Editorial

Citation

Zins, A.H. (2014), "Editorial", International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, Vol. 8 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCTHR-01-2014-0009

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, Volume 8, Issue 1

This first issue of volume 8 is special indeed. It differs from regular issues in a few ways. Hence, it appears worthwhile to explain to the reader in brief. With this issue the journal triggers a new series or section dedicated to articles that dare critically questioning the research progress in the field of tourism. This would not be a new endeavor since other journals initiated similar review type of contributions in the past. Yet, our new series should go beyond. Scott Armstrong (2002) tried to assess the outcome of research in marketing by finding out which of the thousands of published and fragmented results could be qualified as "important".

In a similar vein, this journal invites scholars to review and assess past tourism research by applying their own sensible criteria to this end. Since I expected not to be able to find a single researcher willing to subscribe to such an ambitious goal, the series is conceived to cover a number of areas within the wider field of tourism and hospitality. A second principle shall apply: Papers in this series can be commented and – eventually – refuted. Space is reserved for publishing individual or joint critiques or affirmations in consecutive issues. This approach should avoid that valuable ideas and thought- provoking contributions get lost in cyberspace if exchanged over one of the online communities in tourism only.

Jeurgen Gnoth together with Xavier Matteucci take the lead in this new series applying the tourism experience model (developed by Gnoth) to review and localize the behavioural tourism literature with a special emphasis on tourism experiences. "Experiences" is the buzzword in consumer behavior research of the past 20 years. Their paper attempts to organize the various streams and perspectives and to lay the foundation for future directions of research. By applying a hermeneutical approach for screening the existing literature the paper does not arrive at a ranked assessment of past research outcomes. However, it enables to critically review someone’s own position or those of countless other papers within the domain of perception and experiences in holiday tourism.

Jeurgen Gnoth presented his tourism experience model for the first time at the 8th Symposium of the Consumer Psychology of Tourism, Hospitality and Leisure that took place in June 2013 in Istanbul, Turkey. Starting in 1998, the International Academy of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research organizes this conference every second year together with a local host. The past symposium featured about 35 papers with many young scholars encountering senior researchers in tourism for a fruitful discussion on mainly consumer psychology perspectives. The main theme of the past conference was "Choice, behavior and consumption in tourism, hospitality and leisure". During the symposium the International Academy honored the founder of this journal and one of the mentors of this conference series, Professor Arch Woodside with the Lifetime Achievement in Tourism Research Medal of the Academy.

This issue presents a very limited selection of the conference papers whose authors decided to publish in this journal and finally qualified after reviewing. All three papers apply a qualitative research method for their investigation. Alain Decrop and Julie Masset shed light onto the deeper meaning of souvenirs when collecting them during the holidays and taking them back home. The other two papers focus more on the information behavior and decision-making processes before leaving for one’s holiday trip. Lidija Lalicic investigated changes in holiday decision-making processes among couples entering into parenthood. Joana Dias, Antónia Correia and Francisco José Martinez López applied a netnographic approach to analyze in-depth the relationships between vacationers and home-owners in Portugal who rent their (second) homes to tourists.

The second part of this issue is dedicated to regular research papers which are not linked to the CPTHL symposium. All four papers, though, focus on some special interest at the destination: second-home tourism in Iran (Aliakbar Anabestani), activities at non-profit tourist attractions in Sweden (Anna Karin Olsson and Martin Gellerstedt), motorcycling tours in the USA (Diane Sykes and Kathryn Kelley) and marine tourism in Malaysia (Salmi Isa and Lizana Ramli). This issue closes with two book review articles.

Andreas H. Zins
Department of Tourism and Hospitality Management, MODUL University Vienna, Vienna, Austria

References

Armstrong, J.S. (2002), "Discovery and communication of important marketing findings", Evidence and proposals, Journal of Business Research, Vol. 56 No. 1, pp. 69–84