A multi-stakeholder examination of destination image: Nanluoguxiang heritage street,Beijing, China

ABSTRACT

Perceived destination image is rarely examined through the gaze of stakeholders other than visitors, in particular residents and tourism business operators. This hinders the comprehensive understanding of destination image and limits its practical implications for destination marketing and management. Therefore, this study proposes a multi-stakeholder approach to image evaluation to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the destination image and better inform destination planning and management. Taking Nanluoguxiang hutong tourism site in Beijing as an example, the image perceptions of residents, on-site business operators, and domestic and international tourists are compared. Questionnaire surveys with both types of tourists and semi-structured interviews with residents and business operators are the main research methods. Major between group differences are identified in the evaluation of the authenticity of this Beijing hutong area, its representation of traditional Beijing culture and whether or not it is a place in which to relax. Results demonstrate that visitors, residents and business operators share similar cognitive images of Nanluoguxiang as a traditional historical street and a special business street with Beijing character. However, the historical and cultural values of Nanluoguxiang are undervalued. Moreover, distinct differences exist between the actual motivations for visiting held by domestic and international tourists and their motivations as perceived by residents and business operators. Suggestions are made to better meet the expectations and desires of all stakeholder groups through the provision of participatory programmes and activities to enrich the visitor experience of hutongs and the hutong lifestyle while maintaining a boundary between tourists and residents’ personal space to reduce unnecessary interruptions to residents’ daily life.     

旅游发展中居民态度与社区问题研究--以江苏省无锡市(马山)太湖国家旅游度假区为例

旅游发展不可避免地会引发一些社区问题,这些社区问题与当地居民的社会经济生活密切相关,并直接或间接影响着当地居民对旅游发展所持的态度。该文以无锡市(马山)太湖国家旅游度假区为例,在详细的实地调查所得数据的基础上,运用SPSS(11.5)统计软件,衡量了马山居民对旅游发展的态度及对社区问题的重要性感知,并对两者之间的相关关系与可信度进行了分析。     

Effect of dimensions of place attachment on residents’ word-of-mouth behavior

The purpose of this study is to examine and compare the effect of residents’ different dimensions of place attachment on their word-of-mouth (WOM) behavior in two cities: Sydney, Australia and Shanghai, China. A six-dimensional construct of place attachment is proposed based upon a detailed literature review: four attitudinal dimensions (place identity, place dependence, affective attachment, social bonding) and two interactional dimensions (place memory, place expectation) are proposed to reflect different aspects of a resident's attachment to a place. To test the dimensionality of place attachment and relationships between constructs, a survey was completed by 691 residents in the two targeted cities (361 from Sydney and 330 from Shanghai), and a structural equation modeling instrument was applied to analyze the data. The findings of the empirical study statistically support the dimensionality of place attachment proposed, and reveal that, in general, interactional dimensions of place attachment have an effect on WOM behavior. The results suggest that WOM behavior of residents of the two cities is influenced by different attitudinal dimensions of place attachment: Shanghai resident's place identity and social bonding predict one-to-one WOM, while Sydney residents’ affective attachment to Sydney influences their one-to-one WOM behavior. This analysis provides insights into residents’ psychology and behavior in different tourism destinations, as well as important inputs for the sustainable development of destination branding and C2C tourism communication in these two cities.     

Beyond the everyday? Rethinking place meanings in tourism

ABSTRACT

Existing tourism scholarship on place meanings seems to retain an underlying assumption of a contradiction between tourist places and the mundane world. In contrast, this paper contends that the production of the meanings of tourist places is also closely related to everyday life. To make its case, it interrogates the creation of meanings of two scenic sites of Tianya Haijiao and Nanshan in Sanya, a famous coastal destination in southern China. Although both scenic sites have been recently developed, their significance stems from historical and cultural meanings in traditional Chinese culture, which are frequently communicated in people's daily conversations and practices. Besides, the meanings of the tourist sites are neither fixed by legitimate discourses nor dominated by tourism publicity; they are continuously shaped by wider socio-spatial events in mundane societies and re-interpreted through tourism mobilities in accordance with tourists’ everyday concerns. This paper echoes the ‘new mobilities turn’ in tourism studies and contributes to the discussions of the mundaneness of tourist places.     

The value of community-based tourism in Banteay Chhmar,Cambodia

ABSTRACT

In the era of mass tourism, phenomena such as sustainable tourism, responsible tourism, rural tourism, eco-tourism, pro-poor tourism and community-based tourism are now increasingly under the research microscope. If established and managed correctly, these alternative forms of tourism have the potential to contribute towards sustainable community development and provide visitors with unique experiences. Few scholars have qualitatively addressed the growth of community-based tourism in South-East Asia. This study investigated the value of a community-based tourism project at Banteay Chhmar in north-west Cambodia, specifically the discourse of the project's members and the broader community. The objective of the study was to provide an ethnographic account of the community member's attitudes, opinions and beliefs concerning the perceived value and contribution of the project towards community development in their locality. The study initially relied on a literature review to conceptualise community-based tourism. Unstructured in-depth interviews were conducted with a total of 30 stakeholders of the Banteay Chhmar Community-Based Tourism Project. A narrative identifies the development of the project and provides samples of the respondents’ discourses. Findings from a thematic analysis of stakeholder responses indicated support of tourism and the overall operation of the project. Opinions were divided concerning the future growth of tourism and likely negative impacts on resident livelihoods. While some felt the project was relatively insular and lacked transparency, most identified the project's value as enhanced social capital, pride and a better sense of community. The findings show the project has positively contributed towards community development; however, before it can be considered a best practice example of community-based tourism, its financial sustainability, business practices and community support need to improve. The overall study serves as a valuable insight into themes promoting the merits and complications of community-based tourism, specifically in South-East Asia.     

旅游小企业与旅游地社会文化变迁:阳朔西街案例

本文以阳朔西街的旅游小企业为例对旅游小企业与旅游地社会文化变迁的关系进行了具体分析。论文首先研究了西街旅游业发展以后产生的种种社会文化变迁的现象,在此基础上分析了西街的旅游小企业在旅游地的社会文化变迁中所发挥的作用:西街旅游小企业的经营内容之一就是中西方文化的交流;旅游小企业的从业人员成为社区社会文化变迁的先锋人群;西街旅游小企业是当地居民与外来游客进行交流或沟通的一个平台。最终文章得出旅游小企业的存在直接促进或加速了社区的这种社会文化变迁的研究结论。     

嵌入、认同、责任：地方社区中的旅游小企业

围绕旅游小企业根植于地方社区的社会理性本质,本文借助嵌入理论探讨旅游小企业经济活动背后社会责任行为的成因。研究发现：①旅游小企业主的地方认同对企业社会责任行为有着显著的正向影响;②旅游小企业主的社区嵌入对地方认同有着显著的正向影响;③旅游小企业主的地方认同在社区嵌入对企业社会责任影响中扮演着显著的中介作用;④旅游小企业主的地方身份特征在社区嵌入对地方认同的影响中起着显著的调节作用,社区嵌入中获得更多社会资源的外来小企业主比本地小企业主对地方认同的影响更强。本文揭示了旅游小企业社会责任的地方空间特征,形成了地理学人—地关系研究的新方向,并为社区嵌入管理和商业环境塑造等工作提供了实践启示和建议。     

Immigrant hosts and intra-regional travel

ABSTRACT

A large number of tourism-related experiences involve a personal relationship between a visitor and resident host. As immigration continues to be an increasingly integral experience for many people and communities, and advances in technology make relationship maintenance more accessible, the traditional distinctions of travel types based on ‘pleasure’, ‘visiting friends and relatives’ (VFR), and even ‘business’ become blurred and detrimental to conceptual understandings for large numbers of tourism experiences and their impacts. The purpose is to explore the experiences of immigrants with intra-regional travel when they host VFRs. Constructionism was used as a guiding epistemology in this narrative analysis. The research co-constructed narratives with nine participants in Toronto, Canada about their hosting and intra-regional travel. The hosting experience is powerful, linking old and new worlds, and challenging traditional discursive tourism binaries such as home and away. The experience of intra-regional communities through side-trips with VFR guests added additional context where the host was in a non-routine place on vacation, with a guest who brings expectations of participating in leisure, but in a place that has cultural links to the participant's ongoing integration and connection to the broader sense of Canadian culture. Hosting both inspired intra-regional travel, and enhanced the memorable co-construction of meaning associated with the experience as links and distinctions to the culture of origin were more easily made due to the co-presence of their guest. Implications for integration, place making and marketing are discussed.     

ANALYZING THE COST OF DEBT FOR SMALL BUSINESS

The available empirical evidence provides mixed views of small businesses' relative bankruptcy risk. The difference between Churchill and Lewis' findings and SBA's and Kirchhoffs' may well lie in the difference in definition of firm “size” used. Risk is not evenly spread; the smallest businesses seem to be less risky than the intermediate size businesses. Yet, Churchill and Lewis' actual loss evidence suggests that small business risk is only marginally greater than for large businesses, the loss rate is still equivalent to less than one half of one percent. The assumptions that lenders will adjust the amount of debt they allow small business clients rather than the interest rate is not rejected by this evidence. In fact, the much higher profitability of the small business department reported by Churchill and Lewis suggests that the bank's loan interest rates are more than high enough to cover loss risk and fixed costs, and borrowers provide profitable deposits. Thus, the logic of my utility theory hypothesis provides a reasonable explanation for the relatively higher debt levels of small firms compared to large firms. But, then the Kirchhoffs' findings cast some doubt on whether small firms actually have higher debt levels. None of these findings justify the 2.75 percent interest rate spread allowed by SBA.     

Historical limits: narrowing possibilities in ‘Ontario's most historic town’

Place branding in heritage tourism development is presented as a strategy that opens up new possibilities for attracting investors and visitors by distilling, capturing and shaping what is distinctive about a place. This representational fix is an efficient marketing device in the sense that it represents places through widely intelligible symbols. Branding is also a limiting activity that locks places in time and class relations. While place branding has always had this dual effect, we argue that it has particularly insidious and limiting consequences for local development under current conditions of roll‐out neoliberalism. Beginning in the 1960s, several prominent residents and outsiders initiated efforts to transform the Town of Cobalt, Ontario, into a mining heritage tourism destination. In 2001, the town entered and won a contest to be named Ontario's Most Historic Town. The following year it persuaded Parks Canada to designate it as a national historic site. These two events provided renewed external validation for the efforts to brand Cobalt as a heritage site and began a new cycle of mining heritage tourism development. However, instead of breaking the dependency relationships that characterize resource regions, the current round of place branding has acted to circumscribe the range of possible economic development options.     

旅游小企业与就业研究——桂林阳朔西街案例

文章选取中国旅游小企业发展的典型地区桂林阳朔西街为案例地,对旅游小企业与当地居民就业的关系进行探讨。在对案例地进行大量调查的基础上,文章分别从旅游小企业与直接就业、旅游小企业与就业困难人群就业、旅游小企业与从业人员培训这三个方面来进行研究,最终得出的结论为：旅游小企业在促进旅游目的地居民就业方面起着重要的作用,而且与大型旅游企业相比,旅游小企业在帮助当地居民、女性、就业困难人群就业以及对目的地居民的培训方面的作用更为突出。     

Tourist territorialisation and geographies of opportunity at the edges of mass destinations

ABSTRACT

Geographies of tourism often highlight tourism's tendency to exclude or displace local economic actors. Tourism enclaves tend to be particularly exclusive at destination sites and urban centres. This study looks at the edge of a mass tourism town centre and investigates how landowners, entrepreneurs and employees retain a foothold in the face of tourism expansion. Conducted in 2014–2015, this microgeography of a tourist backstreet in Siem Reap, Cambodia comprises a survey of 73 of the occupants and over 40 follow-up interviews complemented by a photographic record of 135 premises. It found most local landowners retaining their properties, and only engaging strategically and selectively with the tourism economy. Entrepreneurial opportunities were initially taken by migrants from other provinces, and then, as tourism expanded, by foreigners and by local entrepreneurs with experience of employment in established tourism businesses. This study illustrates how tourism's territorialisation of back regions is quite different from that of front regions. Even in relatively impoverished settings, pre-tourism economic activities and business cultures may contribute to local actors being able to achieve relatively secure footholds in hybridised space at the edges tourism booms.     

Tourism development,rights consciousness and the empowerment of Chinese historical village communities

In recent years, China's tourism researchers have started to pay attention to the empowerment of rural communities. Current theoretical research and social practices reflect that tourism needs to seek localized empowerment with respect to different types of tourism destinations. This paper, taking Furong Historical Village in Zhejiang Province as a case study, examines a special kind of Chinese historical village community in which the villagers’ consciousness of their rights is weak and tourism development is only in its initial stages. Based on the field surveys, this paper points out four roots of such a community's disempowerment: (1) the failure of political institutions to ensure the community's public interest; (2) accusations of historical villages ‘damaging protection’; (3) information asymmetry in the relationship between rural leaders and villagers; and (4) a sense of powerlessness in the daily lives of rural residents. Based on these findings, this paper suggests several empowerment paths: (1) placing the enhancement of psychological power as the core of community empowerment; (2) addressing villager empowerment needs according to different types, rather than generalizing a community as a whole; and (3) including a diversity of subjects in the process of empowerment. These empowerment paths would be a moderate extension toward increasing community empowerment, based on this empirical study.     

Tourism and sacred landscape in Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park,Nepal

Abstract

While tensions between the sacred and the profane in tourism have been of long standing interest to tourism scholars, there is a dearth of literature on the growing influence of tourism on local residents’ spirituality and religious practices in sacred landscapes. This paper examines how local residents’ interpretations of sacred landscapes are influenced by tourism development, and whether tourism plays a role in influencing and reproducing sacred landscape and place-based spiritual values. This exploratory study is based on four months of fieldwork conducted in 2014 and 2015 in Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park in Nepal’s Khumbu Region. Results of the 33 interviews conducted with ethnic Sherpa community indicate the Sherpa consider their homeland as a beyul (sacred, hidden valley), and its landscapes (i.e. mountains, forests and lakes) as the abode of local deities. Tourism’s influence on local spiritual values is evident and reflected in changes in mountain deity worship, shift in human-environment relationship, and alterations in religious routines and practices. Although Sherpa still regard Khumbu as a sacred place and are actively involved in maintaining their spiritual values and cultural identity, the religious influence of beyul is slowly diminishing as reliance on tourism grows.     

PUTTING MASSEY'S RELATIONAL SENSE OF PLACE TO PRACTICE: LABOUR AND THE CONSTITUTION OF JOLLY BEACH,ANTIGUA, WEST INDIES

Place is a central concept in geographical thought. Though places continue to play an important role as a scale and site of research, place is not widely used as a method of analysis. Doreen Massey's efforts to conceive of, first, a global and then a relational sense of place provide the foundation for such an analytic frame. However, she does not provide a research methodology. This study has two goals; the first is to provide a methodology for the application of a relational sense of place in field research. I develop that methodology through a review of Massey's epistemology of place. In accord with Massey's concerns with the imposition of more global perspectives, the proposed methodology prioritizes a weak theory perspective and balances deduction with induction. I then provide a case example of this methodology through research into labour relationships negotiated by people in a specific place, Jolly Beach in Antigua, West Indies. My second goal is to demonstrate that the particularistic findings produced through that research can contribute uniquely and critically to geographic knowledge and theory. The findings produced by this research bear importantly on a number of propositions in the current literature, including but not limited to what has been called new work, enclave economies, gendered performativity of labour, and tourist–worker dialectics in the Anglophone Caribbean. These specific findings are of interest, but are not limited to tourism studies.     

Tourism development and cultural conflict: the case of ‘Nazareth 2000’

In areas that are characterized by political, national, cultural and religious conflicts, issues concerning conservation and development become particularly complex. One prominent example of this tension can be seen in events that have taken place over the last decade in the city of Nazareth, which hosts some of Christianity's holiest sites. Until the mid-twentieth century most of the city's residents were Christian. In the past several decades however, Muslims have come to form the majority of the population. Against this backdrop, Nazareth began to prepare for the millennium year, including the formulation of the ‘Nazareth 2000’ plan for tourism development in the city. Unfortunately, the city's numerous complexities rapidly surfaced, with one of the most prominent examples being the bitter struggle around the city's newly planned main square. This paper examines tourism development for the city in conditions of such cultural conflict.     

Constructing the Climb: Visitor Decision‐making at Uluru

Uluru‐Kata Tjuta National Park in Australia's Northern Territory continues to be a contested site, as half of its 400 000 visitors continue to climb Uluru each year against the wishes of the Traditional Aboriginal Owners, the Anangu. Since being opened to tourism in the 1950s, Uluru has come to symbolise the ‘heart’ of the Australian nation. The influx of tourists also marked the beginning of contestations over control and access to this site between settler Australians, who wished to photograph and climb it, and the Anangu, to whom it is sacred. That visitors still climb Uluru could be seen as evidence that this site continues to symbolise a split between settler and Aboriginal Australian concepts of place and appropriate actions in relation to Uluru. To explore whether the continued climbing of Uluru was indeed evidence of an irreconcilable ‘clash’ of cultures, a survey of visitors to Uluru and interviews with both tourist operators and National Park staff were undertaken regarding visitor decision‐making processes. This research found that rather than entrenched, fixed perspectives on the issue of the Climb, both non‐Aboriginal visitors and tour operators showed an openness to the Anangu view of Uluru and their wish that it not be climbed. It also indicated, however, the importance of tourism and other media in conveying the Anangu view to visitors before they arrived at the site of the Climb itself, a point considered to be ‘too late’ by many visitors. These findings suggest the potential for change in the actions of many visitors in regard to the Climb through a more proactive representation of the wishes of the Anangu to visitors before they reach Uluru.     

旅游产业集群的企业网络属性研究——以平遥古城为例

由于旅游产业的特殊性,旅游产业集群内旅游企业间关系和合作并不是建立在投入-产出的物质联系上,旅游产业集群的企业网络也就有不同于制造业集群的属性和特征。根据四种划分标准可以将旅游产业集群的企业网络分为四种不同的类型;根据对平遥古城的调查和利用社会网络分析方法对数据分析发现,以沟通联系和非正式合作为主要内容的非正式网络为主;位于网络中心位置的主要是旅游核心部门或具有一定行业地位的企业;旅游企业本地网络的范围和结网对象与地理空间及个人关系相关;旅游产业集群的企业网络具有本地化网络对集群创新和竞争力提升有重要影响。     

Implications of climate change for glacier tourism

For more than 100 years, the Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers in Westland Tai Poutini National Park have attracted thousands of tourists annually and have emerged as iconic destinations in New Zealand. However, in recent years, the recession of both glaciers has been increasingly rapid and the impacts on, and implications for, visitor experiences in these settings remain relatively unexplored. A mixed-method approach was adopted to investigate visitor experiences and stakeholder perspectives through an assessment of climate-related changes on tourism at the glaciers in Westland Tai Poutini National Park. The bio-physical conditions at both the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers were reviewed in order to assess the magnitude and rate of retreat. Perceptions of climate change risk and awareness of impacts in the National Park were assessed through stakeholder interviews (n = 13) and a visitor survey (n = 500) was used to better understand how impacts at these sites have affected and may continue to affect visitor experiences. Research results were reported to local communities via a series of public talks. Results revealed the fundamental importance of viewing the glaciers as a significant travel motive of visitors, suggesting that there is a ‘last chance’ dimension to their experience. Furthermore, the results demonstrate a high adaptive capacity of local tourism operators under rapidly changing environmental conditions. The implications of altered visitor experiences for tourism operators and protected area managers are discussed in light of these findings.