Tourism Place has a New Home

The Tourism Place Blog has a new home. It is now on the website for my journal, Tourism Geographies. 

Click Here to go directly to the new Tourism Place Blog's home.


You may find that the content of the Tourism Place blog has changed. It is now more of a support site for the journal.

I have a couple of other tourism-related blogs that are more research, thought and experience related, which might be more of interest. These are:

• Collaborative for Sustainable Tourism and Resilience Communities​​ Blog - this is what most of my more recent research has been about
   
• Travelography - Experiencing The World - I used to post here a lot, but not so much anymore
   

Public and Private Sustainable Tourism: Environmental Footprints and Quality of Life

'Sustainable development' has been a popular conceptual framework since the World Commission on Environment and Development issued its report to the United Nations in 1987 (WCED, 1987).  Also known as the “Brundtland Report”, after the commission’s chairperson, Gro Harlmen Bundtland of Norway, its goal was to define a new approach to addressing pressing social and environmental needs of the world.  Among its chief concerns were

• 1.  Poverty (hunger, health, housing, wealth distribution, exposure to natural disasters
• 2. Growth (fossil fuel and other natural resource consumption and pollution), global agenda to deal with the deterioration of natural and social environments. 

Today, 24 years later, sustainable development and sustainable tourism are widely accepted as appropriate philosophies upon which to base policy decisions and behavioral practice. Their wide acceptance is due, in part, to the flexibility used to interpret their meaning.  “Sustainable development” is an oxymoron, in that it implies both environmental conservation and stewardship (through sustainability), and natural resource exploitation (or development). Proponents for both of these perspectives commonly use “sustainable development” to argue for their respective positions. For Destination marketing organizations (DMOs), for example, sustainable development often means maintaining and growing tourist expenditures and tourism investments. This may be in complete opposition to slow growth conservationists for whom sustainable tourism is tourism development that does not impact local natural environments traditional cultures.

Sustainable tourism, however, mostly applies to mostly amenity rich geographic settings and, as such, is a niche area of application for the broader sustainable development paradigm. Urbanization, as a primary force for global social transformation can provide a more general and perhaps universal perspective on sustainable development. Several efforts have been made in popular media, for example, to rate the sustainability of cities, along with justifications for those ratings. A compilation of several of those lists shows a dominance of European cities, followed by North America and then a few cities in other parts of the world (table 1, sources: d'Estries, 2011; Grist, 2007; Linssen & Sindik, 2008).

What is more valuable for these sustainable cities lists is the criteria that they are based on. A review of the sources for table 1 resulted to two general types of criteria against which these cities stood out in various ways: their environmental footprint and their quality of life (table 2) (see also, . The environmental footprint of cities includes technological investments and innovations that either reduce greenhouse gas emissions or, secondarily, enhance the recycling of natural resources. As such, they are efforts to reduce the environmental impact of cities, with ultimate goals of reducing or mitigating the worldwide severity of global warming and environmental change. Quality of life criteria, on the other hand, are much less narrowly focused on global environmental issues. Instead, they address local lived experiences and the creation of places that are comfortably adapted to their social and environmental geographies. Open space, park lands, air, water, transportation systems, forests and heritage sites are shared, common resources that require conservation for future generations as much as the fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources. 

The sustainable cities criteria in Table 2 reflect the perspective of environmental organizations that are the strongest supporters of sustainable development, which reflects a strong bias toward the conservation of natural and social resources.  It also shows a bifurcation in that perspective between mitigation, which is a mostly engineering challenge, and adaptation, which is a more difficult social planning challenge.

The difference in these two perspectives is also evident in the area of sustainable tourism. The most common approach to instituting and verifying sustainable tourism is through engineering evaluations of the environmental footprint of a hotel, resort or tourist attraction that result in green certifications. This approach to sustainable tourism is popular because it is easier to conceptualize and more readily measurable than are social planning objectives. Tourism industry sectors throughout the world have adopted green certification programs both to mitigate the environmental impacts of tourism activities and as an effective marketing mechanism for some travel segments.

How tourism activities impacts local quality of life is occasionally acknowledged by the tourism industry, which mostly associates this through contribution to employment creation and the conservation of traditional culture through artistic displays and performances, and various forms of museumization.  Tourism’s broader roles in community development are addressed more by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and social scientists than by private sector tourism industry representatives.

The distinction in tourism development between private businesses ownership of environmental mitigation measures and public sector and civil society responsibility for public goods is not exclusive. Governments also build green buildings and adopt internal energy efficiency and recycling practices to reduce their environmental footprint.  In doing so, however, they are behaving more like private sector entities, rather than setting public policies that influence broad sectors of community behavior. The true distinction here is the public goods nature of the resources that comprise most of the quality of life sustainability criteria. The profit driven private sector is seldom, if ever, given primary responsibility for ensuring a community’s water and air quality, and shared open spaces.

After two and a half decades of sustainable development, this is where we have arrived the sustainable development paradigm has brought us.  There is a private sector primary focus on the technology of climate and ecosystem mitigations, and there is a public sector dominance of the realm of quality of life. These are both positive experiences that have benefitted the communities by reducing environmental impacts (footprints) and creating more livable places where they have been adopted.

The problem is that although sustainability paradigm practices have been adopted throughout the world to a degree beyond the expectations of many, they have not resulted in effective responses to global climate change and widespread poverty and hunger.  Some have even argued that the success of sustainability has resulted in a depoliticized and coopted climate change concerns, resulting in post-modern indifference to the future (Swyngedouw, 2013; Beck, 2010).  

The solution? See my previous post on Creative Resilience for the direction that I am currently leaning towards...

References Cited

Beck, UY. (2010) Climate for Change, or How to Create a Green Modernity. Theory, Culture & Society 27: 254-266.

d'Estries, M. (2011) Top Five Most Sustainable Cities in the World. Ecomagination.com (29 Nov), online at http://www.ecomagination.com/top-five-most-sustainable-cities-in-the-world, accessed 20 January 2013.

Grist (2007) 15 Green Cities. Grist (20 July), online at: http://grist.org/article/cities3/, accessed 20 Jan 2013.

Linssen, S. and Christopher Sindik, C. (2008) 2020 Global Sustainability Centers, Ethisphere (7 Sept), online at http://ethisphere.com/2020-global-sustainability-centers/, accessed 20 January 2013.

Swyngedouw, E. (2013) The Non-political Politics of Climate Change. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 12(1): 1-8, online at http://www.acme-journal.org/vol12/Swingedouw2013.pdf, accessed 13 January 2013.

A Review of “Tourism in the USA: A Spatial and Social Synthesis”

Tourism in the USA: A Spatial and Social Synthesis

by Dimitri Ioannides & Dallen J. Timothypublished by Routledge, London and New York, 2010, ISBN 0-415-95685-4 

Reviewed by Patrick Brouder, Department of Social & Economic Geography, Ume University, Sweden 

This 222-page book sets out to give a comprehensive overview of tourism in the USA. The title hints that the book is not only about tourism studies but includes many elements of geography, in particular, and social sciences, in general. Ioannides and Timothy state that their 'aim is to provide an overview and detailed account of the workings of tourism as a modern-day phenomenon in the United States of America' (p. 3). Their rationale is, at least in part, an attempt to address the fact that 'despite all the fuss about tourism in the USA, it is more than clear that it is a misunderstood phenomenon' (p. 3). In short, Tourism in the USA: A spatial and social synthesis offers an excellent overview of its subject and makes the phenomenon of one of the largest tourism economies in the world better understood. 


Access the full article for free at InformaWorld  


Published in Tourism Geographies, Volume 12, Issue 4 November 2010 , pages 575 - 577

Learning To See Through Travel

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Can We 'Learn To See?': Study Shows Perception Of Invisible Stimuli Improves With Training

ScienceDaily (Oct. 21, 2009) — Although we assume we can see everything in our field of vision, the brain actually picks and chooses the stimuli that come into our consciousness. A new study in the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology's Journal of Vision reveals that our brains can be trained to consciously see stimuli that would normally be invisible. [Click Here to read full story]
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Many years ago (many, many, in fact), I attended a meditation retreat in the hills near Clear Lake north of the SFO Bay Area.  There was a young guy on this retreat, in his early 20s, who was able to see aura around people’s bodies.  He did not need to do anything, this ability was just natural. 

Now in those days, when I was younger, I had a pretty good ability to see things at night – much better than almost anyone else I had met. So I kind of envied his aura seeing ability.  But he thought nothing of it – he told me that it really doesn’t mean much, he is just able to see them.

So, a few decades later, I still can’t see auras, and might night vision has declined as my need to wear glasses has increased (since I started using computers).  But now comes this story on ScienceDaily about how German researchers have shown that the eye can detect objects even though the brain does not recognize the object as being seen. This has a couple of fascinating possibilities:

(1) Our eyes may be detecting objects and fields of view just beyond the visible spectrum, in the infra-red and ultraviolet range, or in a dark field with no visible light, that we are totally unaware of, but which may still impress our brain, behavior and experience.

(2) We may be able to learn to see these objects of fields of information if we are trained or practiced in doing so. (This is the direction that the German researchers are moving – to help people with blind spots.)

As cool as that sounds, I no longer have my old meditation patience that I think it would probably take to master such skills.

However, I do see implications of this phenomenon – of learning to see what we otherwise would not – in my interests in the tourism and travel experience. These implications are:

(1)  People travel to see parts of the world, parts of the human existence, parts of the planetary geography that we otherwise would not be able to see.  We drive to travel because our monkey curiosity wants to fill in the blind spots of terra incognita.

(2) We use guidebooks, online video guides, and local human guides to help us to see what we would not see if we were to visit a place without any interpretation.  This is what semiotics refers to a the “sign” or “signifier” – it is the name and meaning that we humans assign to sites and sights that, in turn, gives us deep, existential experiences of those sites and sights.

(3) We also reject the guides and the guidebooks in an effort to gain a pure and direct experience of places – especially of the spontaneous and unplanned surprises that new places have the potential to offer us.  And related to this, are new identities and roles that arise in ourselves, that we may never knew were their, but which the liminal experience of traveling away from home, can sometimes show us.

(4) Some of us learn about broader issues of travel and tourism, especially sustainability issues, to make us more aware of our impacts and to better understand how tourism shapes places and people (both the hosts and the guests).

All of these are exercises in geographic visioning – of stretching our normal vision (and understanding) of the world, its places, its environments and ourselves – and to see and understand them in ways that we may never have considered were possible.  (Although, tourism advertisers also know this and flash images of possibilities that are often tempting, if fundamentally shallow.)

So, here we are.  At one level we are curious monkeys wanting to see what is hidden behind the peek-a-boo of distant places. At another level we are stretching our cognitive skill, stretching our brains, perhaps to lead us to a more aware planet that is hopefully able to manage, if not solve, the global issues that we all share today.

Are you a Tourism Extremist?

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Extremists More Willing To Share Their Opinions, Study Finds - ScienceDaily (Oct. 21, 2009) — People with relatively extreme opinions may be more willing to publicly share their views than those with more moderate views, according to a new study. [Click Here for the full story.]
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The story linked above is about a study at Stanford University in which students with extreme views on an issue were more vocal in expressing their opinions when they thought that the majority of their peers leaned in their direction.  There were generally silent if they thought that their peers held moderate or opposite views to theirs.

While we all have met people who are willing to express their "extreme" views even if they are clearly in the minority, they are the exception. The problem is that human nature assumes that the most vocal are expressing the dominant opinion of a group, whereas in reality, they actually represent an extreme position.  Thus, we (those of us on the left) assume that the talking heads on Fox News represent the typical Republican Party views in the US, when they really are a marginal extreme.

So what does this have to do with tourism?  Off the top of my head, I see the following implications:

We (tourism professionals) often assume that everyone want to travel and everyone is supportive of tourism because that is what seems to be the majority. In reality, there people's opinions on travel and tourism run a continuum from no interest in travel to travel as a lifestyle, and from no support for tourism to tourism as a foundation of the new service economy (cf. Urry's discussion of the "service class").  Making the pro-tourism and pro-travel perspective dominant has enormous impacts on macro economic priorities (such as transit and destination branding), community development decisions (where and what to spend tax dollars on), and human behavior (defining the range of possible leisure time activities). 

And this has resulted in major sustainability challenges, from the massive greenhouse gas emissions of long haul air and cruise ship travel, to change in traditional cultures from tourists visiting remote destinations.

Do we ever seriously even consider a no-tourism option as a lifestyle, as a form of community development, as what might be best for a destination? What kind of world would that be like ... possibly a more sustainable one?

 
 

I Hate Being Liminal - on the transition to home from a trip abroad

[Photo: View of the Li River from my conference hotel in Yangshuo, China]

I think I just experienced one of the longest travel-related liminal experiences ever (at least for me).

Liminal experiences are those that are characterized by transitions from one state of being to another. Tourists experience liminality when they transition from a home-based state of being to a travel-based state. Liminality also occurs during rights of passage, such as graduating from school, becoming married, becoming a parent, or becoming a new employee of a company. The liminal experience is one of becoming something different, and is potentially transformative, with a shedding of the old and a creation of something new, but also a period of vulnerability and weakness in the face of an uncertain future.

The transformative potential of travel is one of the major reasons that many people want to travel. Even when a trip is fully planned and fully chartered and catered, there is still the possibility, if not probability, of meeting new people, seeing the unexpected, and doing something that is totally unconnected to one's home. The period of liminality, the transition between being a resident-in-place and being a tourist-on-the-road, normally occurs when the tourist is in transit between their home and their destination. For most people it is a period of expectation, anticipation and hope – the emotions are generally positive, though there could be some strain related to the exertion of travel.

However, there is a second liminal experience that is a bit different. This experience occurs at the end of the trip, when the tourist is returning home and transitioning from being a traveling-guest to a resident-host. In this case, the emotions may be either positive or negative. Negative emotions may be related to reverse culture shock, which arises when a tourist "goes native" in an exotic destination and must readjust to "going native" in their home place. Going native during a trip actually refers to developing a sense of attachment to a place. This attachment may be to the physical place, a culture in that place, or an individual(s) that was met during the trip. In each of these instances, the return home is accompanied by a sense of separation and loss. That loss may be addressed by an attempt to develop or maintain a longer-term relationship with the travel destination through repeated visits or other commitments and activities.

For example, I experienced a deeply moving trip to the Shan State of Myanmar in 2005. I blogged about that trip – basically keeping an online trip diary (http://golden-triangle.blogspot.com). After the trip, I continued for a year to post and discuss news items about Myanmar. Eventually, however, my attachment to the people and culture of Myanmar waned and I stopped blogging about the country, though I still hold it in a special place in my memory. Tourists also develop an attachment to each other, mostly when traveling as a group of some kind. The sociologist Ning Wang has referred to this social bonding as "touristic communitas," and it too can result in a sense of loss when the trip comes to an end. Close friendships can form that continue via long distance, and which may remain strong, though they are more likely to fade with time.

In both of the post-trip instances cited above, intentional efforts can be made to continue attachments to place and attachments to people beyond the trip. This effort is part of the remaking of self that is one of the goals of travel and tourism. (I believe this is the major reason why people travel.) The effort varies considerably from one person to the next. For some, the attachment is a mild one where the destination simply occupies a check mark on the list of places that have been visited – a kind of trophy or bragging right. For others it is more meaningful, either in terms of personal relationships or professional relationships. The permanence of these relationships will also vary considerably, though maintaining strong ties over a distance can challenge any relationship. We might think of the liminality of the return trip as never really ending so long as an intentional effort to maintain a place, culture or person relationship continues.

That being said, there is another way that the liminal experience of a return trip can seemingly last forever. That is when the tourist is ready to return home before the trip has ended. And that is what I just experienced. I just got back from a trip to China to attend a tourism conference in Yangshuo (near Guilin). Prior to the conference, I traveled with a colleague in the Business School at Northern Arizona University who had a conference to attend in Chengdu (Sichuan Province). So I spent about five days touring the Chengdu area prior to the tourism conference, which lasted for an additional four nights. I also spent layover nights in Shanghai on my way to Chengdu and again on my way home from Guilin. Altogether, I was gone for 15 days. However, after touring Chengdu and then attending my tourism conference, with a very full day of outdoor activities in Yangshuo (which was very, very hot and humid), I was pretty burned out and was ready to go home.

However, I did want to see the larger city of Guilin (where the airport is located). I had been to Guilin four times (first time in 1988) in the past and wanted to see how it might have changed since my last visit in 2001. Also, my colleague had never been to Guilin and also wanted to see the city. Finally, he also arranged for us to get free accommodations in exchange for guest lectures at Guangxi Normal University. But just like in nearby Yangshuo, Guilin was very, very hot and humid, and the hotel we stayed in was the lowest quality of the entire journey (no internet, cockroaches, and in need of new carpets -- though it was free!). On top of this, I was coming off of an emotional high from the great meeting we had in Yangshuo, and feeling the loss of separation (as described above) that often accompanies the end of these meetings (which I help to organize every two years in China). So, as much as I wanted to see Guilin, I really wanted to just go home. I was done with my trip in Yangshuo and I had entered a liminal state of mind, which made me feel somewhat weak and emotionally vulnerable (not feelings that I get very often).

The Shanghai Airport Hotel (aka the 168 Hotel) was a very pleasant surprise, with weak but workable internet access, at Y398/night (about US$58/night),. This gave me a good rest for my cross-Pacific flight the next day. I dislike LAX (really bad internet options), but was lucky to be able to change a seven hour layover there into a one hour layover, getting me home sooner than expected. So I have almost completed my liminal transition, I almost over my liminal anxieties, I am reconnecting with conference colleagues to build on the new relationships made there, and I am glad I went to Guilin, despite all the challenges. Now, we'll see how long it takes to get over the jet lag, which is always worse for me when upon returning to Arizona from Asia...

[Photo: sign inside my hotel room at the old Chinese hotel I stayed at in Guilin, China.]

UNWTO's Leading Issues for the Global Travel Industry

The following is based on a story in TRAVEL IMPACT NEWSWIRE - Edition 48, Friday, June 13, 2008 - by Imtiaz Muqbil, Executive Editor, in Bangkok. Unfortunately, this newsletter is only available by email and it is not possible to view it on a website. The title of this particular story was: India Says Travel Advisories Should Go.

However, the story was really excerpts from a speech given by the India's Tourism and Culture Minister Mrs. Ambika Sonire, whos is the current elected Chair of the UN World Tourism Organization's (UNTWO) executive council at the 83rd Session of the Executive Council meeting of the UNWTO in Jeju, South Korea.

What I found most interesting about the story was the list of priority areas that she has proposed for the organization to focus on for 2010-2011. I found the list to be a succinct summary of the issues, and I generally agree with them.

Two issues that are not on this this list, but which Mrs. Sonire noted in her speech as pressing topics, were was the rising cost of oil -- due to the impact this is having on international air travel -- and the need to address the UN Millenium Development Goal of eradicating poverty, for which the UNWTO is promoting sustainable tourism through, for example, rural tourism, adventure tourism, eco-tourism, wildlife tourism.

Some of the areas of other major priority are:

a) Education-Human Resource Development
- to address severe tourism manpower shortages in many countries

b) Promotion of Public Private Partnership

c) Environmental Issues and Tourism
- especially global climate change, with an emphasis on helping developing countries to adopt technologies to limit green house gasses

d) New Tourism Product Development/ Innovation in Tourism

e) Collecting and Disseminating worldwide tourism documentation
- especially in efforts to thwart terrorist incidents

f) Promotion of the Image and Importance of Tourism

g) Travel facilitation and Travel Advisories
- Travel advisories should be issued with more careful consideration, and not immediately following an problematic incident.


ABOUT TRAVEL IMPACT NEWSWIRE

Set up in August 1998, Travel Impact Newswire is the Asia-Pacific’s first email travel industry news feature and analysis service. Mission Statement: Dedicated to reporting with Integrity, Trust, Accuracy and Respect the issues that impact on the Asia-Pacific Travel & Tourism industry. Distributed every week to 40,000 senior industry readers worldwide, mainly in the Asia-Pacific and Middle East. For more informatione Email: imtiaz@travel-impact-newswire.com

Why Don't We Blog? University Faculty Blogging about Travel & Tourism

Last Updated: 30 June 2007

I have been somewhat involved, but very interested, in a recent discussion on the podcast, Six Pixels of Separation, on the topic of university faculty blogs.

• Six Pixels of Separation podcast #50 - blog - mp3 file - 6 May 2007;
  and #51 - blog - mp3 file - 13 May 2007

One of the "complaints" about academia is that it is very conservative and a late adopter of new technology, and in fact discourages faculty members from using new technology, such as social software or social media. A big part of that discussion is trying to figure out how social media would fit into the very traditional approaches to academic review and assessments of productivity. There are several sources that discuss these issues; here are a few:

• Academic Productivity » Soft peer review? Social software and distributed scientific evaluation
• Technical solutions: Evolving peer review for the internet
• Faculty blogs: Good idea or Bad idea? (and a more recent comment by the same author on libraries and blogs)
  

Despite these discussion, there are a lot of university faculty who are blogging about their disciplinary specialties, research activities, and teaching. These two links provide examples of university faculty blogs

• Professors Who Blog (not updated since 28 July 2006, some are no longer activee)
• All The Web search results on "university professor faculty blogs"

Looking at the web search results, you would think that almost all Law professors are blogging. Public policy faculty would be a distant second. However, the 150 blogs listed on the Professors Who Blog site shows predominance in the Humanities, though many other disciplines are represented, as well.

I have been blogging for almost two years now, prompted by my daughter, and starting with a trip diary. Since then I have started a couple other trip diary blogs, a couple of research and teaching related blogs, and I have had my students blogging in my classes. My podcasts evolved directly from my blogs.

• Alan A. Lew's Blogs & Podcasts - some are more active than others
  

DO YOU BLOG?

While there are quite a few interesting blogs about tourism and the travel industry, I had not seen any blogs by other tourism academics in the two years that I have bee doing this. In fact, blogging (which is celebrating its 10th year as a word 1997) is almost considered "old technology" is the realm of social software. So one would think that more tourism academics would be doing it.

So prompted by the discussions on Six Pixels of Separation, and with the Spring semester having ended, I sent an email out on 20 May 2007 to several discussion lists that are frequented by tourism professors and graduate students. These lists included Trinet, IGU Tourism Commission, AAG RTS Specialty Group, Tourism Anthropology, and Asia Tourism Research. Accounting for some duplication (people on more than one list), I guestimate that some 1000 people received my query: "Do You Blog?" Here is a summary of the responses that I got.

NOT-YET-BLOGGERS

• One person told me that she has not blogged, but would like to if she only had the time. (I can certainly identify with that!)
• Glenn Croy (Monash) told me that Monash University is encouraging their faculty to blog "so as another way to promote our programme, especially to potential students. Encouraged is in the literal meaning, that it is not being forced upon us, though if we are interested this is something
  we can do and our marketing people will support us in this."
  
  • This seems to be a growing phenomenon, as seen in this example from Ohio Dominion University.

BLOGGING ABOUT TOURISM

• Fabian Frenzel (Leeds Metropolitan) - Recently started a collaborative blog on the New Economics of Tourism that is based in the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change at Leeds Metropolitan University.
• New Economics of Tourism N.E.T.
  
• Dimitrios Buhalis (Surrey) - Comments on tourism and his personal academic experiences. Although started in 2005, it has only been in the past month of so that he has been posting more regularly. Not a lot there yet, but show much promise.
  
  • Dimitrios Journeys
    
• Two of my (Alan A. Lew, Northern Arizona) own blogs fall under this category
  
  • Web 2.0 Travel Tools - where I review interesting websites that are transforming the travel experience and tourism industry
  • Tourism Place - where I am posting this blog, and occasionally post tourism things that don't quite fit anywhere else. I originally created this with the intent of making it a collaborative blog. If anyone want to be a contributor to it, let me know.

BLOGGING FOR CLASSES & STUDENTS

• Wes Roehl (Temple) has been experimenting with using a collaborative blog to encourage interaction among the graduate students in his tourism program. All of the grad students in the program were members of the blog and could post to it, though not all of them did. He is currently rethinking how to make it more effective.
  
  • Tourism Grad Student Network
• Bruce Wicks (Illinois, C-U) is currently in Poland with five students study abroad students from the University of Illinois, and looking at tourism. They set up a blog for friends and family to follow their adventure. He said "Frankly I can't imagine anything better than a blog to record a trip. This time we have only some text and pictures but we are also taking video for a YouTube entry when we get back, and in the future will explore audio uploads."
  
  • Poland Blog 07
• I (Alan A. Lew, Northern Arizona) have had students blogging, and recently podcasting, in a couple of the tourism classes that I teach. In one class, each student creates their own personal blog site. In the other class, they work in collaborative blogs.
  For this past semester, these collaborative can be found here:
  
  • Sustainable Tourism and the Environment
  • Sustainable Tourism and Money
  • Sustainable Tourism and Community

RESEARCH (and) BLOGS

• Mike Pesses (California State U, Northridge) presented a paper at the 2007 AAG in San Francisco on authenticity in the bicycle tourism experience, which was based on a content analysis of posting on a bicycle touring blog site. You can hear a recording of his presentation here.
  
• Peter Bolan (Ulster), has created a blog to generate discussions around research questions related to movie-based tourism for his Ph.D. research. He has been successful in creating a community and generating a fair amount of reader comments:
  
• Movie Tourism Group
  
• George F. Roberson (Massachusetts, Amherst) has created a blog site to facilitate his forthcoming Fulbright research in Tangier, Morocco, which will focus on current issues of modernization and cultural transformation of the city. His blog is currently mostly used as a repository for articles and resources.
  
• Space and Place
• Emma Stewart (Calgary), and her supervisor, Diane Draper, is using a blog to post preliminary research research and solicit feedback on her work with three Arctic Canadian communities. This blog was just launched last week:
  
  • Churchill - This older site has generated some comments from area residents
  • Cambridge Bay - This new site has not yet generated comments
    
• Carmen Cox (Southern Cross) is not a blogger, but is involved in a research/consulting project in NSW, Australia that will look at the impact of user-content generated travel sites (blogs included) on people's travel planning and trip behavior.
• Chin Ee Ong and Hilary du Cros (Institute for Tourism Studies, Macao) are presenting a paper titled "Almond Biscuit Tasting at St Paul’s Ruins and Camping on Hac-Sa Beach: A Blogspace Study of Mainland Chinese Budget Heritage Tourists in Macao" at the Heritage and Tourism Conference (8-11 July 2007, Guangzhou, China) in which they look at blogs and forums in English and Chinese regarding tourist's and potential tourist's views of Macau.
  
• I have heard of FIVE tourism research papers that at based on the analysis of personal travel blogs. Because these blogs are public, they are readily available as primary research data. (Both of the papers that I have heard of are under review for publication, so they cannot be cited here. I will add them if/when they are accepted for publication.)
  

PERSONAL TRAVEL BLOGS

• Michael Luck (Auckland UT) recently finished his first travel blog about a trip he tool to Thailand.
  
  • Thailand 2007
• Daniela Schilcher (University of Otago) keeps a travel blog for family and friends.
• Pham Hong Long (Vietnam National U, Hanoi) occasionally blogs about his graduate education and personal interests.
  
• I (Alan A. Lew, Northern Arizona) also have three travel blogs based on trips that I have made. I tend to continue blogging on those sites, though not regularly, about tourism, my research, and other issues in those destination areas.
  
  • Golden Triangle Conference and Travels - my first blog in summer 2005. I now update it occasionally with news items from that region.
  • Asia Travels, Tourism and More - originally based trips to Singapore and Thailand, I re-titled this blog to also include my subsequent trips to Malaysia, Nepal and other areas of Asia. The Nepal entries focus on a field research project undertaken their in 2007.
    
  • Australia Travel Blog - I experimented with two different websites that host travel blogs for this 2006 family trip:
  • VCarious.com
  • MyLifeOfTravel.com
    

PODCAST BLOGS

• Martin Fluker (Victoria, Melbourne) has a blog that supports his travel podcast on the ThePodcasterNetwork (TPN). His podcast is closely related to his teaching activities, and includes interviews with students about their travels and travel-related podcasts created by his students. He has also has some CAUTHE presentations on his show.
  
  • The Travel Show
  • Martin also had the following comments to make: "The Travel Show site contains blogs and podcasts to do with tourism. I produce the majority of the podcasts, however, my students are invited to submit the podcasts they produce, in subjects I coordinate, to The Travel Show. The latest podcast (#039) if from my students doing BHO3437 Destination Planning and Development. This subject is being run in Australia and Germany and both groups of students are producing podcasts. I use some of the podcasts on The Travel Show, such as the recording of Prof. Sam Ham, as part of the course material in BHO3437. I also use some podcasts, such as #038 as a way to encourage students to become exchange students. One of the benefits I have gained from podcasting is the winning of an Apple scholarship to attend the 2007 World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco."
    
    
• I (Alan A. Lew, Northern Arizona) have a similar blog for my Geography for Travelers podcast. Topics covered include research that I am involved in, lecture material related to my classes, recordings of conference presentations by both me and others, and podcasts by my students.
  
  • Geography for Travelers
    

NON-ACADEMIC BLOGGERS

A few non-academics also responded to my "Do You Blog?" query.

• Richard Linington told me about the Planning Solutions Blog by the Planning Solutions Consulting Limited (PSCL) -- "specialist research and development company working in the fields of tourism, recreation and leisure." The blog has news about tourism, mostly in the UK, but occasionally beyond, as well.
• Joe Kelly of the Icarus Foundation in Canada told me of their blog on tourism and climate change - Up In The Air. They discuss news items, as well as approaches to mitigation and adaptation.
• Rinzing Lama works in the tourism industry in New Delhi, India, and maintains a blog about his homeland of Sikkim - Blog and Travel Journal.

EMAIL LISTS AS BLOGS

Email Lists are clearly the more common approach to social information sharing and discussion among academics than blogs. They are very different, though, and I am hesitant to put them in the same category as blogs. However, it is possible to use discussion lists postings as a form of collaborative (multiple contributors) blog.

• An example of this is David Dillard's (Temple) NetGold discussion list on YahooGroups.com. The purpose of NetGold is to share "important, informative and useful Internet and sometimes other resources for learning and improvement of skills." Tourism and hospitality are only a small part of the many topics covered:
  
  • Tourism content on Net-Gold
  • Hospitality Content on Net-Gold
  • He apparently distills some of this information on two resources sites for Tourism and Hospitality.
    
    
• Related to this is the Dark Tourism Forum, (hosted at Central Lancashire) which is both a website and an email discussion list. The website is used to develop a resources of material that is discussed on the email list. Again, this is sort of like a collaborative blog, but one with a strong moderator/editor role (the person who decides what moved from the open email discussion to the website).
  

Both of these email lists are more than just email lists (like the ones I posted my "Do You Blog?" query to. But, I do not consider them blogs because they do not fully represent the voice of particular individuals. Even with collaborative blogs, each contributing blogger usually has a distinct and identifiable identity, and each blog entry is treated as an indelible (and searchable) contribution to our world of knowledge and opinion. Email posting are searchable, though depending on the list it can be very difficult to do.

CONCLUSIONS

The diversity of blogging among this small group of tourism academics is quite amazing. There are blogs about tourism, blogs by and for students, research related blogs, and personal travel blogs. There may be even more personal blogs that are not related to tourism, but I think those fall beyond the reaches of this survey. While not a formally constructed survey, the small number of responses confirms the my previous anectodal impressions that tourism academics are not blogging.

Why do I blog? Because it is fun. Blogging enables me to communicating with a whole new audience -- a more real world audience beyond the ivory towers of academia. I meet interesting people through the blogs, and I love looking at the little map on some of my blog pages showing where in the world my readers are reading from. It does cut into my research writing, and does not yet contribute to my annual evaluations. That would be a challenge for most younger faculty, unfortunately. One of my blogs did get me an invitation to speak at a travel industry workshop in Seattle, though the timing did not work. In social media terms, blogging (and podcasting) is helping me to develop my "brand." In fact, when I first started blogging, I used a pseudonym. Today, however, I put my name everywhere I can.

Should more tourism academics blog? I think yes. Tourism is an incredibly important sector of the world economy. Yet the study of tourism is shunned as insignificant by most traditional and established disciplines. Perhaps that is why the relatively small number of tourism academics tend to be inward looking and prefer talking to each other rather than the larger world of academia and beyond. I have done, and still do that myself, and there are benefits from it. However, just as teaching helps balance the different intensity of writing and research, blogging helps bring a balance to the cloistered life of academics.

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NEW (July 2007): Analysis of blogs for strategy development in tourism

"On Thursday, July 12th 2007, the first worldwide conference for "Blogs in Tourism" took place, for which international experts and numerous participants came to Kitzbühel, Germany. The conference was organised by Krems Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH, Kitzbühel Tourismus and the Charles Darwin University, Australia and dealt with the analysis of the content of tourism blogs and forums, the understanding of the process of information exchange and the development of industry strategies for handling these virtual communities."

NEW (17Dec 07): Colleges Are Reluctant to Adopt New Publication Venues

...But, report from the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative argues "that in four to five years, academe will accept as scholarship this kind of interactive online material and will develop methods for evaluating it."

NEW (23Jan 08): Tired of 'Science by Press Release'? Try Science by Blog

ResearchBlogging.org, launched yesterday, is essentially a blog aggregator. Blogging academics (or, apparently, laymen interested in peer-reviewed research) register their blogs with the site. Bloggers can flag certain posts they write about peer-reviewed research by inserting a snippet of code. These posts then appear on the main page of the site, replete with proper academic citation.

...This, evidently, is part of the growing effort to ease communication in the research community, à la Big Think.

NEW (28Jan 08): A couple of related journal articles that may be of interest:

• Hookway, N. (2008) 'Entering the blogosphere': some strategies for using blogs in social research. Qualitative Research, 8(1): 91-113.
• Lin, Y.S. & Huang, J.Y. (2006). Internet Blogs as a Tourism Marketing Medium: A case study. Journal of Business Research, pp. 1201-1205.

Introduction + Purpose + Invitation

This is the start of a new Collaborative Blog on the topic of Tourism and Geography. The focus is on topics and commentaries that are primarily of interest to those who do research on the topic of tourism from a geographic perspective. The geographic perspective provdes a focus on topics that relate to (1) place development and experience, (2) the movement of people, ideas and things through geographic space, and (3) the relationship between the human and physical world. Since I consider most of tourism to be geographically based, this blog can potentially encompasses a broad range of interdisciplinary research topics and interests from across the social sciences, physical sciences and business fields of study. Anyone who has an interest in these topics can contribute to this blog by simply contacting me at TravelGeographer@gmail.com.