Tourism - A Research Guide: Reference Works

Experts from different disciplines and diverse geographic regions discuss fundamental, often controversial topics in the field of tourism studies.

This book contains original papers which span a number of creative topics and debates and which transcend existing frontiers of tourism knowledge, including popculture tourism, gospel festivals as heterotopia, tourism and elections, articulations of the concept of tourismization and tourism of spiritual growth and critical explorations of the tourism image of Switzerland as represented in right wing visual rhetoric. Importantly this original text also includes novel discussions of sustainability and destination evolution and network dynamics.

This is the first book to explore research on visiting friends and relatives (VFR). In many countries VFR is the largest single travel-related market and for some regional economies accounts for over half of all tourism flows. In assembling an international collection of quality VFR-related research the editors present the profiles, characteristics, opportunities and behaviours of VFR travel for the benefit of researchers, industry practitioners and educators.

The authors propose that complexity theory holds great promise in improving understanding of guests' evaluations of their service experiences.

Tourism studies at Masters level are often divided into subsets of tourism such as environmental tourism, rural tourism and sports tourism. This textbook provides an overview of types of tourism, and common themes studied in courses to allow undergraduate students to become familiar with a wide range of tourism topics at a foundation level, allowing them to make an informed decision about their future studies and career.

Cultural tourism includes experiencing local culture, traditions and lifestyle, participation in arts-related activities, and visits to museums, monuments and heritage sites. This book reviews a wide range of qualitative and quantitative research methods applied to the field of cultural tourism, including surveys, mystery tourist visits, visitor tracking, grand tour narratives, collage, researcher-created video, photo-based interviews, ethnographic and actor-network approaches.

This work describes fundamental elements of research methods for leisure, recreation and tourism, with contributions from internationally renowned and active researchers in the field. It covers statistical information such as measurement of variables, sampling, questionnaire design and evaluation methods, and also contains wider discussion of writing proposals, communicating research findings, cross-cultural research, and the use of new technologies in conducting research.

As the field of tourism and hospitality experiences maturity and scientific sophistication, researchers need to fully understand the breadth and depth of existing scales that help explain, understand, monitor, and predict not only behavior but also consequences of such behavior as a function of demand and supply interactions in the field. By introducing the importance of measurement and scales and providing groupings of existing scales, The Handbook of Scales in Tourism and Hospitality Research serves as the state-of-the-art reference book in the field of tourism, hospitality and allied fields such leisure, recreation, and services management.

Research methods can be a daunting topic - Researching Tourism, Leisure and Hospitality for your Dissertation is a unique text that takes away the stress, worry and confusion by providing a step-by-step, user friendly guide to all you need to know to successfully research and compile your dissertation.

Planning Research in Hospitality and Tourism provides a concise and clear approach to planning research projects which are a necessity in most hospitality and tourism courses taught at degree level. The text considers the particular characteristics of the hospitality and tourism industry, whilst providing a balanced approach toward both quantitative and qualitative methods of research.