Nowadays tourists rely on technology for inspiration, research, booking, experiencing and sharing. Not only it provides access to endless sources of information, but has become an unbounded source of tourist-related data. In such crowd-sourced data-intensive scenario, we argue that new approaches are required to enrich current and new travelling experiences. This work, which supports the “dream...

What are the processes behind efforts for more sustainable mountain destinations in the German Alps and what are the views of different tourism stakeholders on these processes? The research deals both with threats pushing the agenda of sustainable development (such as climate change and depletion of resources), indicators of sustainable tourism (to measure the scope of change), as well as cross...

It is widely accepted that technological change underpins a global economy and that geographic location and concentration is of foremost importance for tourism development and competitive advantage. This paper discusses the role of tourism networks, clustering and destination value chains for micro and small and medium size tourism enterprises (SMEs) in freely assembled destinations. In discuss...

Urbanization is one of the great challenges of our time and unchecked haphazard urbanization is a serious threat both to the environment and social and economic balance. In order to meet global sustainability targets, rapid urban growth must be channelled into environmentally friendly, sustainable and liveable urban environments. Thus, this special issue focuses on sustainable urban design whic...

In the European Union and its neighborhood, regional development has increasingly come to focus on agglomerations during the last three decades. Notably, during the 1990s and early 2000s, clustering was the major policy focus in regional development. Currently, the concept of smart specialization is applied all over the European Union and is attracting interest in the EU’s neighborhood. The tou...

This poster gives an overview about the web application “vakantieland.nl”, a Dutch Internet portal in the tourism domain. The core functionality is to provide information about holiday destinations, accommodation and other tourism related points-of-interest as well as a corresponding visualization with a mapping service. Because of the underlying semantic data structures and alternatively gener...

Studies on tourists crowding are developed to explore the perception of crowding, and these studies indicate crowding influence on sustainable development of tourist destinations. This study aims to reveal the influential factors of tourists’ perceived crowding. We obtained data from interviewing over 400 tourists and five senior tourism officials in Xi’an, China. This study firstly applies fac...

Th is paper explores the approach to the construction of literary tourism site from the perspective of authenticity which is a keyword in heritage tourism. Since MacCannell (1973, 1976) introduced the concept of authenticity into studies of tourism motivations and experiences in 1970s, the various notions of tourism authenticity can be summarized into four types of theories objective authentici...

The natural environment represents the main resource for many tourism destinations and tourists are increasingly interested in spending their vacation in unspoilt natural areas. Consequently, destination managers are under increased pressure to implement ecologically sustainable practices. Selective targeting of tourists has been proposed as one approach to sustainable destination management, b...

Facing high competitive intensity and a rapid rise in tourism activity and export trade, many businesses have turned to their place of origin (PO) as a point of positive differentiation (Johansson 1988; Echtner and Ritchie 1993). This PO effect, often associated with a country, but increasingly a state or city (Thode and Maskulka 1998), has led to coordination of campaigns which promote positiv...