This book explores how digital platforms in the realm of tourism and hospitality have shaped social and material worlds. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with hosts and guests, the book analyses the impacts of platforms on the scale of the city, the home, and the everyday life of individuals. The book first situates platforms within the broader history of digital developments in tourism and questions what is essentially new about these socio-technical formations? The following chapters demonstrate how platforms have affected urban housing, challenged the tourism sector, and transformed understandings of hospitality and home. This is illustrated through a case-study of Airbnb's development and impact in Sofia, Bulgaria. The final chapters of the book reflect on the political dimensions of datafication processes and digital systems of measurement that underpin the platform's workings, showing how the platform economies of tourism benefit their users in highly uneven ways. Maartje Roelofsen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain. She has longstanding teaching- and research experience in the fields of Tourism, Geography and Planning. Her work has been concerned with the digital transformations of urban space, everyday life, leisure and the tourism economy.

This book explores how digital platforms in the realm of tourism and hospitality have shaped social and material worlds. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with hosts and guests, the book analyses the impacts of platforms on the scale of the city, the home, and the everyday life of individuals. The book first situates platforms within the broader history of digital developments in tourism and questions what is essentially new about these socio-technical formations? The following chapters demonstrate how platforms have affected urban housing, challenged the tourism sector, and transformed understandings of hospitality and home. This is illustrated through a case-study of Airbnb’s development and impact in Sofia, Bulgaria. The final chapters of the book reflect on the political dimensions of datafication processes and digital systems of measurement that underpin the platform’s workings, showing how the platform economies of tourism benefit their users in highly uneven ways.

In post-pandemic Europe the topic of 'overtourism' is back on the policy agenda of many cities, towns and villages. How to deal with the negative effects of tourism on places and people? This edited volume brings together inspiring perspectives and detailed case studies from all over Europe to better understand the phenomenon of overtourism. Based on the challenges lying ahead, the book makes a call for tourism policies that are more balanced and argues for more interdisciplinary research.

This open access book provides an extensive overview of the usage of information and communication technologies in the tourism and hospitality industry. It presents the proceedings of the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT)’s 30th Annual International eTourism Conference, which assembles the latest research presented at the ENTER2023 conference. The enclosed papers cover various topics within the field, including augmented and virtual reality, website development, social media use, e-learning, big data, analytics and recommendation systems.

The Routledge Handbook of Tourism Geographies, 2nd Edition, offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of the recent developments; conceptual, theoretical and empirical debates; and critical issues in this field of study. Reflecting on and building from its original aim of rethinking geographical approaches to tourism, the volume explores contemporary tourism contexts and concepts, as marked by the present era of polycrises, setting out renewed and reoriented perspectives on tourism geographies into the mid-2020s. Across its diverse range of contributions, the Handbook navigates the complexities of tourism as a shifting construct, situating tourism geographies within the socio-spatial, economic and environmental implications of tourism, leisure and mobilities in the new contexts of global change, ecological transition and digital transformation. The volume aims to provide a nuanced and detailed analysis of established and emerging discourses and debates within tourism geographies, underscoring the field’s inherent criticality and ideal positioning for understanding and catalysing complex global and local scenarios in contemporary tourism, leisure and mobilities. Written by leading scholars in the tourism geographies field, this text is an invaluable resource for students, researchers and scholars working in the areas of tourism, geography and related disciplines, encouraging dialogue across areas of study.

Explore how lifestyle concepts are linked to marketing the hospitality and tourism industry Hospitality, Tourism, and Lifestyle Concepts: Implications for Quality Management and Customer Satisfaction is a comprehensive benchmark review of how lifestyle concepts can be applied to the hospitality and tourism industry. Noted authorities present multifaceted viewpoints examining a range of topics, such as matching the lifestyles of tourism providers and guests, lifestyle segmentation studies, and methodological issues in lifestyle segmentation research. You’ll learn how the consideration of lifestyle concepts can improve the effectiveness of marketing in addition to providing quality management and improved customer satisfaction in the hospitality and tourism industry. This book provides an in-depth exploration of the implications of lifestyle concepts in the marketing of the hospitality and tourism industry. Each chapter of Hospitality, Tourism, and Lifestyle Concepts: Implications for Quality Management and Customer Satisfaction examines essential issues, including quality management and customer satisfaction, improving customer experience through host-guest lifestyle matching, ways to segment customers by lifestyle, and the benefits and burdens of the gay tourism market. The book confronts widely held beliefs about the industry, confirming or adjusting those views through solid data. Research is clearly presented, always with an eye toward strengthening this fragile industry. Hospitality, Tourism, and Lifestyle Concepts: Implications for Quality Management and Customer Satisfaction discusses: the potential use of lifestyle segmentation to achieve psychographic matching between hosts and guests the significance of the lifestyle concept for the management of service quality and customer satisfaction research into gay tourism marketing, with a discussion about recent evidence suggesting that the distinct purchasing patterns of gays are exaggerated lifestyle market segments and the relation to satisfaction with a nature-based tourism experience a lifestyle segmentation analysis of the backpacker market in Scotland three different approaches to lifestyle segmentation in improving the quality of tourism and leisure marketing decisions improved understanding of tourists’ needs through cross-classification Hospitality, Tourism, and Lifestyle Concepts: Implications for Quality Management and Customer Satisfaction is an essential review of the lifestyle marketing concept that will prove invaluable for hospitality and tourism professionals, instructors, and industry members.

It is now widely agreed that the climate is changing, global resources are diminishing and biodiversity is suffering. Developing countries – many of them considered by the World Tourism Organization to be 'Top Emerging Tourism Destinations' (UNWTO, 2009) – are already suffering the full frontal effect of environmental degradation. The challenge for developing countries is a triple-edged sword, how can economic prosperity be achieved without the perpetual depletion of nature’s reserves, the destruction of rural habitat and the dislocation of traditional societies? Many emerging nations are looking increasingly to the tourism industry as the motor for economic development, with hospitality businesses at the forefront. This book uses twenty-five case studies to demonstrate how it is possible to create income and stimulate regional socio-economic development by using sustainable hospitality and tourism attractions. These case studies focus on issues such as the protection of indigenous cultures as a source of touristic curiosity; the preservation of the environment and the protection of endangered species – such as the plight of turtles in Sri Lanka or butterflies in Costa Rica to encourage tourism. Some cases cover government supported projects, for example, the green parks venture and regional tourism development in the Philippines, an archaeological park initiative in Honduras and the diversity of nature tourism in St. Vincent. Sustainable Hospitality and Tourism as Motors for Development is designed to give students, academics and practitioners a guide for best practices of sustainable hospitality operations in developing countries. Based on case studies, it provides a road map of how to achieve the goals of sustainability giving benchmark examples. The book not only taps into a contemporary business subject, but aims to provide readers with a better understanding of how sustainable theories can be put into practice in hospitality and tourism industries in developing countries.