Contemporary Consideration
Asynchronous Session
Featured Transformations in Indigenous Cultural Tourism: Visitor 'Awakenings' or Journeys in 'Becoming Aboriginal'? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Vanessa Whittington
Drawing on scholarly literature on travel and transformation and my own empirical research, this paper explores whether visitors to places of recognised Aboriginal cultural heritage can experience processes of change, or what Bawaka Country et al. (2015, 270) call “an ontology of co-becoming”, when they travel to Australian protected areas, recognising the agentic nature of Country itself in these hypothetical transformations. For some visitors this can involve developing a (self-identified) connection with Country and a deeper self-perceived understanding of Aboriginal cultural heritage. My ethnographic research with visitors revealed that this enhanced understanding of Aboriginal cultural heritage most frequently occurred in cultural tours developed and led by Aboriginal peoples, particularly longer-term immersive experiences. However, this is not to say that visitor transformations are inevitable or even straightforward, as some visitors’ cultural tourism experiences simply reinforced pre-existing stereotypes of authentic and inauthentic Aboriginalities that they brought with them. Settler-colonial discourses about Aboriginality thus represent very real barriers to tourist transformations, discourses which are to some extent reinforced by the tourism industry and some Indigenous cultural tour providers themselves.
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.
Community-based Tourism for Rural Development - Local Perceptions after the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Case Study of North Eastern Thailand
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Angwara Nasoontorn
This research study explores rural development by using community-based tourism (CBT). The COVID-19 pandemic globally paused the tourism movement for more than 12 months, especially Thailand. It caused many CBTs problems, permanently closing, changing development direction, or going back to nothing ever happening. The study is mainly focused on financial dimensions. The research employs a qualitative method which discovered 12 CBT (26 key informants), conducted between 2022-2023 after the worldwide tourism shutdown. The study revealed that, after COVID-19, governments are still pushing CBT to be active by investing via local representative agencies. Some CBTs have ceased themselves, many still remain in service as a result of government promotion. Tourism revenue plays a vital role in the community but a number of communities found it hard to understand the situation. They are aware of the instability of tourism development. However, active CBTs see opportunity as tourists prefer travelling in a small group, creative experiences and meaningful moment. CBT is somehow addressed a significant role in Thailand tourism, but CBTs themselves are more aware this particular approach may not be the sustainable major income, they perceive constant change and admit the slow down.
Exploring Tourists’ Crowding Perceptions on Social Media: The Case of Istanbul View Digital Media
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.
