Judith Mair

While social media receive considerable scholarly attention, studies reveal mixed outcomes in relation to its influence on tourists’ destination choices. There is nonetheless a persistent perception that social media has a fundamental influence on destination choice. However, those studies that do find a social media influence are in contexts where tourists are predisposed to be influenced (the contexts were selected due to social media presence or influence). These studies also have limitations in terms of social media types, tourists and destinations. This research responds to the challenges and explores social media influence across diverse destination choice contexts. Through face-to-face interviews conducted with 39 Australian tourist decision-makers, the findings reveal that social media influence is only apparent when specific context-conditions are co-present. Instead, most destination choice contexts are likely to result in low levels of social media influence. The findings advance theory by identifying three contextual dimensions for social media influence: level of social media engagement; destination novelty or familiarity; and complexity of the planning decision. This research importantly demonstrates the need to illuminate context when conceptualising social media influence on tourists’ destination choices. Practically, destinations should utilise social media to demonstrate ease of visit planning.

This practice report evaluates the impact of an immersive block teaching model known as the Southern Cross Model (SCM) on hospitality education at The Hotel School Australia (THSA). The SCM was implemented as a response to changing industry expectations of graduates, increasing diversity in student demographics, and calls for more flexible and engaging ways of learning. Instead of the traditional semester structure, the SCM offers six-week terms in which students focus their studies intensively on two units at a time. Using quantitative measures and institutional data, this study examined changes in student success, grade point average (GPA), progression, and satisfaction before and after implementation (2022–2025). Findings show that overall success rates increased from 75.9% to 91.5%, GPA rose significantly and absent fail grades (where students do not submit any assessment tasks) declined. Student satisfaction with both units and teaching also improved. Notably, equity cohorts such as First Nations students, and those from low socio-economic status backgrounds, demonstrated strong improvements. Some challenges were identified for staff, and for those students whose studies were undertaken during the time of transition to the SCM; however, overall, the SCM shows significant promise for enhancing engagement and achievement in contemporary hospitality higher education contexts.

Green innovation is an organizational strategy aimed to address climate crises and create low-carbon growth, yet, its implementation remains a significant challenge. We focus on green innovation implementation (GII) and argue that GII is a distinctive strategic process. Traditional innovation implementation, centered on short-term economic growth, can be problematic as it often decouples nature from innovation in the pursuit of profit maximization. Thus, the traditional approach fails to adequately explain GII, specifically, who implements it and how they do it. We adopt a strategy-as-practice perspective and conduct a systematic review of 224 journal articles across various management fields to synthesize existing knowledge of GII. This review makes three main contributions. First, we posit that GII is theoretically distinct with unique implementation challenges: recoupling nature with innovation implementation introduces complex antecedents and environment-inclusive benefits, requiring a long-term implementation process and a broader scope. Second, we develop a framework that synthesizes practitioners, antecedents, processes, and impact of GII from three theoretical foci: (1) resource-based perspective, (2) sustainable value-driven perspective, and (3) institutional perspective. This framework complements the traditional understanding of innovation implementation by offering diverse theoretical insights on GII. Third, we propose theoretical and methodological directions for future research to advance knowledge on green innovation and provide meaningful insights on GII.

Our work on regional Australian festivals has demonstrated the complex and competing roles attributed to regional festivals. Drawing on an infrastructures of care framework, we argue that the significance of regional festivals involves determining impacts beyond the time and location of the festival because of the multiple roles they may offer for regional places and communities. Regional communities are facing challenges such as a just transition to low or zero carbon emissions; out-migration of youth and population decline; lack of essential services; and the impacts of climate change. However, despite the crucial importance arts festivals have for enhancing wellbeing, little research has considered how regional arts festivals can be leveraged to optimize their contributions to rural and regional wellbeing. We argue that festivals ‘make visible, re-vision and re-value the caring possibilities of community (Power & Mee, 2020, p. 486, emphasis added), a perspective yet to be taken up in festival studies, which we argue has been a significant barrier to understanding the full importance of arts festivals for wellbeing in regional communities.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which focuses on a global approach to people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership. There are 17 SDGs and while research has considered the relationship between the SDGs and tourism, the contributions of events and festivals to achieving the SDGs have not been fully investigated. This chapter argues that events can contribute to the SDGs in two main ways. First, events bring tourists to a destination, and thus events can be said to contribute to the SDGs through tourism (for example through positive economic impacts and job creation in the tourism and hospitality sectors). Second, hosting and staging events contributes to the achievement of the SDGs through the beneficial impacts of events beyond tourism (e.g., through enhancing quality of life and well-being, through business development in the logistics and meeting planning industries, and through the legacy provisions of infrastructure and sporting facilities that result from hosting mega events). However, as yet, the majority of academic research has failed to make the contribution of events to the SDGs explicit, a fact that is hindering our understanding of this important topic. This chapter calls for more research to explore and navigate this complex relationship.

Tourism and event organizers implement green innovation to mitigate the negative environmental impacts they cause. However, how to effectively communicate these green innovations to online communities remains a challenge. Drawing on message framing and construal level theories, we collected 503 tweets and used an exploratory sequential mixed-methods approach to analyze the textual data. First , we conducted abductive coding analysis, identifying two novel framing forms, innovative and value chain framings. Second , using negative binomial regressions, we found that input-value (vs. output-value) framing is often used but decreases online engagement. Moreover, proximal (vs. distal) framing is less used but enhances online engagement. Third , we explored the moderating effect of green innovation, revealing that innovative and proximal framings are more effective for green organizational innovation, whereas emotional framing is more effective for green service innovation. This study offers novel insights on how to strategically communicate green innovation to event online communities.

Events play an important role in the economic and social fabric of many towns and cities worldwide and are often used by city authorities working on limited budgets as a way to achieve a range of policy goals. Major festivals and sporting events can result in significant economic impacts from the tourists they attract, in addition to facilitating social benefits such as employment and training for local residents, as well as enhanced civic pride. However, many events are smaller in scale, and may not be so economically lucrative. Nonetheless, smaller community events and festivals are vital for the role they play in supporting local arts, heritage, culture and traditions, as well as for their contribution to social cohesion, social justice, community participation and sense of belonging. Community festivals and events are arguably more sustainable than their larger cousins, the major and mega-events, yet they rarely receive the same attention from researchers or policy makers. Although it can be argued that the contribution of any individual community event to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) may be limited, their holistic contribution to many of the goals is considerable (particularly Goal 8 Decent Work and Economic Growth; Goal 10 Reduced Inequalities; Goal 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities; Goal 12 Sustainable Consumption and Production, and Goal 16 Peace, Justice and Sustainable Institutions). This chapter unpacks the relationship between community events and the SDGs, reviews some of the issues and challenges facing the sector (particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic) and provides some suggested approaches for overcoming these challenges.

Value co-creation can enhance the competitiveness of tourism businesses and destinations. However, traditional notions of value co-creation, emphasising the co-creation of value between tourists and providers, have been challenged by technologies which empower tourists to interact with multiple actors across physical, virtual, and blended spaces, thus significantly influencing the creation of value. This chapter reimagines value co-creation (and co-destruction) through technology-mediated tourist experiences by identifying key actors, resources integrated and dimensions of value and making new connections between disparate bodies of literature in the fields of tourist behaviour, service management, and marketing. In light of the ubiquitous role of technology, this chapter refines the notion of value co-creation in tourism and reconsiders the nature of technology as an operand resource in tourist ecosystems. Additionally, this chapter touches upon a theoretical and practical gap in the value co-creation literature by considering temporal issues in addition to the research questions explored and discussed.