant impact on consumers' attitudes and decision-making processes. However, little is known about the relative effectiveness of tourism ads that portray models in candid versus posed stances. To address this gap, this study applies the narrative transportation theory and utilizes a mixed-method approach to examine the influence of modeling style (posed vs. candid) on destination advertising effectiveness. The findings from an eye-tracking experiment, a semi-structured interview, and three online experiments reveal that candid models outperform posed models in generating favorable consumer responses within the context of destination advertising. Furthermore, this study elucidates narrative transportation as the psychological mechanism underlying such effects. However, the superiority of candid models over posed models is observed specifically in nature-based destinations rather than urban destinations. This research provides important theoretical and managerial implications.