ABSTRACT
Blessed with its rich cultural heritage but cursed with its rich history of terrorist attacks, Egypt has witnessed a decline in tourism revenue, which is vital for the country's economic development. Tourism suffered due to Egypt's revolution on January 25th, 2011, and the imposed travel restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout the pandemic, Egypt's former Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, Dr. Khaled El-Anany, initiated numerous promotional campaigns to revive tourism. As the world experienced a continuous lockdown, the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (MoTA) encouraged people to explore Egypt online through their website and social media platforms. Accordingly, this article examines the MoTA's recent efforts to promote Egypt's civilization by utilising virtual tours, events, and videos to encourage cultural tourism and the traditional sun-and-beach holidays to local and international markets. In addition, three interviews were conducted with leading Egyptologists to gain their opinion about the Ministry's efforts in promoting tourism to Egypt. According to these interviews, the future is bright for Egypt's tourism. However, the country faces different challenges than in the past, such as problems in the hospitability industry and harassment, which can affect tourists' revisit intentions. © 2022 Vita e Pensiero / Pubblicazioni dell'Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
ABSTRACT
The present investigation takes a qualitative approach to explore Airbnb's Online Experience as a new virtual tourism initiative through the lens of attention restoration theory. Data were collected from tourist reviews at Airbnb's platform with an emphasis on touring services such as sightseeing and cultural immersion sessions. Our findings first point to a multitude of virtual tour experiences germane to deep immersion, authenticity, nostalgia, hedonism, past-present resonance, novelty, learning, social interaction, and escape. These stay-at-home virtual restorative experiences were infused by Airbnb's state-of-the-art platform with features such as a super host, storytelling, personalization, virtual connection, stay-at-home indulgence, and technology enablement, which ultimately transcend home as the center stage for virtual attention restoration under the COVID-19 new normal. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
Despite representing a recent world trend, wedding tourism felt a growth of 75% the past few years, which shows this market, specifically, the destination weddings niche, is proving to have an optimistic development and becoming a relevant topic in events tourism. The research objective analyses how the destination weddings have contributed for the development of events tourism in Portugal by examining what tactics are being utilised towards an international positioning. A quantitative method was used to achieve the objectives, being that two distinct surveys were elaborated, to foreign couples and another to vendors that take part in the industry. The data triangulation method was adopted with the goal of obtaining robust results by gathering a broader source of data. The results show that the destination weddings market contributes positively to the expansion of the events tourism in Portugal. Couples tend to choose Portugal for their climate, impressive sites and sense of intimacy, but the country needs to improve the transaction payments and present a wider range of advertisement. Regarding Covid-19, it had a negative influence mainly because most foreign couples decided to postpone or cancel the wedding. Copyright © 2022 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.