Web Marketing and Social Media: The case of Adoption and Outsourcing by Swiss DMOs

A new perspective in destination marketing organizations’ (DMOs) effort to reach their audience involves the analysis of the electronic-word-of-mouth (eWOM) presented on social media websites. Organizations have little control over what is said online about a destination and oftentimes rely on outside providers to better understand online conversations. The purpose of this study was to identify and assess the adoption of web marketing strategies by Swiss DMOs with a focus on the use of partners and top management support. It was found that web marketing success is driven by eWOM and search engine monitoring activities, whereas paid activities (e.g. search engine optimization) had a negative significant effect. This suggests that paid services do not achieve desired outcomes. Last, partner collaboration was found to contribute to the overall success, as long as partners are brought in later in the process

Independent e-learning offers in Tourism and Hospitality. In search of a map and possible quality indicators

E-learning offers in the tourism and hospitality sector have been investigated, recently and four main types of courses have been identified, according to their provider: Academic,Destination Management Organizations, Corporate, and Independent. While for other types several studies are available, there is a lack of research when it comes to the online independent courses. This study focuses on e-learning courses issued by independent providers: they include training offers of very different nature, e.g.: language trainings for waiters, food and wine matching courses, sustainability communication training, cookingfor celiac people, etc. The results of this exploratory study provide an initial map of such educational offers; it discusses also some inferential indicators of satisfaction expressed by the users on social media, which may provideuseful insights for the identification of possible quality indicators of tourism-related online independent courses

An integrated human health risk assessment framework for alkylphenols due to drinking water and edible crop consumption

INTRODUCTION The scarcity of clean freshwater is becoming a major issue for present and future generations, especially in densely urbanised areas. This situation promotes the potential cross-contamination of different environmental compartments by contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) which, in fact, have already been detected worldwide in surface water, groundwater and soils. In particular, the CECs released by wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) can end up both in the recipient surface water and groundwater, both of which are used as drinking water (DW) sources. Furthermore, if those water sources and reclaimed wastewater are used for irrigation, CECs can be directly absorbed by crops intended for human consumption or accumulate in soil and translocate to crops over time. Hence, both DW and edible crops are critical CEC exposure pathways for humans, the combined effect of which requires further investigation. This work is aimed at developing an integrated framework for a quantitative chemical risk assessment due to CECs in complex multiple-use scenarios, combining DW and edible crop consumption, as a decision-making support tool for optimising solutions to minimise risks and social costs. METHODOLOGY The developed procedure includes several steps. Firstly, the analysed system boundaries are defined, to evaluate all the phenomena affecting the fate of CECs from source to end user. Then, CEC migration (e.g. diffusion in surface water, infiltration in soil, uptake by food crops) and human exposure (via water and edible crop consumption) are modelled in an integrated framework as a function of boundary conditions, CECs and by-products characteristics, and proposed interventions. Exposure models are calibrated through literature data, field monitoring and lab tests where, for instance, the CECs’ fate and uptake by vegetables from contaminated soils have been investigated. In the hazard assessment step, a toxicological characterisation was performed to obtain single CEC adverse effect potencies, aimed at applying the Relative Potency Factors methodology for combining CECs that affect the same endpoint. Lastly, exposure and hazard assessment steps are combined to quantitatively estimate the risk to human health from a mixture of CECs, which includes uncertainty analyses to account for knowledge gaps and to provide decision-makers with the confidence level of the risk estimation. RESULTS The developed quantitative risk assessment procedure has been applied to a case study on the mixture of two alkylphenols, i.e. bisphenol-A (BPA) and nonylphenol (NP), used as reference CECs. Literature and field-monitoring data were used to feed the model, with an estimate of BPA and NP concentration in DW up to 0.1 and 0.35 μg/L, respectively, as a function of different system boundary conditions. As for their uptake in edible crops, lab tests with contaminated soil (BPA=75 μg/kg and NP=10 mg/kg, according to the range reported in literature for soil irrigated with reclaimed wastewater or amended with biosolids) demonstrated a significant transfer of NP from soil to vegetables, with concentrations of up to 230 μg/kg fresh weight (f.w.) in the edible parts. No BPA (<8 μg/kg f.w.) was found in vegetables, unlike its metabolite para-hydroxybenzoic acid (up to 56 μg/kg f.w). Those results highlight that both DW and edible crop consumption exposure pathways are critical for the risk to human health due to BPA, NP and their by-products. Several interventions in WWTPs or in DW treatment plants and distribution networks were simulated, demonstrating promising cumulative risk reduction. DISCUSSION Integrated modelling of the fate of CEC mixtures in complex multiple-use water systems, combined with quantitative risk assessment, has proven to be an effective tool to identify the main causes of risk for humans and to assign the various CEC source contributions. Lab tests proved to be useful to investigate the fate of CECs, including metabolites, in the soil system and potential transfer to food crops, corroborating the information from literature and monitoring data for model calibration. Integrated modelling also made it possible to explore several intervention strategies to be adopted at different points of the water system, identifying those that achieve the minimum overall mixture risk. Moreover, in addition to CEC toxicological characterisation, this procedure allows decision-makers to prioritise CECs to be regulated not only based on their exposure levels but looking at their contribution to the overall mixture risk. Lastly, uncertainty analysis made it possible to properly consider the availability and quality of CEC data, especially as regards their physical-chemical behaviour and toxicity, thereby providing the degree of confidence for the estimated risk, which is a key factor for taking informed decisions concerning CEC

Barriere e Facilitatori nella Maturità dei Processi per la Promozione sul Web delle Destinazioni Turistiche Italiane

Despite the growing importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the tourism domain, the opportunities offered by the web to promote tourist destinations seem to be not yet fully exploited by destination marketing organizations. This study seeks to extend the eTourism Communication Maturity Model (eTcoMM), which is based on stage models of online communication in tourism. The model focuses on identifying processes involved in tourism web marketing activities, from awareness by tourism boards to implementation. The study aims to contribute to the definition of maturity in online promotion by Italian tourism boards, identifying and discussing factors that aid and limit the transition, from awareness to implementation of strategic web marketing.Nonostante la crescente importanza delle Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) nel mondo del turismo, le opportunità offerte dal web per la promozione del territorio sembrano non essere ancora adeguatamente sfruttate da parte degli enti turistici. Il contesto teorico di questo studio è dato dal modello eTcoMM – eTourism Communication Maturity Model (Marchiori et al, 2012), basato sugli stages models applicati in ambito di comunicazione online e dedicato all’identificazione dei processi di evoluzione dalla consapevolezza all’implementazione di attività di web marketing da parte di enti turistici. Lo studio qui presentato sulle destinazioni turistiche italiane, si propone di estendere tale modello, contribuendo alla definizione della maturità nella promozione online del territorio degli enti turistici italiani, individuando in particolare quali siano gli elementi che possono limitare il passaggio dalla consapevolezza all’implementazione strategica delle attività di web marketing e quelli che, al contrario, ne spingono con successo il passaggio evolutivo

Learning From Chaos. Suggestions for Hospitals under Extraordinary Stress

Considered as an exogenous and continuous shock characterized by great difficulty in descriptive terms, COVID-19 management required out of the ordinary organizational approaches for hospitals. This paper aims to highlight the resilience factors than can curb or accelerate the rebooting phase of the resilient process for hospitals under COVID-19 stress. Resilience is here considered as a multilevel, multidimensional, and dynamic construct mainly composed of three characteristics: robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness. Technology resulted as an activator of change working as a booster in the rebooting phase. By leveraging on the concept of learning ambidexterity, hospitals made choices between exploitation and exploration-oriented activities. In this direction, it was found that it is necessary to acquire and develop crisis management skills as the existing pre-pandemic ones proved unable to cover a wide range of not linear issues such as those brought about by COVID-19

Religious Pilgrimage: Experiencing Places, Objects and Events

This article explores the concept of the Eventization of faith (Pfadenhauer, 2010) through application of three case studies, to identify learning that might be applied to a traditional pilgrimage destination, such as Jerusalem. This Holy City is held sacred by the three Abrahamic religions, and faith-based tourism is central both to the Holy Land and to the city of Jerusalem (Leppakari & Griffin, 2017). This paper builds on research that identifies processes and models that provide insight into the developing concept of the eventization of faith. The work examines outcomes from three different perspectives: - The impact of traditional church-led pilgrimages to places in the Holy Land, on participants and their local church communities. - The successful eventization of the Lindisfarne Gospels as part of their release to Durham University in 2013, and the impact on local historical, cultural and religious identity and heritage (Dowson, 2019). - The shared pilgrimage experience of thousands of Christian women participating in the annual Cherish Conference in Leeds, Yorkshire, held in a secular event venue (Dowson, 2016). In analysing these three case study examples, this paper aims to identify factors that might enhance our understanding of the concept of eventization of faith. Utilising face to face interviews and online survey results, the research focuses on the aspects of community, identity and authenticity. Events enable shared experiences in a faith context (Lee et al., 2015), and so this research develops a model that captures and expresses approaches that might encourage pilgrimages to traditional destinations, through the medium of events, adding insight into the development of the academic concept of Eventization of Faith

UNet and MobileNet CNN-based model observers for CT protocol optimization: comparative performance evaluation by means of phantom CT images

Purpose: The aim of this work is the development and characterization of a model observer (MO) based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), trained to mimic human observers in image evaluation in terms of detection and localization of low-contrast objects in CT scans acquired on a reference phantom. The final goal is automatic image quality evaluation and CT protocol optimization to fulfill the ALARA principle. Approach: Preliminary work was carried out to collect localization confidence ratings of human observers for signal presence/absence from a dataset of 30,000 CT images acquired on a PolyMethyl MethAcrylate phantom containing inserts filled with iodinated contrast media at different concentrations. The collected data were used to generate the labels for the training of the artificial neural networks. We developed and compared two CNN architectures based respectively on Unet and MobileNetV2, specifically adapted to achieve the double tasks of classification and localization. The CNN evaluation was performed by computing the area under localization-ROC curve (LAUC) and accuracy metrics on the test dataset. Results: The mean of absolute percentage error between the LAUC of the human observer and MO was found to be below 5% for the most significative test data subsets. An elevated inter-rater agreement was achieved in terms of S-statistics and other common statistical indices. Conclusions: Very good agreement was measured between the human observer and MO, as well as between the performance of the two algorithms. Therefore, this work is highly supportive of the feasibility of employing CNN-MO combined with a specifically designed phantom for CT protocol optimization programs