All-Inclusive Coral Reef Restoration: How The Tourism Sector Can Boost Restoration Efforts In The Caribbean, Macarena Blanco-Pimentel, Nicolas R. Evensen, Camilo Cortés-Useche, Johanna Calle-Triviño, Daniel J. Barshis, Victor Galván, Erika Harms, Megan K. Morikawa

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Following a strong decline in the health of Caribbean coral reefs in the 1970s, disease outbreaks, overfishing, and warming events have continued to push these reefs towards a point of no return. As such, researchers and stakeholders have turned their attention to restoration practices to overcome coral recovery bottlenecks on Caribbean reefs. However, successful restoration faces many challenges, including economical and logistical feasibility, long-term stability, and biological and ecological factors yet to fully understand. The tourism sector has the potential to enhance and scale restoration efforts in the Caribbean, beyond simple financial contributions. Its strengths include long-term presence in several …

The Influence Of Social Interactions On Tourist Experience And Tourist Satisfaction: A Study Of Group Package Tours In Vietnam, Tran Truc Vien Pham

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Owing to the nature of tourism services, in most cases tourists experience a tourism service in the presence of service personnel and fellow tourists. Scholars and practitioners have been interrogating the role of co-creation in providing tourists with a superior experience and increased tourist satisfaction. Within a group package tour (GPT), tourists appear to be active co-creators of their experience through tourist-to-tour guide interactions (TGIs) and tourist-to-tourist interactions (TTIs). TGIs and TTIs also seemingly play an important role in determining tourist satisfaction through tourist experience. However, very little research has examined the influence of TGIs and TTIs on tourist experience …

The Antecedents Of Program Satisfaction And Program Loyalty For Hotel Reward Programs, Jill Plumer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Hotel reward programs have been in existence for three decades. These programs were originally established as a customer relationship management tool to reward loyal guests for their patronage. Over time, there have been indications that the programs that are intended to inspire loyalty to the company have actually inspired loyalty to the program itself. The aim of this study was to analyze the antecedents of program satisfaction and program loyalty in hotels to determine the relationship between the program attributes and the impact on program loyalty. Switching costs were also analyzed to determine if they played a moderating role in …

The Impact Of Social Capital On U.S. Based Destination Marketing Organizations And Interorganizational Relationships, Jeremy Fairley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Previous literature echoes the notion that destination marketing organizations (DMOs) play a critical role in ensuring a desired tourism development scenario. To date, the performance measurement of destination marketing organizations is paralleled to financial indicators or operations, ignoring the presence and quality of relationships among DMOs and tourism stakeholders. Based on the premise of social capital theory, it is argued that social capital and the inter-organizational relationships between DMOs and tourism stakeholders can influence the success of tourism efforts in a destination, which in return is a contributing factor to the DMOs success as an organization. Furthermore, broader literature indicates …

Employing A Network Perspective To Study Hazardous Events In Tourism: Tourism Connections, Island Preferences, And Tourism Market Concentrations In The Hawaiian Islands (2015-2021), Frida Bahja

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The purpose of this study was to employ a network perspective to detect fluctuations in tourism (at the level of tourism areas and by inbound tourism markets) that co-occur with hazardous events. Specifically, the study focuses on the Air Travel Tourism (ATT) network of the Hawaiian Islands and its changes with the incidence of nine hazardous events from 2015 to 2021. The three main aspects of the ATT network, which include tourism connections, island preferences, and concentrations of inbound tourism markets were analyzed for a total of eighty-four monthly and seven annual network models. The results suggest that the network …

Transdisciplinarity In Experience Design: A Global Survey Of Higher Ed Programs In Exd/Xd, Yvonne Houy

Creative Collaborations

In our age of ubiquitous devices and digital media it is the perceived value of the end-to-end experience that brings people to a place. Designing inspiring and emotionally engaging end-to-end experiences requires experts in a wide range of disciplines committed to an interdisciplinary collaboration that can arrive at transdisciplinary design - the sum becomes greater than its parts.

Civil engineering, hospitality, business, psychology, digital User Experience (UX) design, and experience data analysis need to be seamless integrated with the fine and performing arts and design fields:

• Architecture, interior, landscape and sound design actively engage the senses.

• Graphic and fine arts …

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Journey To The Dragon's Gate: A Study Of Hybrid Ride Systems And How They Enhance Attraction Storytelling, Matthew Moore

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The purpose of this thesis is to explore a new type of ride design which integrates one or more transitions between formats. Theme Park visitors have come to expect a certain type of immersive experience from attractions. Most rides in the parks are very predictable such as roller coasters which offer loops, drops, speed and quick turns, while dark rides offer a slower pace with the attention on storytelling. The solution to this situation is to combine two ride systems or more into a single ride. The ride system for my attraction begins with a free-floating boat ride navigating its …

Theme Park Queues As Diegetic Worlds: Using Star Wars: Rise Of The Resistance As A Case Study For Core Design Elements, Jordan Zauha

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This thesis seeks to establish core design elements for use by theme park designers to complement the guidelines established by Ledbetter and his colleagues for theme parks. Building upon Rose Biggin's "strands of enquiry" for examining immersive theatre, the suggested core design elements for immersive theme park queues serve as guidance to craft queues where audiences can actively engage with the queue's storyworld and narrative. Implementation of the core design elements alongside the already established queue design guidelines should assist designers in crafting queues that minimize discomfort and maximize narrative immersion. Theme parks offer location-based narrative landscapes, often contributing to …

Sensory Overload: Creating Autism-Friendly Areas In Theme Parks Through Universal Design Principles, Lindsey Leffel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This thesis project explores the application of Universal Design principles to the development of purpose-built rest and play spaces within United States theme parks that provide places of refuge for children with autism and their families. The goal is to offer ideas on how to create spaces where families and individuals can take a break from the over-stimulation of the traditional theme park environment in an area that has been specifically designed with their sensory needs in mind. Though the target demographic for these spaces is children with autism and their families, the ideas offered to create space will not …

Marketing Of Luxurious Gastronomic Experiences On Social Media: The Visual Storytelling Of Luxury Hotels, Noela Michael, Francesc Fusté-Forné

All Works

The role of luxury as a source of tourism experiences is gathering growing attention, with special attention to the foundations of the relationships between gastronomy and social media marketing. Drawing from a visual methodology, this study analyses how luxury hotels (Burj Al Arab, Emirates Palace, St. Regis Saadiyat Island, and Atlantis) in the UAE promote gastronomy by identifying visual features of social media posts (N = 1866) to manage their image of luxury. Results show that the most relevant drivers of luxury gastronomy are the discovery of cultures, experiences in the hotel environment, novelty and hedonism, and promotion of a …

Organizational Networks, And Management Of Disruptions In The Airline Ground Operation Process During Seasonal Crises, Gökhan Tanrıverdi, Senem Besler

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

This study focuses on informal relationships between airlines and suppliers in managing disruptions in the airline ground operation process during peak times in the summer seasons. In this context, the study investigates the change between actors’ formal and informal networks after they face disruptions in the airline ground operation process and their informal exchanges in this process. Antalya Airport was chosen as the research area since it is a leader airport for especially non-scheduled flights during the summer seasons in Turkey. The study was carried out as network research and the network data were collected through face-to-face meetings with actors …

Realising The Goals Of Event Leveraging: The Tourism And Hospitality Sme Perspective, Insun S. Son, Songshan (Sam) Huang, Daniel Padovan

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Event leveraging, particularly by local businesses, is important not only to local businesses themselves for their benefits but also to event tourists and host community. However, the understanding of businesses' broad strategic planning of event leveraging is still limited. This study aims to address this gap by exploring the goals and practices of tourism and hospitality small and medium enterprises' (THSMEs) event leveraging to understand event leveraging as part of a wider business strategy, particularly focusing on small scale events and festivals held in small cities or regional areas. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with owners and managers of THSMEs based …

Examining Tourist Gaze In A Highly Controlled Destination: A Study Of Chinese Tourists To North Korea, Ganghua Chen, Huimin Shi, Zhenghuan Li, Songshan (Sam) Huang

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Extant literature has rarely examined the temporal characteristics of tourist gaze in the context of a highly controlled destination. Guided by the gaze theory and studying Chinese tourists' gaze upon North Korea, this study aims to reveal the process of how tourists' gaze upon a highly controlled destination is organized and developed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and interview data was coded and analyzed. It is found that Chinese tourists' gaze represents a temporal process composed of three stages, each of which has the same structure of ‘gaze object-gaze strategy-gaze consequence.’ In a highly controlled destination, tourists respond with ‘obedience’ or …

Tourism Products And Sentiment Analysis, Ibrahim A. Ozen

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

OVERVIEW

Reviews about tourism products in online environments are an important data source for tourism businesses, destination managements and tourists. Tourist reviews online are completely unbiased reviews created voluntarily by tourists. Therefore, important feedback is provided for tourism businesses and destinations in the evaluation of tourism products. Collecting and analyzing tourist comments and transforming them into strategic information will create an important competitive power. Sentiment analysis, which is a sub-field of text mining, is a field of study that analyzes people’s ideas and thoughts about tourism products and services from text-based comments. Sentiment analysis can be applied at the document …

Seeking Coherence In A Covid-19 Context: The Maltese Islands During The Pandemic, Maximilian Bonnici, Isabelle Bonnici, Brett Miller, Jack Victory, Parth Panchal, Nathan Williams

International Journal of Islands Research

Malta had a rollercoaster experience with the COVID-19 pandemic. One moment it was doing exceptionally well. The next moment it became a basket case, the second worst in Europe. It was unlikely that a little island would garner an ongoing attention in the international press when each country was focusing on its pandemic problems at home. For this research, we visited Malta and explored first-hand the dichotomy between official statements and what transpires on the ground during a pandemic. Maltese public policy communications rely on a conduit model where policy messages are sent to the public in a one-way direction. …

Portuguese Continental Islands As Coastal And Maritime Tourist Destinations. Ria Formosa: An Exploration Of Its Media Impact Through Marketing, Adalberto Dias De Carvalho, Cristiana Oliveira

International Journal of Islands Research

This paper highlights the tourism promotional impacts of the tourism marketing strategies and the related media activities in relation to the Ria Formosa Natural Park, a set of islands located in the Algarve, in southern Portugal. It seeks to understand which representations are induced in the potential customers of a directly targeted tourist market. For this, we will use the conclusions of scientific studies on the geographical and physical reality of this territory and the content of the messages spread by intentionally directed marketing as well as the news spread by the media. Here we particularly reflect on the prevailing …

Island Sustainability-Predicted Impacts Of Climate Change On The Tourism Sector In Malta: Recent Experiences And Anecdotes From A Small Island, Andrew Jones Dr, Julian C. Zarb

International Journal of Islands Research

This paper aims to review threats to, and consequences of current climate change predictions on tourism in Malta. The paper reviews recent published research on the impacts of climate change and consequences of such on the physical social and economic character of tourism operations in the Maltese islands. The validity and practicality of management options to tackle the complex nature and juxtaposition between tourism growth, environment and climate change, and tourism destination management are considered, including an evaluation of management responses, the efficacy of local governance and current and future policy options and choices. The research methodology is primarily focused …

The Potential Impacts Of Climate Change On Avitourism To Islands: The Example Of Fair Isle, Scotland, Richard W. Butler Professor

International Journal of Islands Research

This paper discusses the potential impact of climate change upon a specific form of tourism, avitourism (birdwatching), and the resulting effects upon islands dependent upon this form of tourism. Bird populations, distributions and migratory patterns are all vulnerable to the impacts of global warming, extreme weather events and changes in the marine environment, as are the islands which provide their habitat. Avitourism is a lucrative and non-consumptive form of tourism that is of major importance to some small islands, particularly those that have unique indigenous breeding species and/or are visited by migrating species on a regular basis. A number of …

Climate Change-Induced Effects On Beach Degradation And Tourist Behaviour: A Review Of Previous Studies With Potential In An Island Tourism Context, Yen E. Lam González, Carmen Garcia, Matias M. González Hernández, Carmelo J. Leon

International Journal of Islands Research

This article conducts a qualitative meta-analysis of papers addressing the topic of climate change impacts on beach loss and degradation, and its relation to tourist behaviour (destination choice, willingness to re-visit, expenditure and willingness to pay). The main aim is to identify values that can be used in future research works in the context of island tourism. We found that the strong specialisation and fragmentation of data and methods limit the transferability potential of previous research analysing climate-induced effects on beaches and tourist behaviour. Researchers from different fields bring their own conceptual models which often address similar problems but use …

Ijir Table Of Contents Vol. 2, Giovanni Ruggieri, Patrizia Calò, Kevin A. Griffin, Razaq Raj

International Journal of Islands Research

No abstract provided.

The Pandemic Changed The Face Of Retail. Here’S How Center City, Philadelphia — The State’S Leading Job Market — Is Faring On The Road To Recovery, Francisco O. Velasquez-Turcios

Capstones

The pandemic changed the face of retail. Here’s how Center City, Philadelphia — the state’s leading job market — is faring on the road to recovery.

Link to capstone project: https://franvela033.github.io/Capstone/

Examining The Recovery Of The Mta In Nyc, Angel Adegbesan

Capstones

My capstone project involved writing codes to scrape and analyze data that isn’t readily available in the format we want. I scraped and analyzed turnstile data and metro card data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority from the periods of Jan 01, 2021 to April 30, 2021 and Jan 01, 2022 to April 30, 2022. The purpose of the analysis is to determine how public transit ridership has changed in New York City and whether the MTA was on track to pre-pandemic levels. For my capstone, I wrote about my findings from the data analysis and did some interactive work to …

An Analysis Of The Micro-Determinants Of Domestic Holiday Expenditure By Households In The Republic Of Ireland, Lisa Noonan

Irish Business Journal

The dramatic decrease in overseas visitors to Ireland in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated the risks, for the tourism sector, associated with being over-reliant on international tourism. Growing the domestic tourism market is now critical for sustaining jobs and businesses within the sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine the micro-determinants of expenditure on domestic holidays by households in the Republic of Ireland.

Using data from the Irish Household Budget Survey 2015-2016, instrumental variable estimators are used to conduct the analysis. The results reveal that disposable income, being located in the Border, Midlands and Western …

Reflections On Co-Creating, Developing And Evaluating Virtual Reality Fieldtrips (Vrf): The Student’S Perspective, Catherine Gorman, Jennifer Stewart, Louise Bellew

Conference papers

To ensure graduates have the skill to work within the tourism industry, and spurred on by the paradigm shift in teaching due to Covid 19, this research focused on developing innovative solutions using technology. Using virtual assessment techniques, industry co-created evaluation, and integrated assessment, it explored how virtual field-trips can be developed as part of remote teaching methods. To provide context to the topic of sustainable tourism and technology, a student-led virtual seminar with industry was undertaken linking with TU Dublin Green Week 2021. In place of a fieldtrip using Google Earth and Screen-casto-matic, students created videos incorporating the sustainability …

Camping, Weather, And Disasters: Extending The Construal Level Theory, Christopher Craig, Siyao Ma, Ismail Karabas, Song Feng

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

Camping is an outdoor accommodation and type of recreation that is susceptible to weather and climate change. Camping—in addition to the relationships camping shares with weather— remains understudied despite the subsectors’ salient economic impact and high participation rate. The observable effects of non-meteorological/climatological (e.g., pandemic) is also a topic that has received limited attention. Accordingly, we introduce the Camping-Weather-Disaster (CWD) framework to examine the concurrent impact of weather and the COVID-19 disaster on post-disaster camping trip plans among leisure travelers in the 48 contiguous United States (n=2,442). Extending the Construal Level Theory, the CWD framework considers traveler construal (i.e., understanding) …

Customer Satisfaction Index Of Singapore 2021: Q3 Results, Institute Of Service Excellence, Smu

Research Collection Institute of Service Excellence (2007-2024)

The Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore (CSISG) computes customer satisfaction scores at the national, sector, sub-sector, and company levels. The CSISG serves as a quantitative benchmark of the quality of goods and services produced by the Singapore economy over time and across countries. This is the CSISG’s 15th year of measurement.

Marketing Tourism And Hotel Management Schools In The Context Of Higher Education Globalization And Student Mobility Through Improved Curriculum And Industrial Training Offerings, Ayse Bas Collins, Aysegul Gunduz Songur, Seden Dogan

Journal of Global Education and Research

Recent research from international statistics indicate an important flow of student mobility all over the world, creating a need to provide comprehensive information regarding educational institutions involved in the process. This study examines and compares tourism and hotel management (THM) programs at different levels, including the nature of programs offered, their curriculum, and internship components. A particular focus was given to the industrial training requirement as a core component of THM programs. Results showed both similarities and differences worldwide within the framework of the institutions compared. The findings may help all stakeholders in the education systems, including professionals, educators, students, …

Advances In Hospitality And Tourism Information Technology, Cihan Cobanoglu, Seden Dogan, Katerina Berezina, Galen Collins

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

Advances in Hospitality and Tourism Information Technology has the following chapters:

Chapter 1: Digital Marketing in Hospitality and Tourism

Chapter 2: The Importance and Role of Digital Marketing in the Preference of Touristic Products in Turkiye

Chapter 3: Virtual Reality Marketing in Hospitality and Tourism

Chapter 4: Contributions of Information and Communication Technologies to Cultural Tourism Experiences: Toward a Smart Destination

Chapter 5: Technology in Senior Living Communities

Chapter 6: Tourism Products and Sentiment Analysis

Chapter 7: Analytics in Hospitality and Tourism: Online Travel Reviews

Chapter 8: Wearable Technologies: Kinesthetic Dimension in Enriching Tourist Experience

ISBN: 978-1-7321275-8-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS …

Contributions Of Information And Communication Technologies To Cultural Tourism Experiences: Toward A Smart Destination, Alexandra Georgescu Paquin, Ainhoa Carballido Risco

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

OVERVIEW

Cultural tourism is a growing sector in which technologies play an important role. Location-based technology, or augmented, virtual and mixed reality, amongst many others, open up new possibilities for managers and at the same time enhance cultural tourism experience in all its stages. In this context, cities, and destinations in particular, need to innovate in order to assure a sustainable and competitive offer that benefits to both tourists and residents by facilitating their daily life through smart initiatives. The purpose of this conceptual chapter is to analyze how the creation of cultural tourism experience with information and communication technologies …

Wearable Technologies: Kinesthetic Dimension In Enriching Tourist Experience, Guzide Z. Egeli, Hulya Kurgun

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

OVERVIEW

Wearable technologies (WTs), started to play an important role within the tourism ecosystem. These technologies open up new possibilities for all types of tourism operators such as Destination Management Organizations (DMOs), airlines, hotels, cruise lines, theme parks, museums and other attractions in terms of offering competitive advantage and assuring a sustainable offer. In this context, tourism-related companies and destinations, in particular, need to employ new strategies and be innovate in order to meet the demand of sophisticated consumers, improve the satisfaction of the tourist and increase the overall tourism experience. Although the role of this technology is still very …