Tourism Geographies Podcast

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2025.2464101AbstractThis study analyzed tourism history, management, and impacts in the city of Asheville in Western North Carolina, a prime tourism location for over a century. First marketed for its healthful mountain air in the mid-1800s, its proximity to the famed Blue Ridge Mountains remains one of the city’s major attractions. Over the years, Asheville expanded its tourism opportunities and now sits atop dozens of ‘Top 10’ lists. With over 10 million annual visitors, residents have expressed concerns about the repercussions of tourism, including increased cost of living, decreased quality of life, impaired access to natural and cultural sites, and degraded ecosystems. This research explored tourism management and its impacts in Asheville and on residents through an extensive literature review and interviews. Using a regenerative tourism lens, this study developed recommendations for Asheville’s tourism management. To address the growing overtourism repercussions, it is recommended that Asheville take steps toward more sustainable and regenerative tourism management and development. Proposed solutions are presented, including implementing a sustainability pledge, creating a destination stewardship management body, engaging the community, redistributing occupancy tax revenue, and educating visitors. These proposed solutions may apply not only to the situation in Asheville, North Carolina, but also in similarly sized tourism destinations globally that are striving for resilient, regenerative tourism.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2330574AbstractThis review summarizes some key moments in the development of ethics in tourism research and practice where three main areas of concern are identified: socio-economic inequalities, cultural discriminations, and more-than-human speciesism. Following a brief historical review, the paper delves into some current trends and ethical concerns in tourism geographies, which trace back to the utilitarian ethics within which contemporary tourism emerged, after which, and with the growing concerns about tourism’s negative impacts, normative and moral approaches to ethics held sway. Then the paper addresses a critical gap in tourism ethics’ research and practice. With few exceptions, tourism environments are seen as something apart, things to be managed, developed or even protected, where the focus is instrumental on how these environments can be maintained or manipulated for human benefit. This modernization paradigm and its promise of progress through growth, together with a tourism industry that (re)produces colonial structures through neocolonial practices reinforced by neoliberal globalization has contributed to a host of present-day challenges and injustices. We argue that to address the injustices above and current existential crises like climate change, and other threats to socio-ecological well-being, a paradigm shift in tourism thinking is needed. Specifically, we propose embracing posthumanist ethics as a novel, experimental (as against normative or moral), situated (as against universal), and affirmative (as against oppositional) critique of structural injustices and structural power; epistemological pluralism (as against essentialism), acknowledging the relationality proper of indigenous cosmologies and other traditional knowledges (where more involvement from the Global South is needed); and a new materialist ontology that overcomes human exceptionalism and abandons oppositional binary thinking. In other words, what is needed, is an affirmative posthumanist ethics for tourism that is relational, plural and differential.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2446354AbstractThe ‘turn to the sea’ through yachting tourism recorded during the Covid-19 pandemic prompts the relocation of the sea, including its nature and culture, back at the centre of processes of change in selected coastal resorts. The recent revamp of regenerative thinking in tourism offers a theoretical and practical ground on which to consider the development potential of yachting tourism as agent of societal change and coastal resort evolution. Using the Northern Adriatic Sea as a geographical point of reference, and Rimini as an exemplary model of second-generation coastal resort, we used a constructivist variant of grounded theory. Findings show that in the Northern Adriatic Sea area some favourable conditions do exist for the YT sector to contribute to reconnecting humans with the nature and culture of the sea confirming its regenerative tourism potential. Nevertheless, formal efforts to support the needed for a cultural shift, from international agencies to local administration, are undermined by a culture of the sea that is fragmented by the disjointed agendas of distinct sea communitas.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2423155AbstractThis commentary reviews the state of island tourism literature with specific reference to publications in the journal Tourism Geographies. Despite over 44 years of literature about island tourism, the field remains underdeveloped, with several under-researched critical areas, including adaptation, investment, proximity, and small islands. The Western Hemisphere, except the Caribbean, is the most under-researched area for island tourism. Some important island tourism topics include community, culture, disaster, governance, and tour operators. A focused compendium about island tourism is needed to support the sustainability and resilience of these vulnerable and fragile landscapes that are perhaps the most constrained in terms of economic opportunities for viability. A recommendation has been made for the furtherance of island tourism as a separate field within the tourism academy.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2446355AbstractToday’s multiple crises call for alternative approaches to tourism and nature contemplation. Neoliberal conservation proposes the commodification of nature as a solution to these crises, for instance, through tourism development in private protected areas (PPA). PPAs combine privatisation with the commodification of nature for tourism, illustrating neoliberal conservation. Critics of neoliberal conservation question these practices, claiming that they foster inequality, enclosure, and people’s alienation from nature, leading to displacement. Alternatively, post-capitalist convivial conservation strives to overcome the human-nature dichotomy entrenched in market-based instruments of mainstream conservation. This study analyses tourism management in PPAs in the Serra the Tramuntana, a protected mountain range in the tourist hotspot Mallorca (Spain). The objective is to clarify whether PPAs can align with convivial conservation by supporting decommodification and commons management. A qualitative method based on interviews and participant observation is used to conceptualise decommodification based on the commons. The results demonstrate that PPAs can contribute to the decommodification of nature contemplation and tourism when responsibility and decision-making are shared through commoning. This paper argues for rethinking tourism through a convivial conservation lens, offering a post-capitalist alternative to mainstream conservation and tourism practices by emphasising commoning as a pathway to decommodify nature.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2381061AbstractThis state-of-the art review provides an overview of feminist analyses of tourism that have been published in Tourism Geographies since 1999. The review first introduces feminisms as political projects, forms of activism, diverse theories, and as ways of knowing that have critically informed tourism knowledge production. It then offers reflections on the development of feminist tourism geographies over the past two to three decades, before outlining several trends that have more recently contributed to feminist understandings of tourism spaces and places. Our review then identifies avenues for future research and for cross-fertilisation between tourism geographies scholarship and scholarship relating to indigenous and decolonial feminisms, feminist political ecologies, and feminist economic geographies.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2446356AbstractTourism development can significantly affect the environment and communities in popular travel destinations, often overpowering Indigenous peoples by the sheer dominance of this economic sector. However, the local population can regain control over tourism development in a destination. This paper addresses the research question of how Indigenous peoples can protect themselves as well as their land from the pressures of mass tourism. More specifically, it analyzes the example of the Kanak from the Isle of Pines in New Caledonia, who play a key role in the island’s tourism development, ensuring it aligns with their cultural values and norms. For example, no hotel can be built on the Isle of Pines without the consent of the customary authorities and the Indigenous community. This presents challenges to external investors like Club Méditerranée, the pioneer of the all-inclusive resort model, an innovative approach in hospitality. This paper explores the Kanak community’s resistance to Club Med’s resort establishment in the 1970s, despite pressures from foreign investors and the local government. To answer our research question, we used ethnographic research methods and archival data analysis. Our findings reveal that customary land tenure allows Indigenous communities to maintain ownership of their land while preserving autonomy and control over resources and decision-making processes. The Kanak opposition to Club Med was successful due to three empowerment factors: the broader recognition and adherence to customary law, the emergence of the Kanak independence movement and land restitution claims, and the active involvement of Indigenous peoples in the implementation of tourism projects. This ‘NOvative’ approach – marked by the opposition towards Club Med – allowed the Kanak community to maintain control over tourism development. By adapting it to suit their insular pace and scale, they have demonstrated how Indigenous peoples can shape tourism in ways that respect their customs and lifestyles.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2395469AbstractAdvancement of Indigenous rights through tourism requires practitioners and researchers to think carefully about the roles and responsibilities of Indigenous methodologies and decolonising work. In adopting a stance of refusing colonisation, reflections on tebrakunna country are aimed at introducing ways for Indigenous scholars to accommodate both cultural protocol and western scholarship requirements without compromise.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2024.2412551AbstractThemed spaces and theme parks constitute of significant human-based desires and linguistic discourses that stabilises/destabilises their social identities and materialities. This paper draws on a relational materialist perspective to examine Singapore’s longstanding themed space, Haw Par Villa, to offer insights into its social and material stability and instabilities. Relational materialism facilitates observations and analysis of interactions of humans and their material worlds on the same ontological plane where human’s agencies are de-centred. Social and material objects are seen to operate in mutually constitutive fashions. The development of a site/theme park and its larger country context are conceptualised here as ‘assemblages’ using DeLanda’s brand of assemblage theory to reveal the operations of human-based ‘desires’ alongside material agencies. Specifically, the desires of the founder and the key discourses related to the founder’s name helped constitute and stabilise the social identity and materiality of the Haw Par Villa through its eventful history of physical destruction, reconstruction, rebranding and reimagining. Despite his eventual non-involvement with Haw Par Villa’s management due to his passing, the founder’s desires and discourses linger on in various forms, resulting in subsequent attempts to rework the identity and materiality of this themed space failing if the attempts are not congruent on some level with the founder’s desires and discourses. This resulted in the failure of first, the state and, subsequently, private endeavours in re-constituting the themed space. In doing so, this paper contributes to a socio-material understanding of the resilience and sustainability of themed spaces.