An emerging group of services and activities provided by some State Tourism Offices (STO) called Destination Development (DDev) programs coincides with a growing practitioner shift from promotion to tourism product development. These programs are largely unexplored models for how STO and local destinations might effectively collaborate to create and manage sustainable tourism destinations. Local communities are the innate touchpoint of tourism experiences and the scale at which most negative impacts of tourism naturally occur. Yet many communities lack resources, expertise, and capacity to endogenously plan, develop, and manage sustainable tourism destinations, which creates a need for external actor involvement—involvement that creates equity and power concerns. State organizations are well-positioned to provide accountable support, but little is known about what STOs can do to best catalyze, facilitate, and support sustainable community destinations. Are DDev Programs the key? To better understand the concept and design of DDev programs, as well as the precise role they play in supporting community destination success, an exploratory case study of four US State Tourism Offices that operate DDev Programs was conducted via purposive, in-depth interviews. Themes within and between the cases were identified, and it was discovered that DDev programming largely emerged from the field of rural development; is positioned as a key complement to destination marketing; and has engendered a highly collaborative community of practice that desires greater structure and professional support.

Tourism is not always a lighthearted affair. Visitors are often attracted to places associated with dark and complex pasts, where communities host a wide range of lived experiences, memories and associations. While tourism has potential to facilitate progress and create opportunities, it may also emphasize a place’s hardships or its controversial history. For tourism development to be ethical and sustainable, it is vital to understand its community impacts, including how it may influence residents’ perceptions and wellbeing.This research investigated residents’ senses of affect and emotion within touristic spaces of Mostar, a re-emerging destination city in Bosnia and Herzegovina that experienced some of the worst physical destruction and human casualties during the Bosnian War of the 1990s. An interdisciplinary, multiple-methods approach employed qualitative and quantitative methods, including an intercept survey, resident interviews, participant observation, and autoethnography.
In Part 1, construal level theory of psychological distance was applied in quantitative, survey-based research to understand how tourism may impact residents’ affective responses to local places. In Part 2, fourteen young adult residents were invited to experience their city as “tourists for a day,” visiting attractions alongside the researcher and reflecting upon their experiences via a three-stage interview process. The resulting article specifically explores the concept of affective atmospheres, drawing connections to interdependence theory. Part 3 employed a creative and introspective autoethnographic approach incorporating journaling, poetry and photography to examine the researcher’s own experiences and observations as a visiting researcher in a post-war city. This inquiry was inspired by works from cultural geography engaging non-representational theory and affect theory.
These three discrete studies under a shared thematic umbrella allowed for an in-depth exploration of affect, emotion, and lived experiences within touristic spaces of a post-war, recovering city. Overall, findings suggest that residents perceive tourism as a generally positive force, fostering senses of pride and creating opportunities for the city to move on from the persistent social and economic repercussions of war. However, the social and affective impacts of war are deeply engrained within the fabric of the city, and tourism has the capacity to emphasize differences and discomforts amongst residents and visitors alike.

ABSTRACT

The tourism industry continues to mature as many consumers are demanding more responsible and sustainable development. Mindfulness has been studied in tourism as a cognitive trait recognized by actively processing information through an acute sensitivity to an individual's environment and openness to new information. Mindfulness has been shown to predict behaviors related to tourism and recreation. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) has been extensively applied to understand human behavior. Despite TPB's extensive history in the social sciences, researchers continue to incorporate new social factors to explain behavior. This study employs an emerging psychological construct, mindfulness, into the TPB model as an enhancement to conceptual and empirical discrepancies.

This study aimed to: (1) understand the presence of mindfulness among those who travel, and (2) test a hypothesized relationship between mindfulness and intent to be sustainable on vacation. The research seeks to answer - does mindfulness add to a traveler's likelihood to behave sustainably in a destination with active sustainable initiatives? The purpose of this study is to showcase emerging consumer traits, like mindfulness, to enhance visitor experiences through sustainability initiatives.

A survey research method was employed to provide a broad, generalizable set of findings from a group of people who were planning a trip and may have visited a specific destination. This study partnered with Sedona Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Bureau to access such a population. The survey was conducted with a self-administered online survey and 550 completed surveys were obtained. Behavior intention to be sustainable, in any visited destination, was regressed twice to address the research question. The first regression included original TPB independent variables (such as attitude, social norms, perceived behavioral control). The second regression added the mindfulness variable. The mindfulness variable was found to be positive and significant in a general context. The model was tested for those who traveled to Sedona and mindfulness and actual behaviors associated with sustainability were strongly related. A traveler's perception of their ability to control behaviors had a significant role when paired with mindfulness. Results suggest the TPB model has availability to incorporate new consumer behavior traits to understand behavior intention.