The implications of ‘miniaturism’ for urban tourism destination futures – from micropubs to microbars

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how the continued interest in the concept of “miniaturism” has seen the micropub develop into the new format of the microbar and examines the drivers of this trend. It then reflects on the possible implications of the rise of the microbar concept on the future of the urban tourism destination landscape. Design/methodology/approach This is a conceptual paper that is built on the natural curiosity of future studies to use an understanding of the present to predict what will happen next and what the implications of those developments will be. Findings The paper provides a clear definition of the microbar and identifies four distinctive drivers behind its conception, linked to changes in consumer behaviour. These cover the rise of the micro-break, the need for responsible urban regeneration, consumers desire for immediate and unique experiences and increasingly diverse populations. The paper predicts that these trends will drive an increase in microbars leading to greater tourist mobility in the urban tourism destination, more fragmentation and heterogeneity of products and services as well as an intensification in the need for authentic experiences and opportunity driven development giving rise to a hybrid form of guerrilla hospitality. Ultimately the authors predict that the venue will become more important than the specific location when consumers view the landscape of the urban tourism destination. Originality/value The focus of previous academic research has been on the historic development of the micropub and its impact on regeneration and communities, but very little literature has examined the rise of the microbar and the potential implications for the urban tourism destination

The asymmetric impact of air transport on economic growth in Spain: fresh evidence from the tourism-led growth hypothesis.

The tourism sector has emerged as an essential driver for economic growth strategies during the last decades. An asymmetric long-run effect of air transport on economic growth is validated assuming a process of social globalization in Spain between 1970 and 2015. To achieve the study’s objective, the recent asymmetric autoregressive distributed lag methodology framework advanced by Shin, Yu, and Greenwood-Nimmo (2014) is applied. For determining the causality direction, this methodology is applied in conjunction with the non-parametric causality test proposed by Diks and Panchenko (2006). The current study also accounts for the effects of renewable energy use and urbanization process over economic growth. Empirical results showed that air transport, urbanization process and social globalization exert positive and significant implications over economic growth, while renewable energy use reduces economic growth, as a consequence of an energy mix sustained by fossil sources. Based on these outcomes several policy recommendations were offered in the concluding section

Understanding the ways and the dynamics of collaborative innovation processes: the case of the Maritime Cluster of the Algarve region (Portugal)

The Algarve region has always showed a close relationship with the sea as a result of its excellent natural conditions, historical and cultural reasons, and notorious know-how related with traditional maritime activities, such as fisheries and fish processing, and naval industry; more recently, nautical activities, such as tourism and recreational boating, have been gaining increased importance. The region is also well infrastructured in terms of public R&D institutions which are important cornerstones of the regional and national innovation systems. Through surveys carried out over a population of firms related to fisheries, aquaculture, fish processing and trade, nautical tourism, naval construction, and repair and shipping, we intend to: (1) characterize the innovation processes adopted by the Algarve’s firms of the maritime economy and evaluate some of the main outputs generated by R&D activities promoted by the regional innovation centers; (2) analyze the potential externalities linked to the production and dissemination of information from knowledge spillovers and knowledge networks; and (3) assess the strategic interest associated with the use of knowledge-intensive service activities regarding their role as sources and/or facilitators of innovation in customer organizations, or as carriers of innovation, when they help in transferring knowledge between or within organizations

Impact of Taiwan open policy on Chinese tourist satisfaction

The Taiwan government has imposed a daily visitation quota with strict regulations on Chinese visitor travel modes, length of stay, and visa authorizations since July 2008. This highly controlled scheme was an attempt to maintain service quality on top of security and political considerations. The purpose of this study is to provide in-depth analysis regarding the Chinese tourist satisfaction over time under different travel modes. The results indicated that package tour (PT) visitors generally gave higher satisfaction scores than free and independent travel (FIT) visitors. However, PT visitors demonstrated a decreased level of satisfaction on their tour arrangements of hotels, meals, itineraries. Addressing safety and environmental issues is the priority task in order to provide quality travel services

Determinants of environmental management in the red sea hotels: Personal and organizational values and contextual variables

What motivates firms to adopt environmental management practices is one of the most significant aspects in the contemporary academic debate in which the review of the existing literature yields, with an obvious contextual bias toward developed world, contested theories and inconclusive findings. Providing a unique model that brings together the individual and organizational levels of analysis on firms' adoption of environmental management practices, this study aims to provide a new insight from the context of developing world. Data from 158 Red Sea hotels reveal two identifiable dimensions of environmental management-planning and organization, and operations-that can be explained as originating from different values. Whereas organizational altruism is a powerful predictor of both dimensions, managers' personal values and organizational competitive orientation are only relevant to environmental operations. The evidence also indicates that contextual variables such as chain affiliation, hotel star rating, and size are important to explain hotels' environmental management behaviors. © 2012 ICHRIE

Exploring Well-being as a Tourism Product Resource

This study employs a qualitative research approach where focus groups (n ¼ 11) with key stakeholders were used to understand how tourism investors view the concept of well-being in relation to tourism and the potential to use it as a tourism product resource. Findings validated by a wider group (n ¼ 50) exposed the barriers and enablers of implementing well-being in this way. The potential for businesses and policymakers to transform these barriers into enablers was also identified. In addition, study findings were mapped onto a robust model extracted from the public health sector and applied in a tourism context using a systems theory approach. This further highlighted the potential offered to the fields of public health and tourism in the concept of well-being, and demonstrated the well-being value of tourism. Data from this research will aid tourism business practice and development by embedding a well-being philosophy for tourism destinations' strategies

The economic benefits of malaria elimination: do they include increases in tourism?

BACKGROUND: Policy makers have speculated that one of the economic benefits of malaria elimination includes increases in foreign direct investment, particularly tourism. METHODS: This study examines the empirical relationship between the demand for travel and malaria cases in two countries with large tourism industries around the time in which they carried out malaria-elimination campaigns. In Mauritius, this analysis examines historical, yearly tourist arrivals and malaria cases from 1978–1999, accounting for the background secular trend of increasing international travel. In Dominican Republic, a country embarking upon malaria elimination, it employs a time-series analysis of the monthly, international tourist arrivals from 1998–2010 to determine whether the timing of significant deviations in tourist arrivals coincides with malaria outbreaks. RESULTS: While naïve relationships exist in both cases, the results show that the relationships between tourist arrivals and malaria cases are relatively weak and statistically insignificant once secular confounders are accounted for. CONCLUSIONS: This suggests that any economic benefits from tourism that may be derived from actively pursuing elimination in countries that have high tourism potential are likely to be small when measured at a national level. Rather, tourism benefits are likely to be experienced with greater impact in more concentrated tourist areas within countries, and future studies should seek to assess these relationships at a regional or local level

The role of museums in bilateral tourist flows: Evidence from Italy

This paper estimates the causal relationship of supply of art on domestic tourist flows. To this aim, we use aggregate bilateral data on tourist flows and various data on museums in the twenty Italian regions. To solve the potential endogeneity of the supply of museums, we use three different empirical strategies: we use a fixed effects model controlling for bilateral macro-area dummies, we compute the degree of selection on unobservables relative to observables which would be necessary to drive the result to zero and, finally, we adopt a two-stage least squares approach that uses a measure of historical patronage, the number of noble families, as an instrument for the number of museums. For each empirical strategy, there is strong evidence of a positive effect of the number of ‘net-museums’ on bilateral tourist flows