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A shift from memorable to transformative experiences is taking place in the emerging transformation economy. Experiences constitute the essence of the tourism industry. While the literature has recognized the link between sustainability and local food, how local food affects tourists’ perceived sustainability, service experience, satisfaction, and advocacy is little known. This paper contributes to filling this research gap by examining the relationship between local food and sustainability at Spanish destinations within the transformative service theoretical framework. We conducted a questionnaire on 1476 Spanish tourists to show that service experience, perceived sustainability, and local food, are fundamental to any tourist destination strategy. Data reveal that perceived sustainability is a determining factor of tourists’ service experience at the destination, and the perception of local food reinforces perceived sustainability. Moreover, tourists’ service experience significantly and positively affects satisfaction and, consequently, advocacy. The significance of safe experience as an additional dimension of the service experience is also shown. This paper contributes to the transformative service literature in the field of tourism by demonstrating the enhancing role of local food over visitors’ sustainable experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, the tourism industry has been devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated changes in international travel. This paper draws on interviews with 51 women working in the tourism sector in Tanzania and examines gendered impacts of the pandemic on their welfare, which instigated or accelerated entrepreneurial activities as an attempt to protect women's incomes and security. Women in the study adopted one of three entrepreneurial strategies: they (re)committed to the tourism industry, working on developing their own skills and business ideas; they diversified their business interests to have a 'Plan B' in addition to tourism to safeguard against future crises; or they moved away from tourism altogether, focusing instead on other less volatile sectors. The crisis caused by the pandemic exposed tourism as a risky business and a gamble for many women, who are considering leaving the sector. This represents a significant obstacle for the tourism industry's recovery and sustainability and illustrates some of the limitations of tourism entrepreneurship for supporting and empowering women in the Global South. Priority policy areas for supporting women to remain within tourism are identified to help support women entrepreneurs and ensure their skills and enthusiasm contribute to rebuilding and reshaping the sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many historic and post-industrial cities, tourism is often positioned as an important component for urban regeneration. Yet, the promise of sustainability and social transformation is often empty as policymakers focus on sustaining tourism over supporting greater social, economic, and environmental sustainability. Furthermore, the pandemic has drawn attention to the unsustainable nature of the neoliberal model of tourism engagement. Due to the paucity of research exploring spatial injustice in urban tourism, this study examines the impact policymaking and governance structures have on urban destinations and the potential inequalities this creates. Drawing on Edward Soja’s approach to Lefebvre’s The Right to the City (1968), this research explores how lessons learned during the pandemic in the tourist-historic city of York, UK, could transform tourism in historic urban spaces. Taking an interpretive case study approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with leading stakeholders to understand the spatial dimensions of the lived experiences of policymaking. The hopeful signs emerging from York’s response to the pandemic demonstrate how communities can reclaim voice to build sustainable and purposeful models of engagement. This paper contributes to our understanding by demonstrating the transformative potential that future policymaking could have for reducing the negative impacts of tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The hotel industry is increasingly developing voluntary measures to tackle waste generation, but they fall short of the problems faced by municipal waste services in many tourist destinations. This paper exemplifies how a collaboratively designed waste tariff reform for hotels in a tourism-intensive municipality can achieve a sustainable waste management system through stronger collective action, involving not only the hotel sector but also the city council and waste management companies. The co-created Pay-As-You-Throw tariff meets the demands of the stakeholders by establishing a progressive waste charge that penalizes hotels based on their waste generation intensity, defined as the ratio between waste flows and size. In addition, a competition system is introduced by imposing penalties (or rewards) according to whether the waste generation intensity is above (or below) the sector average during the settlement period, incentivizing waste prevention, recycling and encouraging long-term investment in sustainable waste management. The tariff is consistent with the principles of the EU’s Circular Economy Package and offers hotels a competitive advantage, while ensuring a progressive waste charging system and waste management cost recovery. Empirical results of the co-created tariff show a reduction in waste generation intensity and signs of increased recycling rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced employment in the Spanish tourism sector from a gender perspective and aims to infer its impact on sustainability. We use employment data from 2002 (Q1) to 2020 (Q4) on women and men in the Spanish hospitality sector and employ fractional integration methods to determine the temporary scope of the shock. Our results suggest that the impact of the pandemic will have a permanent effect, unless strong policy measures are adopted to resume pre-crisis trends. We also found that persistence is higher for women's than for men's employment. Therefore, women seem to be more vulnerable to the shocks of COVID-19, making sustainable development of tourism in Spain more difficult. Based on our results, we offer policy recommendations to counter the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender equality and tourism sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many ways, the expansion of commercial for-profit, P2P social dining platforms has mirrored those within mobility and accommodation sectors. However its dynamics and impacts have received less consideration to date, with a notable paucity of attention to the hosts of social dining events. The aim of this paper is to address this research lacuna. Through its exploration of the social dining platforms VizEat in Athens and Eatwith in Barcelona, this paper identifies, analyses and compares the social practices of hosts around their social dining events in two key tourist destinations in Europe. Data is gathered through multiple methods from participating in and observing social dining events in each city to interviews with key stakeholders in the P2P social dining process (such as hosts, platform employees and ambassadors). The research reveals how dynamic rules, tools, skills and understandings shape and reshape the performance of hosting social dining events. It exposes tensions and ongoing negotiations between hosts and guests regarding matters of authenticity and privacy, an uneven risk burden between hosts and platforms with regards liability and scant regard for matters of sustainability. As a result there is little alignment between P2P social dining and the goals of sustainable tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study conceptualizes labour mobility in the tourism and hospitality industry within the context of a developing country. Previous conceptualizations of labour mobility in the tourism and hospitality industry are unable to adequately represent specific economic and socio-cultural settings that may shape the mobility of tourism and hospitality labour in non-western developing countries. Interview data for the study on which this paper is based were collected from Kathmandu, Nepal in two phases in 2015/2016 and 2019, and analyzed using a constructivist grounded theory approach. The study identifies a pervasive phenomenon of 'necessity-induced (im)mobility' that either discourages or encourages mobility among tourism and hospitality workers. Several factors highlighted by this study show that the way mobility is perceived and executed by tourism and hospitality workers in developing counties, such as Nepal, is in stark contrast to how it is perceived in western and developed nations. This study has also identified several issues that may have implications for the sustainable supply of qualified labour (with higher education qualifications and skills) in the tourism and hospitality industry, particularly in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Favourable media coverage and the New Zealand space agency's focus on commercial opportunities, positioned within the Ministry of Business Innovation & Employment that is also responsible for tourism, provides a basis for a developing space tourism industry. There are many possible environmental, cultural, and geo-political consequences to being a space launch state with implications for tourism, sustainability, and tourism branding. The '100% PURE NEW ZEALAND' tourism brand in use since 1999 has received on-going criticism from various sources in response to reports of wide-spread environmental degradation in New Zealand, dairy farm conversions causing nitrate run-off and contamination of waterways, and New Zealand's comparatively high per-capita level of greenhouse gas emissions. The establishment of commercial space launch operations, and the ancillary industrial and service facilities required, opens a new dimension of environmental hazard for New Zealand that has not been considered in the space launch legislation, or any other existing legislation, for regulating the environmental impact of rocket powered high altitude and space vehicles. This paper will examine the environmental, cultural, geopolitical and regulatory issues for New Zealand as a space launch state, and the likely implications for sustainable tourism, tourism branding, and New Zealand as a space tourism destination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's tourism entrepreneurship has been identified as fundamental to meeting the UN's Sustainable Development Goals of both 'gender equality' and 'decent growth and economic growth' but neither entrepreneurship nor sustainability are gender neutral in the tourism industry. Therefore, further research is required into how gender influences sustainable entrepreneurship, providing insights for tourism entrepreneurship policy. In response to a prevalent essentialism in much of the literature, this paper adopts a post-structuralist framework, alongside a mixed-methods approach, to understand the complex role of gender and sustainability at different stages of entrepreneurship. The initial focus is on a survey of 539 tourism students (women and men) which analyses the latent and nascent entrepreneurship stages, while 19 interviews with established tourism entrepreneurs provide further insights into these issues. The analysis focusses especially on the individual characteristics of risk, personal attitudes to entrepreneurship and behavioural control. While broad gender differences are observed, notably in societal perceptions of risk aversion, there is also considerable blurring of the approaches of established entrepreneurs in particular to sustainability and entrepreneurship. If entrepreneurship is to enhance sustainability, policy needs to account for the non-essentialised gendered dimensions that inhibit and enable sustainable tourism entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]