This study examines the interactions among climate adaptation policies to explain network effects on climate resilience for island destinations. An existential climate crisis necessitates comprehensive policy interventions. In light of inadequate resilience strategies within tourism policymaking, this study examines adaptation indicators to establish a priority framework for island destinations. In this article, a detailed case study of The Bahamas is presented, illustrating the connections between agencies and actions as climate-resilient actor-networks. Using a policy document, focal actors were identified from a broader list of connected actors. The structure of these actor-networks is then explained through underlying attributes of sustainability, direct and indirect tourism impacts, and the prevention and mitigation efforts of climate-resilient actors. The results highlight critical policy areas for climate resilience, such as regulation and standards, extreme weather management, agriculture and fisheries, water planning, and the protection of coastal communities. These findings offer theoretical insights into the enactment of climate-resilient actor-networks, while providing practical guidance for prioritizing policies that build sustainable and resilient island tourism destinations.

Regenerative tourism has recently emerged as an influential concept in the academic writing around tourism and its future. Since 2020 over 30 articles have been published focused on this concept, and the field continues to grow. Much of the writing is characterised by advocacy for, rather than simply research about, a regenerative future for tourism. This advocacy resides on a number of contestable moral claims that are made, thus far, without contestation. The commentary brings these claims into correspondence with counter views in order to develop a provisional critique of advocacy of regenerative tourism as a moral imperative, and also to prompt further debate.

Drawing on fieldwork at Jiuzhaigou, this paper examines discursive power in a key Chinese tourism landscape and its post-disaster recovery. Using a Foucauldian framework, it extends Nyíri’s arguments of ‘scenic-spots’ and their associated tourism and landscape rationalities to Jiuzhaigou’s contested post-disaster recovery. Nyíri’s concept of scenic-spot is a state-designated, professionally managed tourism territory in China where landscapes including local cultures are administratively bounded, engineered, interpreted and regulated to produce an authorised, marketable sightseeing experience. Drawing on his account of tourism as a site of cultural authority and state governmentality, it examines how post-earthquake interventions are organised around producing an authorised way of seeing that remake the landscape as legible, orderly and consumable. In this framing, ‘beauty’ becomes a governing objective that coordinates technical, administrative and narrative work. The governing objective of beauty also resulted in the restoration of the post-earthquake landscape. Consequently, competing rationalities and interests such as minority beliefs and geological logics were sidelined in favour of a landscape that is geared towards a consumption of specific touristic aesthetic forms, that of a pristine landscape dotted with photogenic peoples.

Despite significant place-based transformations driven by digital nomadism, the perspective of place remains underexplored and is thus a notable and pressing research gap. The contributions in this collection address diverse issues concerning the impact of digital nomads in places at multiple scales and registers. They examine local-level community-building practices and embeddedness into local communities, analyse meso-level marketing campaigns that position cities as urban remote work hubs for remote professionals and digital nomads, investigate macro-level supply factors and infrastructures that make a digital nomad destination, and consider the logic of national-level attract-and-retain strategies of digital nomad destinations. The complex geographies of digital nomadism and its interrelationship with the places digital nomads visit and the spaces they inhabit are examined. By focusing on a multiscalar place-based perspective, this collection contributes to understanding of how place shapes and is shaped by nomadic practices, impacts and uneven geographies of digital nomadism, and broader trajectories of contemporary tourism developments.

The paper discusses sounding bodies and more-than-human relations within tourism practices. It joins emerging attempts to challenge the anthropocentric tourism paradigm and to recognise more-than-human entanglements by engaging with sound through a relational approach. Rather than thinking of the soundscape as the aural equivalent to the visual panorama, which one visits and listens to passively from a distance, we explore the idea of intra-active ‘sounding bodies’ which share the atmosphere with other sounding bodies as they move, and are, in Tim Ingold’s words, ‘ensounded’ during the practice of hiking. The study is grounded in a longer-term engagement by the researcher-practitioners along the UKK hiking trail in Finland and draws upon empirical listening encounters as part of multispecies ethnography in the summer months of 2024. Through the use of the Merlin Bird ID app and an AudioMoth remote sensing device, the paper explores how various listening and sounding practices can stretch our anthropocentric ears and lead to new, more-than-human ethical considerations for tourism practices and infrastructures amidst the ongoing ecological crisis.

This study highlights digital nomads and mobile remote professionals as a new target in tourism marketing strategies by analysing how three mature Spanish tourism destinations—Barcelona, Malaga, and Benidorm—promote themselves in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on qualitative analysis of multi-source empirical data, the article examines how urban marketing ‘re-images’ the tourism city for mobile remote professionals: what kind of attractions it highlights, the ideal visitors it aims to attract, and why these strategies are pursued despite often controversial social dynamics in mature tourism destinations. We argue that tourism marketing discourses reconfigure cities to promote them as new hybrid destinations merging work and leisure, and use the concept of workation destinations as a conceptual tool to grasp these transformations. The study presents three main findings: workation destinations are remarkably similar in their assets, services, and added value, emphasising ‘plug-and-play’ elements that allow mobile remote professionals to integrate smoothly and quickly; tourism marketing discourses are closely linked to broader talent attraction strategies, aiming not only to draw these professionals as visitors but also to retain them as affluent, highly skilled residents, linking tourism and migration into a continuum; digital nomads are targeted as an emerging aspirational ‘quality’ segment, even though marketing strategies struggle to effectively reach them. By exploring city re-imaging, the study offers empirical insights that extend the understanding of digital nomadism as a distinctive category and contribute to broader debates on the tourism city in the neoliberal age.

Global tourism industry has been expanding significantly, generating revenue that circulates through society, communities, and local populations. Thailand has implemented national policies that strongly promote tourism, with cultural tourism emerging as a particularly popular and distinctive form. The Amphawa Floating Market, located along the Amphawa Canal, has become a key attraction. This study tracks changes in land use in Amphawa District, Samut Songkhram Province, over the past two decades using remote sensing techniques. The findings reveal that between 2003 and 2013, agricultural land declined, while urban areas, infrastructure, and roads expanded. In the following decade, transportation networks, miscellaneous land use, and urban development continued to grow. These changes align with the steady rise of cultural tourism in Amphawa over the past 20 years, demonstrating that tourism has become a significant source of income, replacing agriculture as a primary economic driver and contributing to local economic development. This study provides valuable findings on spatial transformations that can support future efforts toward sustainable development through the formulation of spatial policies to accommodate tourism expansion and alleviate local poverty. Furthermore, the results may serve as a model for monitoring and managing spatial dynamics and promoting equitable and fair income distribution among local communities.

Noise from low-flying aircraft has negative impacts on nature-based tourist experiences, wildlife, and communities in tourist destinations worldwide. Within the United States, some national parks, such as Denali National Park and Preserve (DENA), experience a high volume of low-flying overflights, including from tourism activities like flightseeing tours. We utilized flight tracking data to identify overflight patterns, acoustic monitoring to estimate noise exposure, and visitor surveys to measure visitor thresholds for noise from overflights. Low-flying propeller aircraft flight patterns were identified using Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast data. A mean of 21 flights per day occurred in DENA’s frontcountry, the developed area of the park, during the study period (23 June 2023 to 29 July 2023), when visitation is at its peak. Visitor survey data were separated by interest in taking a flightseeing tour. For visitors interested in a flightseeing tour and those not interested, 25 flights or more per day were rated as unacceptable on a Likert scale for acceptability. The maximum sound level visitors may experience while in DENA’s southern frontcountry area is 56 dBA1s, which we predict will be rated as unacceptable based on previously published data from DENA. These results highlight the impact of low-flying propeller aircraft on visitor experiences. Finally, these methods can be applied in other tourism contexts where overflights are a concern for tourism managers and local communities.

The niche field of critical surf studies examines localism as a ubiquitous phenomenon wherein experiences of place and belonging are negotiated through surfers’ differentiated positioning relative to surfing’s cultural imaginaries and geographical territories, or ‘surfscapes’. Beyond conventional explorations of localism as a response to common pool resource dilemmas provoked by overcrowding of wave resources, critical perspectives account for power dynamics related to race, class, and gender in contested surfing space produced through Global North/South relationships within the colonial-patriarchal foundations of global surf tourism. This body of critical surf tourism literature acknowledges diverse localisms as enacting entitlement and/or resistance in occupied surfscapes built on historical legacies of structural violence and settler colonialism. Engaging with novel frameworks of communal governmentality, commoning and translocalism in Global South surf tourism communities, critical surf tourism scholarship suggests that certain localisms represent subversive modes of commons governance and/or emancipatory politics in occupied surfscapes. The state-of-the-art narrative review of critical surf studies concepts offered here centers localism in surf tourism contexts as a lens for recognizing critical surf tourism studies as its own nascent subfield of inquiry in sport tourism geographies.