Contemporary Consideration
Asynchronous Session
Featured Honing Heritage: Dance, Festivals and Tourism in Khajuraho, India
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mihika Banerjee
This paper focuses on an interdisciplinary study of dance festivals organized at the World Heritage Site in Khajuraho, India. The Khajuraho Dance Festival began in 1975 and I propose it significantly contributed to the inter/national attention towards the Khajuraho Monuments, which was recognized as a WHS by UNESCO in 1986. Amongst the plethora of scholarly and documentary works centered around Khajuraho, its annual dance festival, despite its long-standing repute, have not been thoroughly considered. Studies have foregrounded the revenue-generative properties of the dance festivals, without deeply engaging with the prolonged, cyclical, transactional relationship dance festivals foster between the tourists and the site. My study would like to pronounce how the popularity and value of these sites are secured and maintained through the annual, and thereby continual, performances advanced by dance festivals. Moreover, it is crucial to note that the importance of these representations extends beyond the festival period and site locations. They enter the global media and market and (re)produce cultural imaginaries of the nation. Khajuraho Dance Festival is the earliest and among the most reputed cultural programs held in postcolonial India. Therefore, this study proffers a template for touristic festivals that subsequently took shape within India and other transnational contexts. Khajuraho Dance Festival marks its 50th year in February 2024, and it is a crucial time to look at its historical trajectory and contemporary relevance.
Post-pandemic Shifts in Chinese Tourism: Unveiling the Middle Class's Invisible Resistance
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Abigail Qian Zhou
This study delves into a hidden yet profound phenomenon: the post-pandemic "invisible resistance" reshaping travel behavior among China's middle class, a crucial demographic in the tourism sector. Despite relaxed restrictions, this group exhibits a distinct hesitance to embrace pre-pandemic travel habits. Their subtle resistance manifests in shifting destination preferences, a pursuit of new experiences, and heightened health and safety concerns. Employing qualitative methods, the research unpacks the nuanced implications of these changes through in-depth interviews and thematic analysis. The findings reveal a deep-seated transformation in values and priorities, potentially redefining the tourism landscape. The study illuminates evolving patterns in Chinese domestic and international travel, highlighting the intricate interplay between societal shifts and individual leisure travel decisions. Ultimately, it contributes to a holistic understanding of how global crises subtly influence consumer behavior and market dynamics. For tourism stakeholders navigating the post-pandemic landscape, this study offers invaluable insights. By shedding light on the changing Chinese travel landscape, it aids in comprehending the broader impact of global crises on tourism dynamics, ultimately serving as a guide for adapting to emerging market trends.
Reviving Post-pandemic Competitiveness of Tourism Destinations: Negating the Moderating Effects of Perceived Risks with Innovative Technologies View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sylvester Ilo
The global economic recession that supervened the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to last for a while. Consequently, policy makers have been saddled with the challenges of devising strategies and policies for stimulating a post-pandemic economic recovery, growth, and development. For tourism-sensitive economies, reviving inbound tourism with its attendant foreign exchange income has, as previous economic crises showed, proved to be one of the effective strategies of revamping a distressed economy. With the two broad divides of predictors of tourism demand, those that impede it against those that stimulate it, this research investigates the moderating effects of perceived risks and technological adoption on tourists’ behavioural intentions using the Structural Equation Modelling. Data were sourced through a survey of 479 tourists, sampled through multi-sampling method. Results show that four out of six COVID-19-induced dimensions of perceived risks have negative moderating influence on tourists’ behavioural intentions while technological adoption in tourism space has positive moderating effects on tourists’ intentions to visit. The study concluded that technological adoption in the tourism industry have the potentials of reversing the negative influence of perceived risks occasioned by COVID-19 pandemic, and therefore, improving tourism destination attractiveness and competitiveness. It recommended, among others, that tourism destination managers and policy makers utilise the benefits of innovative technologies in addressing the negating influence of perceived risks in their tourism industries and further improve the contributions of tourism to their national economies.
Exploring Tourists’ Crowding Perceptions on Social Media: The Case of Istanbul
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Daniela Buzova, Maria D. Alvarez, Silvia Sanz Blas
Research on tourism crowding is gaining momentum in the current literature as more and more destinations and monuments face carrying capacity issues nowadays. However, the crowding phenomenon is still poorly understood, as studies have mostly relied on quantitative survey-based methodologies, which have provided inconclusive results about crowding’s impact on tourists’ satisfaction, emotions, and behaviour. Hence, to extend the current body of literature on tourism crowding perceptions, the study leveraged an underexploited source of data: tourists’ social media posts on destination crowding. The study content analysed 300 posts published on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok containing the #crowded or its derivatives in one of the most visited European destinations: the city of Istanbul. The research set out to explore how tourists describe their crowding perceptions on social media by answering the following questions: (i) how is the perceived crowding represented visually?; (ii) how do visitors express the perceived crowding in the posts’ texts?; (iii) what types of crowding-related emotions are manifested? The visual analysis of the posts revealed four different ways of representing the experienced crowding: posing in front of/without the crowd, showing only the crowd and a view without it. As for the textual analysis, visitors used various figures of speech when mentioning crowding such as irony, sarcasm, palilogy and emphasis, apart from a wide range of positively-valenced emojis and travel-related hashtags. As for the emotions associated with crowding, a wide variety of emotions was found ranging from enjoyment, excitement, fascination, and love, to annoyance, frustration, shock and neutrality.
