TOURISM DISCOURSE MEETS MIGRATION DISCOURSE: GODFATHER PROMOTIONAL WEBSITES TO SICILY

In recent years, film-induced tourism has promoted tours to film locations through various travel websites, focusing on the symbolic and cultural value that some tourists associate with their favourite film scenes. Among the film locations that have long fascinated tourists in Sicily, the Godfather Tour or Mafia Tour seems to have a particular cultural value for a specific target group of tourists: Italian-Americans. It is well known that the Godfather saga reflects the stereotypical image that Americans have of Sicilian-American immigrants, but also evokes traditional Sicilian culture and the feelings of Sicilian immigrants who, in reaction to isolation and in defence of their identity, have tried to achieve the American dream. Based on these assumptions, this paper deals with the contemporary cultural tourism referring to The Godfather film and the Mafia phenomenon in Sicily. It will be shown how the tourism discourse found in a selected corpus of American tour operators, promotes the film locations and recalls some scenes as something fascinating, evoking the identity of Italian-Americans through specific linguistic persuasive strategies

Predictors of Repeat Winery Visitation in North Carolina

Wine tourism is a relatively fledging industry with a range of important economic development issues. One issue is the identification of key drivers of repeat business, in this case, intention to pay a return visit to a winery or wine region. The purpose of this study is to identify specific factors that may influence wine tourists’ intentions to revisit a winery or wine region in North Carolina. Exhaustive CHAID decision tree analysis was used to identify statistically significant visitor characteristics influencing respondents’ intentions to revisit a winery or wine region in North Carolina. Customer service and the importance it has to the visitors was found to be the best predictor of their intention to revisit

A Learning Theory Framework for Sustainability Education in Tourism.

As efforts abound across tourism educator networks to craft plans for guiding educational responses to the threats of tourism to people and the planet, it is worth exploring areas in which such labors might be made more efficient, and thus more timely and productive. In this article, we examine how the concept of learning systems can serve as a useful tool for identifying opportunities to improve sustainability education planning in tourism. We provide a conceptual framework for sustainability education that moves beyond current models by incorporating additional concepts from learning theory and from a 2-year curricular revision process

Study of Visitors to North Carolina Wineries

The wine and grape industry generates a significant economic impact in North Carolina’s rural communities. In 2009 the wine and grape industry generated 7,600 jobs and $1.2 billion in total annual economic impact in the state. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that NC’s wine tourism revenue grew 27$156 million in wine tourism revenue

Automatic Classification of Roof Shapes for Multicopter Emergency Landing Site Selection

Geographic information systems (GIS) now provide accurate maps of terrain, roads, waterways, and building footprints and heights. Aircraft, particularly small unmanned aircraft systems, can exploit additional information such as building roof structure to improve navigation accuracy and safety particularly in urban regions. This paper proposes a method to automatically label building roof shape types. Satellite imagery and LIDAR data from Witten, Germany are fed to convolutional neural networks (CNN) to extract salient feature vectors. Supervised training sets are automatically generated from pre-labeled buildings contained in the OpenStreetMap database. Multiple CNN architectures are trained and tested, with the best performing networks providing a condensed feature set for support vector machine and decision tree classifiers. Satellite and LIDAR data fusion is shown to provide greater classification accuracy than through use of either data type individually

Wine tourist valuation of information sources: the role of prior travel

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine winery visitors’ use of information sources in making decisions regarding the choice of wineries to visit. Enrichment theory is used as a framework for determining how previous experience influences the decision on how much and what type of information individuals will use when planning a trip using wine tourism as the context for the research. Design/methodology/approach: A visitor study was conducted at 23 wineries in the US Southeast. Data were collected from winery visitors using a structured self-administered questionnaire. Findings: Results from 832 consumers indicate that an individual’s previous travel systematically influences the number and type of information sources that they will seek out when making future consumer decisions. Findings confirmed the hypothesized expectations about wine tourist information search behavior and help to partially explain the nature of bounded rationality in the case of tourists’ winery visit decisions. Research limitations/implications: Because the study focused only on winery visitors in the US Southeast, the research results may lack generalizability. Practical implications: These findings can assist winery owners and destinations with wineries in their promotional efforts. Of major importance is the finding that increases in experiential knowledge from prior travel are monotonically associated with increases in the number of information sources marked to be valuable in selecting a winery. The influence of experience is particularly dramatic in that the mean number of information sources marked to be valuable moves from a low of 2.5 to a high of 10.0 out of 16 as travel experience increases. Originality/value: The study contributed significant and useful findings that advance the application of enrichment theory to wine tourism. Enrichment theory does not currently differentiate between types of knowledge that enrich a consumer’s ability to more easily encode and use new information. The current study confirms that experiential knowledge is an important knowledge construct in models of bounded rationality

Consumer drivers of muscadine wine purchase decisions

Muscadine wine, fresh muscadine grapes, and other derivatives have enjoyed a heritage niche for decades in the Southeast. Muscadine growers in North Carolina in the United States (US) have asked whether the purchase of muscadine wine is linked to consumption of the fruit itself or even familiarity with other muscadine-based products in terms of spillover effects. The authors explored the interdependency between the market for fresh muscadine grapes and muscadine wine purchase. Consumer panel data were obtained from a State of North Carolina agency with oversight of the grape and wine industry; the agency contracted quota sampling of online consumers from six states in the US South. A total of 543 cases were used in the present study. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS)® was employed in analysis. Results show that prior muscadine wine knowledge and knowledge of other muscadine products, e.g., jams, juices, smoothies, sauces, and health/beauty products were significant factors associated with buying muscadine wine. Beliefs about muscadine grapes as a healthy ingredient showed a slight influence, while direct experience with fresh muscadines and consumer attitudes towards buying local or US products were insignificant. Therefore, marketing efforts should focus on increasing consumer exposure to and knowledge of muscadine wine and other muscadine related products

Visitor spending at wine festivals: Perspectives on stakeholder benefits

Economic benefit is a motivator for communities and wineries to participate in events (Byrd et al., 2016; Kim et al., 2008). Two primary stakeholders have a vested interest in the success of wine festivals: participating wineries and host communities. Tourism is a driver of local wine sales, since most regional wineries are small-scale and lack access to traditional distribution channels. Nonetheless, investment in festivals needs to be evaluated against the reality that events often fail to meet expectations for returns on stakeholder investment (Crompton & Lee, 2000)