How has Covid-19 Affected Tourism Stakeholders?

This month we published Changing Practices of Tourism Stakeholders in Covid-19 Affected Destinations edited by Erdinç Çakmak, Rami K. Isaac and Richard Butler. In this post the editors explain the importance of focusing on stakeholders in this context.

The Covid-19 pandemic caused unprecedented impacts on tourism at all scales, from local to international, and its effects are likely to be felt for some years to come, even when tourism numbers recover to pre-Covid levels. One of the major impacts has been the way in which the many and varied stakeholders in tourism have reacted to the travails of the pandemic and the restrictions imposed by most governments. Our new book includes a range of adjustments and changes established by greatly varying stakeholders in different countries and settings during the course of the pandemic.

One of the common factors emerging from the chapters is that many of the individual stakeholders discussed in the volume were forced to make their own adjustments to survive the pandemic, both economically and literally. Such a situation came about because, for many small stakeholders, their concerns were not noted or were ignored by government agencies responsible for handling the responses to the pandemic. In some cases, even with their own tourism industry segment, many enterprises were too small to be given attention, and ‘fell through the cracks”. Thus, many had to improvise and change their approach to visitors in order to stay in business, and while some of the responses were individually unique, e.g. in the case of small operators in Iran, in other cases, where the scale was very different, e.g. in the airline industry, some ‘solutions’ were shared and applied in similar ways in very different circumstances.

One of the interesting features of the book is the variation in responses in different cultural and religious situations, with some stakeholders changing operations, and others placing trust in their faith and continuing to operate with little change in behaviour. When looking to the future, some commentators are pessimistic in terms of continued fear of infections and negative attitudes towards foreign visitors by residents of destinations areas, and there is a general lack of confidence that governments will be prepared or effective in the case of future pandemics, based on experiences from Covid-19. While many sectors and academics forecasted the epidemic as a potential for transformation, it remains philosophical and theoretical, with no proof that travellers or the travel industry are truly embracing proximity tourism, staycation, and ‘new urban tourism’.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Tourism and Resilience by C. Michael Hall, Girish Prayag and Alberto Amore.

Q&A with the Authors of “Contemporary Christian Travel”

This month we published Contemporary Christian Travel by Amos S. Ron and Dallen J. Timothy. In this post the authors answer some questions about the inspiration behind the book and their experience putting it together.

What were your motivations in writing this book?

We have some motivations in common, as well as some individual ones. We both love religions in general, as they reveal a great deal about cultures and people, and their encounters with deity and nature. We have an awareness of the magnitude and impact of faith-based travel in general, and Christian faith-based travel in particular, which is an increasingly important phenomenon worldwide. We wanted to highlight that Christianity is diverse with many different denominations practicing their own versions of pilgrimage and manifesting in different patterns of travel, products and destinations. We also enjoy gaining knowledge and sharing it with others, which is why we decided to write this book to fill an academic gap as regards one of the largest faiths on the planet.

An additional motivation was to create a dialogue and understanding within Christianity, which seems to be important, albeit somewhat lacking, in our world. We believe that this book has the potential to contribute to this goal.

Amos at the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem

In my case (Amos), working on such a book is less obvious because I am not even Christian. However, my professional background is very relevant. Apart from my academic career in cultural geography and tourism studies, I have been guiding Christian pilgrims through the Holy Land for decades, and often these encounters encouraged me to know more. For example, I once guided an evangelical group that came on their pilgrimage with suitcases full of medications to give away to needy locals. At the end of the tour, I had boxloads of medications in the back of my car. Through this event and others I became more interested in humanitarian needs and volunteer tourism.

Dallen with his wife, Carol, at the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem

In my case (Dallen), I am a devout Christian and have personally undertaken spiritually-oriented travel that I found to be uplifting, enjoyable and relevant. I have many friends and colleagues of many different religions throughout the world. I also have numerous friends who belong to many different Christian denominations. I have spent years trying to understand different churches’ doctrines and practices associated with religiously-motivated travel, relationships with deity, the earth and other sojourners. Amos and I have been researching religion and tourism separately for many years and together for the past 12 years. There is always more to learn; this book represents a step in the right direction toward providing a deeper understanding of how religion simultaneously venerates, blesses, consumes and commercializes sacred places.

Did you enjoy writing it?

We definitely did. It took us a number of years to gather all of the information we needed and many site visits in order to experience Christian tourism for ourselves first hand. One of the reasons we enjoyed writing the book was the fact that this book is different, unique. It is not ‘more of the same’, and so far, the reviewers have agreed with us.

How was it to work together?

A pleasure. A very positive experience. Writing with others can be challenging, but for us it was easy, as we think in much the same way.

How will the Christian travel market accept this book?

We will find out, but we think that in addition to the academic aspects of this book, it is relevant to the Christian faith-based travel industry for the purpose of developing new markets, understanding consumers’ experiences, and connecting supply with demand.

 

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Tourism and Religion edited by Richard Butler and Wantanee Suntikul.

Tourism and Trails

In December we published Tourism and Trails by Dallen J. Timothy and Stephen W. Boyd. We asked them a few questions to find out more about the background to the book.

What inspired you to write a book about tourism and trails?
Since our youth, we have had personal interests in trails. Dallen has fond memories of utilizing nature trails during primary school field trips and his family using them during Easter egg hunts. He also grew up enjoying trails in some of Utah’s most spectacular national parks. Since that time he has become especially interested in researching long-distance heritage trails, including religious-oriented pilgrimage paths and trade routes. Stephen has fond memories as a child of lots of walking on family holidays over the traditional beach holiday and so nowadays when he visits new destinations he is keen to explore the landscape using formal and informal trails of varying scales and importance.  From a scholastic point of view both of us realize the importance of trails and routes in connecting disparate parts of regions for economic development and developing broader tourism products, yet few people have systematically examined them from a holistic perspective. There are many studies about the recreational impacts of trails, but we saw a need to treat linear resources more comprehensively from tourism and recreation standpoints.

How did the two of you come to collaborate on this book?
We have known each other since graduate school in Canada, where we shared many personal and professional interests in nature-based and cultural heritage-based tourism. In 1999, based upon our own experiences and our emerging professional interests in the management of linear tourism resources, we co-wrote and presented a conference paper conceptualizing trails as management mechanisms. Since then we have maintained our common research interests in trails and spent much time visiting and researching, largely from a policy perspective, many trails and routes in the UK, Europe, North America, Africa and Asia. We are planning to carry out much more empirical collaborative work on tourism trails in the near future.

What makes your book different from others that have been published before?
Well, honestly, there are no other scholarly books out there that deal with recreational and tourism trails, let alone one that delves into the management, conservation, supply and demand and experiential elements of linear resources. The book consolidates a disparate range of literatures and concepts into a volume that is accessible to researchers and students. It provides in-depth analysis of the current trends, issues and implications of routes and trails as crucial resources for tourism and recreation.

Which other academics in your field do you particularly admire and how have they influenced your own research?
There are far too many to mention individually, although Richard Butler comes to mind first. He was Stephen’s PhD supervisor and one of Dallen’s master’s mentors. His pioneering work in tourism studies influenced us in many ways during our formative years as emerging academics, and we will forever be grateful for his mentorship. Geoff Wall, Dallen’s PhD advisor, is another tourism pioneer who taught us much and who has led the field for decades; it was Geoff’s simple typology of classifying tourism attractions as points, lines and areas that started our thinking that there is a lack of attention by tourism scholars to study linear attraction with the one exception of linear coastal resort development.

As a tourism academic you must get to travel to some exotic locations. Where is the most unusual or interesting place you have travelled to for work?
Dallen’s preferred places are where most mass tourists don’t go. For him, in this regard the most interesting locales have been Greenland, Lebanon, Mongolia, remote parts of Myanmar, North Korea and Bhutan. Stephen has visited many locations often to present at conferences; some of the most interesting over the years have been Singapore, North Cyprus, Brisbane, Vancouver; others have been more remote like Umea, Sweden and Valapariso, Chile where he experienced a student riot when entering the city!

What are your next research projects?
We are planning a new book on heritage tourism and technology, and we will continue our research on pilgrimage trails in Ireland and other parts of Europe. We are also exploring an edited book on political tourism which is around concepts and issues as opposed to case studies. Stephen is looking to undertake research on the Wild Atlantic Way; one of the largest coastal touring routes that takes you on a journey around the south and west coast of Ireland, linking to some of the touring routes along Northern Ireland’s coastline.

For more information about the book please see our website.

Summer and Sport

Just published this week in time for England’s latest test match, Tourism and Cricket edited by Tom Baum and Richard Butler is the first book to focus on the relationship between tourism and cricket. Here, Richard Butler explains a bit about the unique nature of cricket tourism. 

Football and rugby notwithstanding, it is summer which is really the sporting season, and nothing epitomises summer in England more than cricket. As in the United States with baseball, summer afternoons and evenings seem highly suited to the crack of a bat on a ball. There are marked similarities between baseball and cricket, both involve bat and ball, both are team sports, and yet both essentially come down to one man with a ball throwing it at one man with a bat. The other players are secondary to the personal competition between two individuals.  Both sports have contributed to the language of their respective host countries, cricket via more than twenty phrases at the last count (including “a sticky wicket” and “stumped”, as well as the summation of the spirit of the game in “It’s not cricket”) and baseball has made it into the lexicon of English clichés with “stepping up to the plate” and “striking out” at least.

Where these summer iconic activities differ most however, is in the duration and frequency of play and the travel patterns of their supporters. While most first class cricket teams play in the region of forty games a season, including county championship, limited over and Twenty20 formats, major league baseball teams play one hundred and sixty two games in a season and up to an additional twenty one in the misnamed “World Series” should they make the playoffs. It is unlikely any baseball fan watches live all the games his or her team plays in a season,  as attendance would require massive travelling across North America with great frequency, even allowing for the fact that some days see two games played between the same teams.

In the case of cricket however, such devotion to a team is possible and the distance and frequency of travel would be much less. In the case of national teams however, patriotic cricket fans become true international tourists compared to their American counterparts, whose international experience would be mostly non-existent as baseball is only played in a very few countries with no real international competition. Thus cricket encourages tourism on a considerable scale, if not in vast numbers, certainly in terms of per capita distance covered and time involved. The travels of the “Barmy Army” as the English supporters’ association is known sees some of its members travelling  half way round the world for several weeks to support their team in test matches in Australia and New Zealand in particular. As well, it is  not just the players and spectators who travel, because, as Michael Atherton recently pointed out there are at least as many backroom staff as players.

The links between cricket and tourism are explored in our new book just published by Channel View, Tourism and Cricket: Travels to the Boundary. The book examines the origins of international cricket, issues relating to the grounds, the travails and travels of both participants and fans, and the influence of cricket on the attitudes and behaviours of the supporters.

For more information about this book, please see our website. If you found this interesting, you might also like Sport Tourism Development by Tom Hinch and James Higham.