Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Using a method that examines goal setting, this study investigates the reasons people take a holiday during the ‘COVID summer’. Participants were 141 Italians that completed a questionnaire during summer 2020. The results revealed 13 reasons for taking a holiday: ‘Family/Friends’, ‘Attachment’, ‘Relax’, ‘Fun’, ‘New experiences’, ‘Increasing knowledge’, ‘Overcoming general stress’, ‘Overcoming lockdown stress’, ‘Present well-being’, ‘Future well-being’, ‘Enrichment’, ‘I like it’, and ‘Socialising’. Revealing connections between reasons, the hierarchical structure revealed that the principal reasons for taking a holiday during the COVID summer are tied to gaining future well-being, maintaining close relationships, and enhancing personal growth. These results are useful for defining tourism destination policies in the post-pandemic phase.

The assessment of content validity is a critical and complex step in the instrument development process, frequently used to measure complex constructs in social science research. Nevertheless, there is scarce documentation in the field of tourism and hospitality on how content validity should be analysed. This study aimed to present the assessment of content validity of an instrument developed to assess domestic ecotourism in protected areas. A 54-items survey was designed based on previous literature. Content validity assessment was conducted by recruiting a panel of experts to evaluate the instrument’s elements and rate them based on their relevance to provide a content validity index for each item. 

Local tourism professionals entail those who strongly face the personal and financial difficulties of tourism seasonality. The main purpose of this paper is to examine the local tourism professionals’ perceptions of a small-scale sports event, which is held in the off-season. Through the study of Kissavos Mountain Race — a small-scale running event that is held annually in the region of Agia Larissa — the contribution of such an event to seasonality mitigation is investigated. Accordingly, this study aims to describe how the local professionals of this mountainous village understand and interpret the relations between sustainable small-scale sports events and seasonality aspects. An exploratory study was designed to address the local professionals’ opinions regarding the effectiveness of the running event in mitigating seasonality as well as their willingness to support similar actions. Through a literature review on seasonality tourism, sustainability, and minor events, a semi-structured interview guide was created and twenty-five local tourism professionals were interviewed. Subsequently, data that reflect their perceptions of events and seasonality were collected. Based on the analysis of the replies, the respondents believe that the sports event impacts seasonality mitigation but only in conjunction with other actions. Most of them also converge on a strategy that would not only include the needs of visitors but also the authorities’ ongoing support of their businesses. On this basis, it is recommended that local and regional tourism managers use a variety of combination tools to smooth out seasonality. From a practical viewpoint, this study draws attention to the perspectives of local professionals and allows tourism policymakers to understand the market’s characteristics and needs. As it would be interesting to apply this investigation in different seasons for different areas, this study ultimately contributes to the tourism field by examining the contribution of a small-scale event to seasonality mitigation via a local stakeholder approach.

The current paper focuses upon the impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on locals’ opinions regarding the hospitality sector in Crete. The main research aim driving the current study is to evaluate respondents’ (locals’) willingness to pay a premium for CSR activities in the hospitality sector. The paper utilizes primary data collected through a survey questionnaire in the region of Crete. In total, researchers collected 400 survey questionnaires over a course of three months during the pandemic period. The paper utilized a logistic regression framework. According to the results, respondents that were highly familiar with CSR were also very positive in supporting CSR actions. Whereas gender does not seem to exert a particularly strong influence on individual willingness to pay a CSR premium, yet once the analysis distinguishes between different premium levels, females were found more likely to contribute at lower amounts, as compared to their male counterparts. The results indicate that businesses should adopt and adapt their CSR practices to new business discourses.

In order a hotel business to achieve a long-term quality performance, it should train, empower and actively involve the employees in the service process. Therefore, the involvement of Human Resourse Management (HRM) department is imperative. The purpose of this study is to explore the level that HRM basic approaches are applied by hotels, particularly those fundamental requirements that might enhance quality service provision. Furthermore, the paper is examining the individual and unique characteristics of the hotel units, such as size, categorization etc., in an effort to reveal possible diversions and correlations according to the HRM implemented philosophy. According to the research findings, the examined hotels adopt a range of agreed HR policies and practices that are more likely to create organizations aiming to compete on the basis of high-quality services. Moreover, the hotels that apply greater HRM principles are those of great capacity. This can be explained due to the large number of hotel employees; their number, along with the fact that hospitality is a labour-intensive industry, necessitates HRM practices to play an important role in service quality provision. One more interesting finding arising from this research is that the category of the hotel does not play an important role at the degree that a hotel applies HRM best practices.

This research study addressed the ability of an extended with Past Experience model of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to reveal the Greek travelers’ intentions to choose a green hotel over a conventional one. Perceived Behavioral Control provided a stronger impact on intentions, followed by Subjective Norms and Past Experience, while Attitudes offered rather weak evidence of influence. The additional factor of Past Experience was found to be also correlated with Perceived Behavioral Control. Therefore, it can be implied that green hotels’ communication strategies should firstly underline the travelers’ own control to choose a green hotel, emphasizing that there are no time, money, or opportunity obstacles to restrict them. Secondly, visitors as well as distinguished persons, who have previously experienced a visit to a green hotel, should be promoted and valorized in an effort to increase social pressure. Thirdly, staying at a green hotel should be presented as a positive, environmentally beneficial while healthy, desirable, and enjoyable experience.

This paper intends to explore local-specific sustainability facets of pro-poor tourism initiated in India's Protected Area (PA). Mixed methodology, i.e., interview and structured questionnaire adopted for data collection and followed by the factor analysis for testing hypothesis. The result indicates that the sustainability facets of pro-poor tourism have five distinct facets: monetary, environmental, societal, cultural heritage, and governance. The study assumes significance in the pro-poor approach in tourism development for addressing various Sustainable Development Goals and in understating the ground-level reality of sustainability in the context of tourism-led development in developing countries. It also throws light on setting standards for approach-based tourism programs that cater to various segments of society and the environment.  

Book Review: Poverty and Development: Problems and Prospects, edited by Michal Apollo and Pahlaj Moolio eds., 2021, Channel View Publications.

This study deals with a quasi-experimental pedagogical intervention carried out at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. Epistemological pluralism and libertarian pedagogy have been established as structural pillars in order to collectively build educational processes that attend to all the diversity present in the classroom. In the classrooms there is an epistemological diversity that cannot be addressed solely from the knowledge of the teacher, but he must recognize his ignorance about the epistemological construction of his students to open the dialogue and build an educational process that adapts to the students. The intervention was carried out during a semester in the Curriculum subject with a total of 25 students. Regarding the methodology, it means that the technique used for data collection has been the discussion groups, with a total of 2 different groups. We must bear in mind that the methodological paradigm is qualitative, therefore, the object of our research is not the generalization of results to other contexts, but to rigorously verify and analyze the phenomena evidenced in the context in which we carry out the study. One of the results to take into account is one that reveals the importance of autonomy in order to adapt the educational process to the characteristics of the students. As a noteworthy conclusion to mean that the implementation within educational spaces of epistemological pluralism and libertarian pedagogy has positive effects on the democratic and pedagogical dimensions.