The Kowloon Walled City is a dreamlike landscape in Japanese imagination. Through the lens of tourist gaze, many Japanese are interested in Hong Kong old buildings and grass-root culture. The stereotype of Hong Kong as a disorderly but lively and exc
This paper examines the profile and the extent and pattern of local participation in tourism industry in Taman Negara National Park, Kuala Tahan. The concept of sustainable tourism is used as a framework to analyse the people’s participation. The results are based on local respondents working in the tourism industry (entrepreneurs, employees in private sector and park management) who were interviewed by means of a questionnaire survey. Additionally, in-depth interviews were conducted with entrepreneurs and Orang Asli (indigenous people). The majority of respondents are Malay, male, young, married and have secondary education. Local people occupy a wide range of occupations, from owning their own business, working as an employee in a hotel/resort to working as a tour operator for a tourism agency. The majority of the local respondents were satisfied with their current occupation. They believe that tourism development has helped the economical growth of the region and the lives of the local people living within it. Tourism has become the main source of income for local residents and they are satisfied with their business. The bigger part of the respondents would like to stay in Kuala Tahan for the rest of their lives and didn’t want to move to another place. However, not every group has benefitted equally and locals are not participating in the decision making process. The Orang Asli form a minority that has benefited relatively little from the tourism industry. Also it is demonstrated that despite weak participation in the decision making process, local people can benefit sufficiently from ecotourism. It is proposed that in order to make tourism sustainable local people and the Orang Asli need to participate in the decision making process, all ethnic and gender groups should benefit equally and environmental education should be improved.
Keywords: Sustainable Development, Ecotourism, Local participation, Taman Negara
As the World Wide Web has developed considerable bargaining power has been transferred from suppliers to consumers, especially in the tourism and hospitality industries. As a result there is a real need to improve market intelligence and market research for private and public tourism organizations and facilitate timely consumer decision making. This paper explores the development of user generated content and specifically the use of Twitter (and of web logs or blogs) in the process of tourist destination choice and decision making. Tourism businesses cannot afford to ignore the development of user generated content, peer-to-peer web applications and virtual communities. Automated discovery and analysis of customer opinions on the web holds a lot of promise for future marketing practices in this industry. Opinion mining (sentiment mining) attempts to come up with ways to automatically analyze subjectivity expressed in natural language text, and twitter is a popular microblogging service where users create status messages (called "tweets"). These tweets sometimes express opinions about different travel destinations. Additionally blogs frequently contain references to tourism and travel. In this paper we analyze supervised machine learning approaches to explore appropriate methods for automatic sentiment classification in the domain of twitter tweets that relate to Japan and also for blogs that focus on Japan. We also seek to ascertain whether information from tweets can assist in early detection of changes in sentiment and the identification of topical trends for inbound tourism to Japan. Such information yields considerable promise to stakeholders from government and industry in the tourism sector.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced in mid 1999 the campaign to “Open Up the West” (xibu da kaifa) with the goals of reducing socio-economic disparities, encouraging economic growth, and ensuring social and political stability in the non-Han areas (Goodman, 2004: 317). For the village of Zhaoxing, located in the remote province of Guizhou and inhabited by the Dong minority nationality, the Chinese state ideal of modernization has been channeled in large part through the development of ethnic tourism. As a result, what a Dong village should look like as well as the outward expressions of being Dong are increasingly fixed by delocalized agents of change driven by tourism profits. Concurrently, this once isolated, barren and profitless place (Oakes, 1998) is increasingly being incorporated to the Chinese nation state through what Scott (2009) calls “distance demolishing technologies” (state electricity, all-weather roads, railroads, highways, Internet and television). Far from being passive subjects of modernization, the Dong constantly negotiate to maintain or improve their livelihoods in their own terms. They selectively resist and indigenize elements of modernity according to the opportunities and constraints stemming from their “unique and troubled place within the Chinese Nation” (Mueggler, 2001: 19). In Zhaoxing, I analyze the local responses to changes that are integrating the village as never before into the Chinese nation state.
In contrast to the rapid development of outbound tourism since the 1980s inbound tourism has played a minor role in the development of tourism in Japan until 2002, when the Japanese government embarked on a policy of active enticement of foreign tourists. This policy developed from a background of stagnating regional economies, declining mass tourism destinations and an ageing population. In consequence, visitor numbers have almost doubled from 4.771.555 in 2001 to 8.350.835 in 2008. However, foreign tourists spread unevenly across the country. Their regional distribution differs for each nationality and is influenced by a range of factors. As a result, some regionally restricted inbound clusters have evolved that have gained a status as symbols of successful inbound tourism policies. One destination that has witnessed a more than four-fold increase of foreign visitors is Hida Takayama, a historical town tucked away in the mountains of Gifu Prefecture. This paper will examine the development steps of Takayama as an international tourist destination. It will then introduce the result of a survey conducted with 448 Japanese and 148 foreign tourists to assess differences in motivations, preferences and behaviour. Finally, it will draw on interviews with key persons from tourism associations and accommodation industry to examine innovations incised by the increase in foreign tourists. Through these three steps of analysis, we will assess the impact of international tourism on the reconstruction, stabilisation and innovation of destinations in the Japanese tourism market. (256 words)
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