Rethinking destination success: An island perspective

The global tourism industry has shifted due to COVID-19, with tourismdependent islands facing a dire need to realign and reconstruct their tourism offerings to remain competitive. The traditional mass tourism model that has dominated island development has to be re-examined in this new tourism environment with new mindsets regarding the current conditions for destination success. This paper aims to promote an understanding of destination success in an island context and to identify which determinants are critical during this period to achieve optimal destination success. The findings from this study suggest that island destinations are at a critical turning point, and key strategic shifts are necessary to enable future destination success as defined by the Destination Management Organisations. There is a need to shift from management to stewardship, from product to experience, from quantity to quality, and from stakeholder presence to engagement. Core to these strategic shifts is an incorporation of locals as central to the quality of the overall experience, with less reliance on the natural resources (sun, sea, and sand) to which these island destinations have been beholden to for decades.

From Quantity to Quality: Capturing Higher Spending Markets through a Segmentation of Travelers' Expenditure

Many tourism destinations aim at expanding their market share of high spending visitors by shifting from quantity to quality. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the introduction of social distancing requiring hotspots and mass destinations to reduce their capacity. This paper proposes a two-step approach for identifying top spending European countries over time, distinguishing between leisure and business travelers. The methodology employs the Country Product Dummy index with a hierarchical clusterization, enriched by a convergence analysis. This approach overcomes general shortcomings of descriptive statistics and cluster analyses directly applied to raw expenditure data. The outcomes of this analysis provide a detailed picture of the European travelers' expenditure across time and geographical area. The identified top spending countries of leisure and business travelers can be targeted through ad-hoc marketing campaigns and specific packages for privileging quality tourism and planning economic recovery in the post-COVID-19 reopening phase, while shifting away from mass tourism. © The Author(s) 2021.

Promotion of Domestic Tourism by Enhancing the Practice of Alternative Tourism as a Quality Measure to Satisfy and Retain National Tourists

This study aims to study the satisfaction of national tourists with the tourism experience in the Sahara. It also seeks to examine the influence this has on the intention to return and spread positive word-of-mouth about this destination, work on its improvement to capitalize on the internal mobilities induced by COVID-19, and build a long-term relationship with them to strengthen regional attachment. Data were collected from 123 national tourists in Algeria using convenience sampling. Two analyses were carried out to process the data: a structural equation modeling approach to test and validate the hypotheses and textual analysis. The results show that among the five factors determining the quality of the Sahara experience, four factors significantly influence the satisfaction of domestic tourists: The scenic environment, the personal environment, entertainment, and reliability. It is deduced that the niche and responsible character of Saharan tourism is the main thing that satisfies tourists and ensures the success of tourism in the Sahara. © 2021. Krzysztof Zółtowski.