Tourism and Community Well-Being: An Applied Approach

This study utilized a grounded, inductive framework to explore the relationship between tourism and the well-being of communities through the integration of three complimentary planning and strategy exercises. Attendees of a regional tourism development conference in Queensland, Australia participated in a “Futures Wheel, Appreciative Inquiry, and Make It Fail” exercise. This was part of a workshop hosted by researchers interested in understanding the current and future relationship between tourism and community well-being. In order to provide parameters for the three-step exercise, Flora’s community capitals framework was applied as a means of identifying components of a community that contribute to its well-being. These exercises benefitted both practitioners and researchers seeking to understand how stakeholders perceive tourism’s impacts on community well-being. This paper demonstrates how the exercises were applied in a workshop setting and presents limited findings based on the analysis of a portion of the data

Potential Volunteer Tourists’ Expectations of Transformative Learning Opportunities

This study utilizes a factor-cluster analysis to determine segments of potential volunteer tourists based on their motivations for participating in volunteer tourism experiences. Three segments emerged, Volunteers, Voluntourists, and Tourists, and were subsequently compared across their expectations for transformative learning opportunities in volunteer tourism experiences. Three components of transformative learning are considered: self-reflection, engaging in dialogue, and intercultural experiences (Taylor, 2008). Each segment was found to hold different expectations of the components of a transformative learning experience, suggesting that in order to fully engage in such an experience and gain its benefits each segment requires a customized volunteer tourism program. The study offers implications for future research and managerial action