Carmelo J. Leon

The economic valuation of sustainable policies is necessary for undertaking socially optimal decisions that reduce the adverse impacts of tourism across society and the environment. This paper focuses on the economic valuation of sustainable tourism policies based on the evidence found in the literature of discrete choice experiments (DCE). The methodology involves both a systematic critical literature review and a meta-regression analysis of tourists’ preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for sustainable policy attributes. The findings show that tourists value policies that contribute to sustainability. However, preferences are higher for those features related to nature, the environment, and local communities and lower for those policies concerning sustainable accommodation, infrastructures, and facilities. The results show critical gaps both in terms of the available evidence of sustainable policies and the methodological pitfalls across study results. Based on this assessment, a guiding protocol is proposed for future research.

This paper studies the factors that influence tourists’ risk perceptions of various destinations with different attributes and sociocultural profiles. Factor analysis is utilised to investigate the determinants of risk perceptions, finding that they are influenced both by the type of risk (delinquency, health, accident, environment and catastrophe) and by the characteristics of the destination regarding the management of risk. Structural equations modelling is conducted to study the relationships between risk perceptions, destination image and visiting intentions across destinations. Multi-group analysis across different destinations proves that tourists’ risk perceptions have different influences on destination image and visiting intentions. The results show that there are significant differences according to the predominant religion at the destinations, i.e., Muslin and Christian. The implication is that different dimensions of perceived risks and destination socio-culture contexts have different influences on the behaviour of tourists.

In whale-watching tourism, ensuring responsible human–cetacean interactions has raised critical academic debate over recent decades. This chapter reviews empirical evidence with the aim of progressing towards new trends that yield managerial responses for reconciling whale-watching tourism with sustainability principles. A co-word analysis of the last 30 years of scientific literature is conducted to explore the evolution of the leading topics, relate these to some industry milestones, and identify the research and managerial gaps. The evidence urges a new socio-ecological relationship approach in whale watching for sustainability, to be achieved by 2030 and beyond, by reorienting management practices to a more integrative approach based on scientific breakthroughs and collaborative stakeholder networks.