Yaning Zhang, Wei Shao, Mai Nguyen, Kun Zhang · 5 authors
ABSTRACT Destinations are increasingly adopting NonâFungible Tokens (NFTs) as innovative tools for brand communication and visitor engagement in digital tourism contexts. Drawing on Construal Level Theory (CLT), we examine how the anthropomorphic (ANT) design of NFT characters influences tourists' impulsive travel intentions and whether customization strengthens this effect. In two online experiments, we tested a sequential mediation model linking ANT to impulsive travel intention through psychological distance (PD) and perceived playfulness. The results show that highly anthropomorphic NFT characters increase psychological proximity, which subsequently increases impulsive travel intentions. Moreover, customization significantly strengthens this indirect effect. This study extends research on digital destination marketing while offering practical guidance for designing effective NFTâbased tourism strategies.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are an emerging application of blockchain technology, with the potential to transform various industries, including tourism. Despite conceptual discussions that have highlighted opportunities and challenges associated with using NFTsâsuch as in digital souvenirs, ticketing systems, loyalty programmes, and conservation initiativesâthere is a critical gap in the literature consisting of the lack of a structured methodological framework to empirically evaluate the impact of real-world NFT implementations. This study addresses this gap by proposing a conceptual model and methodological framework designed to assess NFT projects in the tourism sector. The framework integrates diverse data collection methods, advanced analytical techniques (including econometric analysis, natural language processing, and machine learning), and a technological workbench for tracking key performance indicators (KPIs). To demonstrate its applicability, the framework is applied to the Dalmatia NFT project, an exploratory application in cultural tourism. The considered example highlights the potential of NFTs to enhance tourism experiences while addressing challenges such as scalability, sustainability, and user engagement. This study concludes with insights into the frameworkâs practical implications for stakeholders and outlines future research directions for empirical validation. By bridging the gap between theory and practice, this study aims to provide a robust foundation for effectively integrating NFTs into the tourism industry.
In this paper, we analyze the global controversy surrounding the innovation of cryptocurrencies, developing an analytical framework to assess the empirical structure of arguments. By unpacking an argumentation analysis of a comprehensive set of scholarly, media, and industry publications, we identify six key dimensions of disagreement, comprising 42 distinct arguments. These dimensions include the raison dâĂȘtre, environmental impact, social inclusion, susceptibility to illegal activities, economic impact, and potential for decentralization and democratization. Our findings reveal entrenched positions supported by robust scholarly research and empirical evidence. Cryptocurrencies represent a controversial innovation, for which global resolution remains elusive. While the controversy may appear unbounded, we plead for a geographical approach, emphasizing that localized institutional contexts are crucial for exploring potential trajectories of the controversy. Finally, our analysis illustrates the potential of argumentation analysis to properly disentangle complex societal disagreements, and it therefore promises to enrich the methodological pluralism in economic geography.
With the emergence of the metaverse, countriesâ digital efforts to create tourism opportunities have given rise to the possibility of capitalising on digital content which, along with physical tourism experiences, can generate further income and enhance a countryâs reputation. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a unique application of blockchain technology, offer an enabling technology in several sectors, including tourism. Therefore, this study aims to explore the official tourism websites of Croatia and Slovenia and analyse current NFT applications in tourism economics. The methodology focuses explicitly on sentiment analysis, blockchain and machine learning. The paper introduces various applications currently in place, including Sloveniaâs âI Feel Nftâ project. The research shows that the main benefits of using NFT and sentiment analysis in the tourism economy are the promotion and presentation of major tourist destinations, exhibitions, works of art, and companiesâ products in tokens, digital content and souvenirs. The adoption of sentiment analysis and NFTs in the tourism economy is still open to proposals for implementing public quantitative data metrics. Therefore, the scientific contribution of this research is essential in terms of operational recommendations and defining metrics for measuring the effectiveness of those methodologies and their applications in the tourism economy. On top of that, the practical contribution lies in monitoring the influx of tourists, and highlighting their increase over time and the significance of new technology in time series tourism research.
Open access
Diverse Aspects of Tourism Research
Digital Marketing and Social Media
Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification
A museum is the destination of the crystallization of history and culture, and a museum is the center for the development of heritage culture. The display and exhibition of historical relics can promote the harmonious development of society. However, there are many defects in traditional museums. The collection in the museum is scattered. The exhibition needs a specific time and place to open, and the exhibition mode is boring and lacks entertainment, which seriously limits the museumâs dissemination of history and culture. In order to improve the publicâs number of visits, museums need to keep pace with the times. Using augmented reality technology can digitize the information in the museum and integrate it with the userâs real environment, which solves the limitation of time and space for most users to visit the museum, and greatly increases the entertainment of users to visit the museum. In addition, the application of blockchain technology in digital museums can effectively ensure the security of museum cultural relics data and quickly restore the lost cultural relics information. The digital museum can help tourists realize cross-region viewing. Through multimedia software and hardware, it can greatly stimulate touristsâ interest and attract tourists of different ages to visit. This article uses digital technology to present physical museums in a digital form on the network, but it is difficult for digital museums to conduct targeted analysis on tourists of different ages. This article will analyze the attraction ability of digital museums to tourists of different ages, thereby attracting tourists of different ages to visit. This paper compared traditional museums with digital museums based on augmented reality technology and blockchain technology. The experimental results showed that from the perspective of young people, the average interactivity of traditional museums and digital museums was 47.20% and 78.20%, respectively; from the perspective of the elderly, the average interactivity of traditional museums and digital museums was 59.04% and 70.36%, respectively. Therefore, the digital museum built by using augmented reality technology and blockchain technology can effectively improve the interaction with users. The digital museum can improve the interaction with tourists of different ages, attract a large number of tourists for virtual visits, and improve the cultural transmission and economic development of the digital museum.
Vikram Puri, Subhra R. Mondal, Subhankar Das, Vasiliki Vrana
Blockchain and immersive technology are the pioneers in bringing digitalization to tourism, and researchers worldwide are exploring many facets of these techniques. This paper analyzes the various aspects of blockchain technology and its potential use in tourism. We explore high-frequency keywords, perform network analysis of relevant publications to analyze patterns, and introduce machine learning techniques to facilitate systematic reviews. We focused on 94 publications from Web Science that dealt with blockchain implementation in tourism from 2017 to 2022. We used Vosviewer for network analysis and artificial intelligence models with the help of machine learning tools to predict the relevance of the work. Many reviewed articles mainly deal with blockchain in tourism and related terms such as smart tourism and crypto tourism. This study is the first attempt to use text analysis to improve the topic modeling of blockchain in tourism. It comprehensively analyzes the technologyâs potential use in the hospitality, accommodation, and booking industry. In this context, the paper provides significant value to researchers by giving an insight into the trends and keyword patterns. Tourism still has many unexplored areas; journal articles should also feature special studies on this topic.
Open access
Digital Marketing and Social Media
Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification
Forest protection is crucial to ensuring the balance between human beings and ecology. This study explores the key role played by communities that originally lived in forest-protected areas in implementing the traditional management of forests. The unified management mode previously used by the state power can no longer meet the demands of modern times; hence, multiple types of management systems should be implemented to enable adaption to the original ecology of forest areas. A multimodal management mode should be adopted to restore the original ecology of forest areas. The adoption of this management system can restore a forest to its original state (i.e., the state that existed prior to the entry of state power). The forest has been in a state of ecological balance involving numerous species since ancient times. However, in the modern field of science, the passive restoration of a community's self-governance ability could be unsustainable and unstable. To improve this situation, blockchain technology can first be used to improve the community management of a forest, such that the capabilities of the original local community can be improved; second, tourism promotion benefits both the community and the forest. When a community in a forest develops the tourism industry with the support of blockchain technology, the information and resources of all parties can be widely connected with the larger world, and this considerably increases success rates; finally, the traditional spiritual culture of a community, such as the culture of sharing, should be promoted. In addition to the skillful utilization of technology, culture can improve the traditional forest management ability of tribal communities who live in native forest areas in terms of their personality traits. Overall, we conclude that: against the evolution history of the over one hundred years, the adoption of new technology for forest management is inherently a creative innovation for the tribal community's entrepreneurial development.
The Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013-2014 was the most comprehensive analysis of anthropogenic climate change, its impacts, and potential responses. It concluded that climate change is âunequivocalâ and human activities are the dominant cause. Avoidance of âdangerousâ climate change will require sustained substantial reductions of emissions by mid-century and that net emissions decrease to zero before 2100. This paper describes, reviews and explains the place of tourism in AR5 and AR5âs relevance for tourismâs future, including impacts, adaptation, vulnerabilities, and mitigation. Tourismâs position in AR5 has strengthened, particularly with respect to the recognition of transboundary impacts, the sectorâs contribution to climate change and its mitigation requirements. Major regional knowledge gaps persist. A lack of understanding of the integrated impacts of climate change and the effectiveness of adaptation strategies potentially hinders the development of resilient tourism operations and destinations. Uncertainties regarding tourist response to climate change impacts and mitigation policy impede predictions of tourism demand. The implications of different decarbonization pathways for the future of international tourism represent a key knowledge gap. The limited response of key tourism organizations to AR5 contributes to the risks climate change poses to the sector. Keywords: climate change; mitigation; adaptation; emissions; impacts; development Please note that the version provided here is the uncorrected proof version. For the authoritative version please go to the journal website: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09669582.2015.1062021#.VbMDLEV30os
Bojan RadojeviÄ, Lazar LaziÄ, Marija CimbaljeviÄ
The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed numerous, lasting adverse effects on the global tourism industry. At the same time, it exposed the competitive advantages that existing smart tourism infrastructure could provide for addressing urgent health issues and providing meaningful smart services. This paper initially provides examples of smart geospatial services based on COVID-19 pandemic-related data, such as algorithms for measuring social distancing through CCTV and proximity contract tracing protocols and applications. Indeed, smart destinations, as an evolutionary step of smart cities, very quickly became a practical and research framework in various other disciplines, from leisure and service-oriented to technical and geospatial domains. However, various technologies employed and interests of different stockholders create a constant need for rescaling of smart data to facilitate their usability in providing optimized smart tourism services. One of the pressing concerns is the functional alignment of geospatial data with tourism-related data. Thus, we aim to pinpoint the growing importance of smart geospatial services, by pointing to the main downturn of the current smart destination issue with geospatial data resolutions, and, by building upon the relations of the geospatial layer of data with the tourism-specific layer. To this end, we pinpoint two further research directions - reinvestigating spatial and temporal resolution as a core of data smartness and the need for contextual (tourism-oriented) scaling of smart technology. This could be of keen interest in post-pandemic tourism, where smart geospatial services will be of pressing concern, but also it still an issue to be resolved in further smart destination development.
The era of transformation powered by digitization, improvements in information and communication technology, machine learning, robotics and artificial intelligence is upon us. Today, we are able to solve complex problems with the aid of technology. That notwithstanding, animal populations globally are under threat, with the extinction of species taking place at a far accelerated pace than can be reversed, thus making wildlife conservation a critical issue of our time. Along with wildlife extinction currently underway, there remains a chronic financial shortage for wildlife conservation and the funding shortfall is expanding annually. This research contends that blockchain, the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin can be utilized as a catalyst by the development of cryptowildlife nonfungible tokens (NFTs), which are provably scarce, unique and programmable digital wildlife collectible assets. These could be used to finance wildlife conservation as a supplementary source of revenue.
Michal PlaÄek, FrantiĆĄek Ochrana, Milan Jan PĆŻÄek, Milan KĆĂĄpek
Abstract This study tests whether decentralized leadership influences the efficiency of running selected cultural institutions, specifically museums in the Czech Republic. For the analysis, data from 2015 from 187 museums spread around the whole Czech Republic are used. The method for the evaluation of efficiency is data envelope analysis, and for identifying the influence of decentralized leadership, a regression analysis is used. Museums established by municipalities reach higher efficiency than museums established by regions and central government. The causes may be found in the ability to better estimate the local demand as well as in the rational behavior of municipalities that prefer a cost-minimization strategy. The benefits of decentralization cannot be seen only in the field of finance but also in reinforcing local traditions, trust and the effects of social capital that is generated by a strong regional cultural identity.
The incorporation of the territorial perspective into the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), through the delimitation of fishing areas and the creation of Fishery Local Action Groups (FLAGs), has allowed the decentralized management Axis 4 of the European Fisheries Fund (EFF) through the application of the LEADER method in this sectoral policy. The present study brings together the research of five case study regions (including Portugal) and their FLAGs in the period 2007-2013. Based on the analysis of each participatory local development strategy (LDS) and measures financed, there are different responses to the experience: misalignment and lack of cohesion between projects, excessive dependence on local power, and, in contrast, very meritorious actions and impact both in the fisheries sector and in the sustainable development of the coastal communities.