Philipp Wassler

University of Bergamo | UNIBG

The "Gaze" is a complex and overarching phenomenon comprised of diverse "Gazers" and "Gazees". This paper adopts an existential-phenomenological perspective to understand tourists' lived experiences of being gazed upon by local people. Based on thirty experiences collected from interviews with ten participants, we show that experiencing the "Local...

Resident attitudes towards tourism are well researched, but related approaches vary. Social Representations (SR), a set of ideas, values, knowledge and explanations forming the social reality of a community, are one of the most misunderstood concepts in regard. This study demonstrates a practical way to identify, characterize and understand SR thro...

While COVID-19's public health and economic impacts are evident, its sociocultural impacts are often overlooked. This study takes the case of the Italian destination of Pisa during the early stages of the pandemic-when most infection cases were assumed to be imported from China-and investigates Social Representations of Chinese tourists from an Ita...

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented "super-shock" for the tourism industry. How tourism academia relates to this unpredictable context is anyhow not yet evident. This study uses a qualitative scenario method to propose four possible futures for tourism academia considering the pandemic and to draw attention to key factors of these fut...

Cruise tourism is a contested practice, requiring research that moves beyond oversimplified accounts of progress or despair and applies primary data at the community level. Using in-depth interviews with residents of Eidfjord, Norway, during the pandemic-induced "break" from cruise tourism, this study critically examines their perspectives on and c...

Purpose The purpose of the paper is to analyze the supply and demand of marketing and communication consulting services and evaluate actual and perceived gaps. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses two different datasets to assess the gap. The supply database comes from desk research carried out in the province of Bergamo (n. 159 consulting a...

The monograph presents a part of the research work within the project "Active and Inclusive Teaching of Literacy and Communication Skills for Enhanced Employment and Sustainable Economic Growth (In-Comm Guide)," and underscores the significance of communication skills for both business success and personal development. These skills are deemed essen...

War tourism is a scarcely researched topic, although the presence of spectators in war zones is attested throughout history. In addition to visiting sites of past conflict, “hot” war tourism in active war zones is on the rise. This study looks at how “war tourism” is represented within an online community of (aspiring) war tourists, taking the cas...

Creativity has turned into a resource for innovating gastronomy tourism. Novel culinary options, as well as co-created hands-on activities, have appeared, gaining increasing attention from travellers. The development of such proposals has been recognized as challenging for destinations and suppliers, because of limited knowledge of what tourists se...

Sustainability influences and is influenced by tourism resources on islands which require suppliers to be proactive in their contribution to sustainable production. However, these tourism suppliers are challenged with a myriad of sustainability issues that paralyzes progress toward sustainable tourism development of island tourism. This study emplo...

Although ecotourism has been widely researched, much of potential ecotourists’ characteristics, attitudes, and worldviews are still poorly understood - particularly concerning climate change. This study profiles a sample of 2733 Italians based on their intention to undertake ecotourism and to ascertain whether significant differences exist among th...

Research highlights: • We challenge the construct of Travel Intention that was critically complicated by the context of COVID-19 ; • We highlight the relevance of cognitive-emotional travel constructs amid Covid-19 ; • We empirically validate Travel Intention, Desire (Craving) and Vaccine Confidence ; • Travel Intention, unlike Travel Craving,...

With the release of several COVID-19 vaccines, hopes for ending the pandemic have emerged. However, the uptake of the vaccines is largely voluntary and depends on the intentions of the public. From a social marketing perspective, this study takes the case of Italy to identify and test factors that are likely to increase COVID-19-vaccine intentio...

Vaccination campaigns worldwide have been implemented to fight the persisting threats associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. However, some segments of the population are far from being even partially shielded by vaccine immunisation. This is the case of younger individuals that represent one of the least protected population segments. As the reason...

Restarting the mass tourism industry relies on the success of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign which requires individuals' voluntary participation to reduce health risks to hosts and visitors. This study identifies segments of Italian residents based on vaccine confidence at the early stage of a voluntary mass vaccination program. Using a survey h...

As key stakeholders in successful destination branding campaigns, residents have the potential to act as destination brand ambassadors. Based on the literature on destination branding, this study examines residents' brand ambassador behavior (BAB) in relation to power and trust in relevant authorities. As such, this research considers destination r...

This chapter, 6, proposes a preparatory method for researchers and literary travel writers who are planning inquiry into a new urban space, with the French port city of Cherbourg, presented as a case study to illustrate this process. Using theory from Onfray, Bartlett and Patron, and travel writing from Ernaux, Barthes, Mann and Sebald the work dev...

In addition to being formally defined as a pandemic, COVID-19 has been classified as an “infodemic” and “(mis)infodemic”. As an "infodemic", the information environment on COVID-19 is constantly evolving, with emerging scientific findings, political responses, media coverage, and individual impressions all shared on social media Initial positions o...

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) tourists are considered one of the most profitable and, at the same time, vulnerable and discriminated-against segments of the industry. However, a more detailed understanding of how heteronormativity (the privileged and normalized view of heterosexuality) constrains their travels is missing. As a result,...

Although the relationship between literary reading, the creation of identity through writing and tourism practice has been investigated, in the tourism field this has been based on cultural geographers’ perspectives (Robinson & Andersen, 2002); how these practices link to the tourist experience has scarcely been explored.

This letter is a rejoinder to Xiang, Fesenmaier, and Werthner (2020) who responded to our letter to the editor about knowledge creation in Information Technology and Tourism (ITT) research (Cai and McKenna 2020). We believe the authors have misinterpreted our claims and failed to address our main points in relation to the lack of theoretical and me...

The problem of technology overuse-and related mental health and addiction issues-has spilled over into the tourism context. Recent literature has also suggested that heavy use of technology while travelling could potentially have negative impacts on the overall tourist experience; and that tourists might search for "disconnection" while travelling....

This study was taken as management responses remain scarcely understood in theory and practice, especially concerning consumer preferences. This research aims at examining consumer preferences of the action frames and language styles adopted in hotel management responses to online reviews. A multi-method approach, adapting discrete choice experimen...

Tourism research has been largely unconcerned with the aesthetic dimension, although few attempts have recently begun to surface. In this chapter, the authors highlight a multifaceted process of incorporating aesthetics in tourist experience design, based on a three-level framework for theming. The first level is based on aesthetic features of dest...

Most tourism-scholars have taken an etic perspective on vulnerability, defining the concept as a risk for - and mostly confined to - vulnerable populations. An emic perspective, defining vulnerability as a universal, experiential state of the human condition is anyhow largely absent. Based on forty collected experiences from interviews with twelve...

In 2014 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) outlined their plans for the construction of a Social Credit System (SCS) with nation-wide implementation by 2020 (State Council of the People's Republic of China, 2014). The stated purpose is the continuous development of the socialist market economy through increasing trustworthiness and transparency of d...

This paper used a mixed‐method approach, combining cluster analysis and member‐checking interviews to understand Hong Kong residents' attitudes towards the Individual Visit Scheme policy for mainland Chinese tourists. Three distinct clusters were identified, which grew significantly more positive with advancing age and higher income levels of the r...

Tourism has often been defined as a linear “way of seeing”, where tourists gaze upon the world in order to consume it as a tourism product. It is now largely understood that “the Gaze” is more complex and overarching, comprising of diverse “gazers” and “gazees”. This paper adopts a Sartrean perspective through building on the concept of “being-for-...

Tourism in North Korea is limited by entry bans, visa restrictions, and stringently controlled itineraries. As a consequence, academics and practitioners alike still poorly understand the experience of visiting the country. In order to fill this research void, this study aims to describe the essence of the lived experience of travelling to North Ko...

Although destination branding has become increasingly popular throughout the last decades, the role of the biggest destination brand stakeholder has scarcely been researched: the local inhabitants of a destination, commonly called the “resident” stakeholder. Only recently scholars have speculated that residents could be a brand‟s most valuable advo...

This working paper applied a triangulation of qualitative research methods, namely projective techniques, to gain a more specific understanding of the main reasons for dissatisfaction with Hong Kong service for mainland Chinese tourists. The presented study adds on results from the PolyU Tourism Satisfaction Index 2009 to 2015, where tourists from...

The growth of the Chinese outbound market has been phenomenal during recent years and still highly concentrates on neighboring Asian destinations. In particular, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region heavily depends and focuses on the Chinese tourism market. Recent calls for a possible diversification of the tourism market have nevertheless f...

The increasingly competitive market in China has resulted in the struggle of hotels for competitive advantage, and even for survival. Among the possible tools to rise above this cut-throat environment is the concept of hotel collaboration. This paper moves towards the understanding of hotel collaboration in China based on the focus group discussion...

Facing increasing competition, many hotels have adopted “theming” as a marketing strategy. Although still in its fledgling stage, hotel theming has already gained popularity in the growing Chinese hotel market. This study conducted focus group discussions to understand the concepts behind hotel theming in China. Respondents were 41 practitioners fr...

Tourism self-congruity studies use two facets to personify destinations, namely, brand-as-person and brand-as-user. These features have been considered synonymous in previous research, and thus the differences between these facets, which may demonstrate biased congruity, must be investigated. This study uses projective techniques to personify brand...

Past research related to host-­guest relations has been heavily influenced by the host-guest paradigm, a binary concept assuming a reciprocal relationship among two clearly distinct communities. Recently scholars have questioned the validity of this notion in a contemporary context, but have not widely succeeded in showing what facilitates/inhibits...