Search Results (36)

The study aims to evaluate the demand for forest bathing in northern Italy’s regions, underlining the willingness to pay and the potential tourists’ habits and flows on attending alpine contexts. Several studies have analyzed the psychophysical benefits of forest bathing, and there is a growing interest in assessing its economic value for tourism purposes. The sample’s answers have been analyzed employing a stratified sampling methodology considering three different macro areas (northwest regions, northeast regions, and the Friuli Venezia Giulia region). After analyzing the sample’s attitudes, the research approached the estimation section by calculating the flow as the number of potential forest bathing hikes per year and the willingness to pay through the contingent valuation method. The main results indicate that forest bathing activity in northern Italy has a considerable monetary value, and it is generally compared with positive feelings, particularly concerning well-being and fascination factors. Full article

Exploring the dynamic variation in ecosystem services and clarifying the driving mechanism will help with the formulation of effective ecological environment protection policies. Accordingly, this study sought to reveal the complex variability in ecosystem services in the Yellow River Delta (YRD) at a higher temporal resolution and the transition between the main driving factors in different periods. To this end, we used the economic equivalent factor valuation method to quantify the ecosystem service value from 2000 to 2019 at 5-year intervals. Furthermore, the Geo-detector model was used to identify the main driving factors and interaction between the driving factors of ecosystem service value variations. Then, we analyzed the temporal and spatial dynamic variations in the ecosystem service value and the transitions between the main driving factors in different periods. The main results are as follows: (1) From 2000 to 2019, the ecosystem service value of the YRD showed an increasing trend followed by a decline, whereby water and construction land increased and the other classes of land decreased. Overall, the inland and coastal distribution patterns exhibited low and high values, respectively. (2) The main driving factors of ecosystem service value variations were the NDVI and topographical factors (aspect, slope, elevation), which had q values that were stable and greater than those of the other factors. Although human activity, tourist resource concentration and traffic convenience factors had a comparatively minor effect on ecosystem services, we noted a trend where their effects increased from 2000 to 2019. (3) The detection of interactions revealed complex mechanisms affecting the variation in the YRD. Interactions between variables had a stronger influence than individual effects. The interactions between the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and other factors consistently had the most significant impact. These interactions primarily shaped the spatial and temporal distribution of ecosystem services. The NDVI and human activities exhibited nonlinear enhancement. These results contribute to improving our cognition of the factors and mechanisms influencing ecosystem services, offering theoretical support for the improvement of ecosystem services in the YRD. Full article

In all countries, cities and their suburbs are the most densely populated areas. They are also the places visited by the largest number of tourists and one-day visitors, who inevitably run the risk of becoming victims of crime. It is, therefore, important, not only at national but also at the international level, to know the structure of urban crime and identify urban areas that differ in terms of their criminogenic situation. This requires a geographical approach and regionalisation based on the quantitative data that can offer it. This paper presents the results of a study using big data regarding violent crime, property crime and infringements against public order registered by the police in 2020 in the territories of three major Lithuanian cities and their suburbs (n = 149,239). Events in open spaces were separately addressed. A series of experiments were carried out using several spatial clustering methods. The automatic zoning procedure method that gave the best statistical results was then tested with different combinations of parameters. In each city, seven types of areas of urban crime were identified. Maps of crime areas (regions) were created for each city. The results of the regionalisation have been interpreted from a socio-geographical point of view and conform with previous sociological urban studies. Seven types of areas of crime have been identified, which are present in all the cities studied and, according to a preliminary assessment, roughly correspond to the socio-demographic and urban zones of each city. The maps of crime areas can be applied for crime prevention planning and communication, real estate valuation, strategic urban development planning and other purposes. Full article

Wellness tourism is a growing segment that destinations can rely on to increase tourism flows and revive underdeveloped rural areas. This study elicits tourists’ preferences for wellness tourism products and the redevelopment of a wellness destination in a depopulated rural area. The research included 595 participants in Central Greece using on-site, face-to-face surveys. The survey data were analyzed using a two-step process. First, conjoint analysis was applied to determine the combination of wellness tourism product attributes that maximize visitors’ utility. In the second step, we elicited visitors’ willingness to pay (WTP) for improvements in tourism product attributes using the contingent valuation method. The findings indicate that the combination of attributes that maximizes the preference structure of respondents includes time of visit from September to October, duration of visit from 1 to 7 days, wellness tourism as the primary purpose of the visit, and wellness activities that contain both physical activities and training as well as spiritual and emotional enhancement. Using binary logistic regression, the analysis indicates that respondents are willing to pay EUR 47.33 per visit on average further to develop wellness tourism products in the study area. Empirical results confirmed that sustainability issues, quality, and entrepreneurship factors positively impact visitors’ WTP for revitalizing wellness products. In contrast, a longer duration of stay in the area and respondents’ age negatively impact their WTP. These findings suggest that structuring a customer-driven tourism product will enhance the rural destination’s efforts to attract high-yield visitors and advance the rural economy. Furthermore, practical implications reveal that Destination Management Organizations will benefit from research results to foster targeted management plans. Full article

The paper develops a model through a contingent valuation approach to support public authorities in the exploration and assessment of ecosystem services (ESs) generated by forest and woodlands (FOWLs). This approach is employed to the cork oak forests of the Sardinia region (Italy) due to their ability in the provision and regulation of cultural and recreational values to society. The paper describes the economic valuation of cultural ESs through the contingent valuation method (CVM) with the purpose to explore residents and tourists’ willingness to pay (WTP) preferences towards conservation, valorisation, and the management of Goceano’s cork oak forests in Sardinia. The approach may help retain suitable support for DMs, planners, technicians, and operators for a better understanding of the ESs’ role in policy decisions, leading FOWLs towards a learning process between the environment, human beings, and landscape to promote and develop a proactive landscape and forest planning and management within the region. Full article

A social–ecological system is a highly connected organization of biophysical and social actors that interact across multiple scales, share resources, and adapt to the actors’ changes. The ways in which humans and nature interact have traditionally been characterized and influenced by competing intrinsic and utilitarian values. However, recently, relational values and relational models have been used to unpack the myriad of values society assigns to nature and create general typologies of nature–human relationships. Here, we investigate the spectrum of environmental values that exist in the San Marcos River (SMR)—a social–ecological system (SES) in which a spring-fed river flows through an urban environment in central Texas (USA) including a university campus that attracts regional and international tourists. Recognizing that scholars have struggled to identify a nuanced understanding of environmental values and how these values shape nature–human relationships in SES, we use the SMR case study to capture the nature–human relational models that exist among social and user groups of the blue space. Analyzing different groups of visitors and stakeholders of the SMR (n = 3145), this study serves as a pilot to apply relational models using a variety of metrics to build a framework for understanding models of nature–human relationships, beyond ecosystem services and dualistic valuations. In our sample, most respondents were classified under the stewardship model (59%). The utilization model (34%) was the second most common, followed by wardship (6%). We found that patterns of place identity emerged to support the development of relational models beyond utilization. Despite the differences among perceptions, values, and some variation in relational models, one commonality was the innate, ubiquitous preference to protect natural habitat, water quality, and the river’s aquifer water source. Our study contributes to the growing literature around relational values and is a pathway to integrate ecosystem services, environmental values, and human–environment interactions into a more holistic approach to environmental valuation. Full article

With the wide spread of the concept of sustainable tourism in various countries and regions, the research on tourism poverty alleviation is paying increasingly closer attention to the sustainability of the poverty reduction effect of tourism, and the social-ecosystem theory of tourist destinations has been widely applied in the sustainable development of tourism in backward mountainous areas. However, existing studies lack the dynamic evaluation of social-ecosystem vulnerability in places of tourism, and are devoid of large sample data. This paper aims to analyze the law of spatial and temporal evolution of the social-ecosystem vulnerability in China’s Wuling Mountains area, and to help solve the obstacles and difficulties of realizing the effective connection between poverty alleviation and rural revitalization. The set analysis method (SPA) was used to evaluate the vulnerability and the obstacle degree model was utilized to identify the vulnerability barrier factors. Forty-two national key poverty-alleviation counties in the Wuling Mountains area were selected as the research objects to analyze the spatial and temporal evolution characteristics of social-ecosystem vulnerability based on the valuation model of “Social-Economic-Ecological (S-E-E) model” and the “Vulnerability-Scoping-Diagram (V-S-D) model”. In this paper, we clarified the two types of changes in social-ecosystem vulnerability in the Wuling Mountains area, and analyzed the spatial differences of vulnerability from the perspective of subsystems and counties. In terms of the results of this study, from 2010 to 2019, the overall vulnerability of social ecosystems showed a trend of “slow-rise and steady-decline”, with the vulnerability index peaking in 2014 and declining year by year thereafter. Spatially, the overall vulnerability is smaller in the north than in the south; and social-ecosystem vulnerability is the result of the interaction between system exposure-sensitivity and system adaptive capacity. Based on the change in vulnerability of different subsystems and different counties, and the barrier factors it faced, we make targeted suggestions to help the region to reduce its social-ecosystem vulnerability. Full article

Territories throughout different continents have a wide variety of natural and cultural resources, defined by the dynamics of spatiality, temporality, and functionality that have been generated by the human groups settled in these spaces. These resources have become an object of study of great interest since they constitute the initial sources for the definition of the tourism potential of destinations, as well as contributing to the generation of new tourism activities and modalities for those already consolidated. Although these resources were initially used as objects of exploitation, with the passage of time the dynamics have changed to the use of these resources, focusing on the foundation of the pillars of sustainability, a condition that implies practices of environmental valuation in situ, the recognition of the cultural heritage of the territories and the valuation of the interaction between culture–nature–human beings. The objective of this research is to identify the existing scientific production in which the relationship between the tourist exploitation of natural and cultural resources and regional development is explored. Bibliometric analysis based on the guidelines of the PRISMA method was used. The international databases considered were Web of Science and Scopus. The analysis was complemented with an overlap analysis to establish the relationship of information between the WoS and Scopus databases. A total of 507 documents on the subject were identified, which provided a preliminary X-ray that will allow future research work to be focused on this line of re-search. The results allowed us to observe that there is little literature on the relationship between the use of natural and cultural resources for tourism and the regional development of the territory, both from an economic and social point of view. Full article

In this paper, we examine the impact of destination risk and currency valuation on the U.S. tourism-growth nexus using the recently developed nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag cointegration technique. Tourism development is proxied by tourist arrivals, while growth is measured by real GDP. Empirical results show evidence of long-run asymmetric bidirectional causality. Positive shocks in tourism development directly impact growth, while negative shocks in GDP have a negative causal effect on tourism. This latter finding, which supports the growth-led tourism hypothesis, suggests that in the long run, tourism tends to improve following periods of economic weakness, perhaps due to the dollar’s weakness at such times. However, we have evidence only of unidirectional causality running from GDP to tourism in the short run. An important implication of these findings is the need to promote inbound tourism, especially when weakness in the U.S. economy is accompanied by a decline in the value of the dollar. Full article

Visible trends in city tourism related to the development of sustainable tourism clearly imply an increase in the significance of green areas and the development of nature-based tourism. Natural areas in cities that ideally fit the assumptions of sustainable tourism are nature reserves—areas where protection of the valuable environment is a priority. This paper aims to highlight that nature reserves are green spots in cities that can be excellent sites for sustainable tourism. The choice of big cities was dictated by the fact that they have the highest requirement for recreational green spaces due to a high concentration of tourist traffic in historic city centres and a clearer need for sustainable forms of tourism. Sixteen nature reserves in five big Polish cities with a population of more than 100,000: Gdańsk, Łódź, Poznań, Toruń, and Warsaw were selected for the study. Field surveys were carried out in nature reserves to see whether basic tourism facilities providing information about nature, supporting education, and conservation of the natural environment existed in the publicly available areas of such reserves. The attractiveness of nature reserves to tourists and their suitability for developing sustainable tourism was evaluated through score-based valuation of the reserves. The valorisation index was used for a synthetic rating and classification of the reserves in terms of attractiveness. The results of surveys imply a possibility of using selected nature reserves in cities for developing sustainable forms of active tourism—in particular hiking and cycling, educational tourism and daily recreational activities of city residents. The sites in question can be regarded as attractive ecotourism products, and as such hold the potential to become a popular destination among tourists and eco-tourists in particular. Full article

Over the last decade, the emergence and significant growth of home-sharing platforms, such as Airbnb, has coincided with rising housing unaffordability in many global cities. It is in this context that we look to empirically assess the impact of Airbnb on housing prices in Sydney—one of the least affordable cities in the world. Employing a hedonic property valuation model, our results indicate that Airbnb’s overall effect is positive. A 1% increase in Airbnb density is associated with approximately a 2% increase in property sales price. However, recognizing that Airbnb’s effect is geographically uneven and given the fragmented nature of Sydney’s housing market, we also employ a GWR to account for the spatial variation in Airbnb activity. The findings confirm that Airbnb’s influence on housing prices is varied across the city. Sydney’s northern beaches and parts of western Sydney experience a statistically significant value uplift attributable to Airbnb activity. However, traditional tourist locations focused around Sydney’s CBD and the eastern suburbs experience insignificant or negative property price impacts. The results highlight the need for policymakers to consider local Airbnb and housing market contexts when deciding the appropriate level and design of Airbnb regulation. Full article

Due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, tourist destinations have been increasingly selected on the basis of health, safety and social distancing criteria. In this framework, protected natural areas represent ideal tourist destinations due to the presence of wide and open spaces, services for tourists and attention to nature. The present paper focused on accessible tourism, a subset of sustainable tourism that is increasingly gaining greater importance within the tourism sector. By applying the Contingent Valuation Method, the study investigated whether potential tourists are effectively willing to pay extra money to be granted more accessible facilities in a natural area. To this end, a logit model was estimated to determine the probability that tourists exhibit a higher WTP for accessible tourism facilities. The analysis was carried out in the Gargano National Park, Southern Italy, an area traditionally characterised by large tourist flows that have increased further during the recent pandemic. The results showed that only a limited percentage of the respondents are willing to pay a higher amount for improved accessibility. These results represent an interesting starting point to outline an adequate strategy for the tourism valorisation of the natural area. Full article

The landscape is an essential resource for attracting tourists to a destination, but this resource has long been overused by tourism development. Tourists and scholars have begun noticing the interference of human structures in the natural environment and how this can change the meaning of a landscape. In this study, the impact of artificial elements on mountain landscapes was investigated by measuring the characteristics of visual perception and a landscape value assessment using eye-tracking analysis. Furthermore, this study includes socio-demographic features for testing whether they have an impact on landscape perception. The results show that human structures impact both visual perception and the perceived value of landscapes. Hotels and temples attract more visual attention than a purely natural landscape. Modern hotels appear to have a negative influence on mountain landscape valuation, while temples with unique culture have positive impacts. Socio-demographic groups differ significantly in how they observe landscape images and, to a degree, how they value the landscape therein. Our study should be of value to landscape planning and tourism policy making. Full article

Given the current travel restrictions with the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an unprecedented opportunity for Hawai’i to reexamine its current tourism offerings and establish a new approach to support a more authentic, cultural, and sustainable tourism for the U.S. domestic tourist market. As tourists from the continental U.S. are the largest source market for visitors to Hawai’i, the purpose of this study is to examine the trend towards an “authentic cultural” tourism experience and evaluate whether U.S. visitors will be willing to pay for a deeper integration and representation of Hawaiian culture in tourism offerings. The contingent valuation method (CVM) was adopted to quantify the willingness to pay (WTP) more by the tourists to Hawaii in order to experience a more “authentic Hawaiian cultural experience” as well as “sustainable experiences”. Differences between returning and first-time visitors were considered. This study focused on continental U.S. visitors’ perceptions of Hawaiian culture and the sustainability of Hawaiian tourism products, as well as the assessment of locally grown food and tourists’ willingness to pay extra for these tourism products and experiences. The contingent valuation survey demonstrated that continental U.S. travelers were supportive of an additional fee in order to experience authentic Hawaiian cultural and tourism experiences designed and/or facilitated by Native Hawaiians. In addition, U.S. visitors were also supportive of paying additional fees for activities or experiences to support sustainable tourism in Hawai’i, including paying more for locally grown food, indicating that they would be willing to increase their restaurant/hotel food bill in order to support the Hawaii’s local farming industry. The results of this study demonstrate that there are economic opportunities to further integrate Hawaiian culture and sustainability into the experience of visitors, and that U.S. visitors are willing to support these cultural activities financially. Full article

This study estimated tourists’ willingness to pay (WTP) for tourist sites or facilities in the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic by applying the dichotomous choice-contingent valuation method to two different tourism destination types. A survey was conducted among domestic tourists in South Korea who had visited destinations within the last six months. We conducted a logistic regression with 1283 effective samples. The results showed differences in tourists’ WTP, depending on type, and the factors affecting WTP differed. Tourists with higher tourism attitude and knowledge of tourism risk exhibited a higher WTP. Tourists with higher perceived risk of infectious disease exhibited less WTP. Full article