The tourist experience of heritage urban spaces : Valletta as a case study

This article provides an understanding of how tourists experience heritage urban spaces by investigating features that influence tourist experiences most. It is framed within urban design literature which refers to three elements of urban space namely physical setting (or form), activity, and meaning. These elements are used to explore how urban spaces are experienced by tourists. Its findings are derived from an in-depth qualitative analysis of interviews with tourists to Valletta, Malta. The research suggests that the intrinsic qualities of the space are relevant to the tourist experience but what is even more relevant are the interactions of the tourist with different elements within that space, namely interactions with surroundings, interactions with others, and interactions with self/meaning. Within this broad conceptual model, the research identifies important sub-themes. Some of these reinforce the findings of existing work on tourist experiences, but others are often under-estimated or neglected.peer-reviewe

Industrial heritage management : Polish perspective

The aim of the article is to briefly present the current Polish perspective on industrial heritage. It stands for specific aspects of the past, which do not necessarily conform the usual criteria of aesthetics or emotional commitment. In the first part the basic information and the theoretical background are presented. The second is devoted to alleged oppositional processes: neglection and deterioration versus activity and re-usage. These two characterize the approach towards industrial heritage, simultaneously hype and ignorance. This assumption derives from research results conducted in previous works

What attracts vehicle consumers’ buying:A Saaty scale-based VIKOR (SSC-VIKOR) approach from after-sales textual perspective?

Purpose: The increasingly booming e-commerce development has stimulated vehicle consumers to express individual reviews through online forum. The purpose of this paper is to probe into the vehicle consumer consumption behavior and make recommendations for potential consumers from textual comments viewpoint. Design/methodology/approach: A big data analytic-based approach is designed to discover vehicle consumer consumption behavior from online perspective. To reduce subjectivity of expert-based approaches, a parallel Naïve Bayes approach is designed to analyze the sentiment analysis, and the Saaty scale-based (SSC) scoring rule is employed to obtain specific sentimental value of attribute class, contributing to the multi-grade sentiment classification. To achieve the intelligent recommendation for potential vehicle customers, a novel SSC-VIKOR approach is developed to prioritize vehicle brand candidates from a big data analytical viewpoint. Findings: The big data analytics argue that “cost-effectiveness” characteristic is the most important factor that vehicle consumers care, and the data mining results enable automakers to better understand consumer consumption behavior. Research limitations/implications: The case study illustrates the effectiveness of the integrated method, contributing to much more precise operations management on marketing strategy, quality improvement and intelligent recommendation. Originality/value: Researches of consumer consumption behavior are usually based on survey-based methods, and mostly previous studies about comments analysis focus on binary analysis. The hybrid SSC-VIKOR approach is developed to fill the gap from the big data perspective

Extracting meanings of event tourist experiences: A phenomenological exploration of Limassol carnival

The common examination of the event and tourism experience can reveal the attached meanings that exemplify the valued characteristics of a destination in the perceptions of tourists. From this standpoint, this study employed a phenomenological approach conducting eight unstructured interviews to explore the experience and assigned meanings of tourists who attended the carnival in Limassol, Cyprus. Results indicate that the meanings of tourist experiences in the carnival were extracted as continuously evolving products shaped by the interaction of two interrelated dramaturgical states, namely the generalized sociality and perceived community metamorphosis, and the interfering dimension of obstruction referring to organizational aspects constraining the tourist experience. The findings of this exploratory phenomenological study bring into the fore the need for more effectively incorporating events into a destination's product mix by designing experiences that leverage event meanings in synergy with unique destination features, thereby enhancing their impact on tourists. On these grounds, it is argued that the phenomenological perspective applied on the study of event tourism can enable destination marketing and management to develop a joint framework for cross-leveraging events and destination assets, hence, synergistically optimizing both social and tourism ends for host destinations. To this end, the study highlights the need for future research to start exploring systematically the relationship between the meanings of tourist experiences and the characteristics of a destination's product mix