Editorial

New development for the journal

Global Grand Challenges (GCs) have received only a limited attention within the tourism literature and this Progress paper examines one such GC – dementia and the contribution that tourism research can make to helping people live well with dementia. The paper critically debates the concept of GCs, the challenges of addressing them and how dementia presents both a challenge and opportunity for the academy. Using the concept of the visitor journey and the social model of disability as a paradigm, the paper reviews progress towards creating a more dementia-inclusive society through the auspices of tourism research, reviewing the contributions to date and where the interconnections with dementia and tourism exist. The review draws from a wide interdisciplinary framework including health, medicine, travel medicine and leisure and argues for a greater use of transdisciplinary approaches to address GCs.

Understanding pro-environmental behaviours (PEBs) in protected areas has attracted considerable research attention. This perennial issue is pertinent in reducing negative compounded impacts and/or increasing positive impacts in protected areas. This study aims to provide a review of the literature to unpack the existing publications of PEBs in protected areas and to scope future research avenues. A total of 88 empirical research journal articles were collected through Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar databases. Results showed 43.18% of the articles analysed considered PEBs as a general group of behaviours while the remaining 56.82% were specific domains of PEBs including littering, staying on-trail, and car use. The majority of the literature adopted cross-sectional quantitative survey methodology, making limited use of longitudinal, experimental and qualitative research approaches, which may have limitations for future research. The review suggests modelling and predicting PEBs needs to be focused on a specific behaviour of a specific (target) audience in a specific context (time and place). There are avenues for potential future PEBs research; however, its specific domains, theoretical advancement, measurability and cultural influences, require significant rethinking for future research.

This study aims to: 1) describe the travel motivations of the types of film tourists proposed by Macionis (2004), specifically, serendipitous tourists, specific film tourists, and general film tourists, in visiting a film-induced tourist destination; and 2) empirically test the assumption that film tourism is incidental and neither the main nor the sole motivation of most tourists traveling to a film destination. A mixed method of quantitative and qualitative (a series of self-complete questionnaire surveys over a period of eleven months and a longitudinal study of interviews and participant observations over a period of four years) was used in the study. Out of 1852 samples, the numbers of specific film tourists (10.5%) and general film tourists (19.5%) are less than serendipitous tourists (70%). Though both business and leisure tourists can be specific film tourists, their number is very small. Furthermore, serendipitous tourists can be distributed into almost equal numbers, namely, “incidental serendipitous tourists,” “disinterested serendipitous tourists,” and “sightseeing serendipitous tourists.” While successful films create destination awareness among all types of film tourists, an individual's favorite film, rather than a successful film, motivated most specific film tourists to take a pilgrimage film trip. This study also highlights the value of the mixed method, of a quantitative and qualitative approach, in explaining film tourism, in regards to unusual behavior of outliers. Whereas the quantitative design increases the generalization of the findings, the qualitative method provides better understanding of contradictory findings without having to eliminate outliers from analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to explore tourism labor research using a thematic approach. Set against a background of increasing interest in and diversity of labor issues, dominant and emerging themes in tourism labor research are discussed to demonstrate the broad range and evolution of studies undertaken to date. Following an exploration of the themes, the paper considers three different perspectives on tourism labor in order to articulate the complexities of labor issues. These perspectives are from the tourism worker, the tourism employer, and the tourism researcher. Each is considered through the use of a scenario. The paper concludes that the intricacies of tourism labor afford an opportunity for multi-disciplinary boundaryless research that promotes dialogue between different perspectives.