Morakot Ditta-Apichai

The food service sector plays a substantial role in the food waste creation. Restaurants in Thailand, driven by tourist demand, substantially contribute to food waste. This study analyzes the managerial and operational attributes influencing restaurants' practices for reducing food waste in Thailand's Andaman coastal region. This quantitative research uses the Waste Hierarchy framework to investigate restaurants' food waste practices. Independent variables are divided into two categories: 1) Manager Characteristics, and 2) Restaurant Characteristics. In total, 353 questionnaires were distributed using proportional allocation. The data were collected via simple random sampling and analyzed using logistic regression. The results indicate that restaurants demonstrated a high level of compliance with prevention practices; however, they showed substantially lower adoption of reuse and recycling practices. The logistic regression models revealed that personal factors (education, age, interest in food waste reduction, and restaurant experience), along with the number of meals served at the restaurant, significantly influence food waste practices. The multiple logistic regression model showed a good fit (model chi-square = 72.78, df = 6, p < .0001) and explained 25.2% of the variance. This study offers valuable insights and practical implications by highlighting that manager characteristics, rather than operational attributes, are important in shaping food waste reduction. This insightful information can be used to design and implement policies on human capacity development related to food waste reduction.

This exploratory research investigates how tourism microentrepreneurs built postpandemic resilience, focusing on Thai street food vendors and local tourists. Applying a qualitative triangulation approach, this study thematically examined 3344 online reviews, alongside 25 in‐depth interviews with 17 tourists and 8 vendors. The findings reveal that resource‐constrained street food microentrepreneurs successfully utilized digital platforms to mitigate crisis impacts, seize emerging business opportunities, and reconfigure daily operations. Consequently, digital adoption transitioned from a temporary crisis response into a permanent structural framework for sustainable business survival and community development. From the consumer perspective, while nostalgia and the desire for social reconnection strongly drive a postpandemic behavioral rebound, transforming street food visits into “must‐visit” attractions, this renewed demand remains permanently moderated by heightened food safety and hygiene expectations. This research contributes to the sustainable tourism recovery literature, offering actionable insights for stakeholders to facilitate bottom‐up empowerment and achieve the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.

This chapter examines ASEAN community-based homestays (CBHs) in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, providing practical examples and critical insights. It examines how CBH models balance cultural preservation, economic empowerment, and environmental sustainability, addressing key challenges faced by host communities. Using case studies, the chapter highlights the importance of local participation, supportive government policies, and collaboration with external stakeholders in ensuring CBH success. Key themes include integrating cultural authenticity, eco-friendly practices, and community-orientedness. Uneven quality standards, restricted capacity-building, and the necessity for management and marketing technology are also discussed in the chapter. By analyzing these models, the chapter offers actionable recommendations to foster sustainable homestay tourism that benefits travelers and local communities. Policymakers, researchers, and practitioners can learn from the findings on the CBH sustainable tourism in ASEAN.

Although food waste management has been significant for all stakeholders from all industries globally, research in hospitality food waste management and practices still needs to be further studied, especially in five-star hotels in developing countries. Using the Food Waste Hierarchy, this study proposes to contribute to the knowledge of sustainable food waste management and practices in five medium and large five-star hotels to promote the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Findings of in-depth structured questions from purposive and snowballing samplings show different aspects of sustainable food waste management and practices at these hotels supported by policies and implemented by practices at all levels, from top management to operations levels. The thematical analysis shows four emerging themes: food waste management policies; food service planning, procurement, and storage; food waste handling and operations in the kitchens, staff canteen and restaurants; and food waste management through reusing, recycling, donations, and disposal. The findings highlight these hotels’ challenges and suggestions for sustainable food waste management and practices. By providing the current situation of sustainable food waste management and practices, this study embellishes the guidance and recommendations for the hotels’ restaurants. It augments the industry practitioners with actual practices and solutions in implementing sustainable food waste management and practices in hotels’ restaurants.

Community-based tourism (CBT) promotes a model for enhancing communities’ social, environmental, and economic needs upheld as a post-Covid-19 revival strategy. This study aimed to critically review the model following longitudinal fieldwork in Thailand. “Reflection-in-action” methodology exposes CBT failings against sustainable development goals (SDGs). CBT falsely assumes: communities possess necessary capability for effective implementation; structural equity exists among host, and hosts possess uninhibited local control over their tourism assets. Such expositions underpin the study’s contributions: a supply-side focus on “community outputs” rather than the demand-side “expectations” of tourists; contradictions to known asset-based development assumptions; and theoretical extension to the CBT literature through critique to onsite experiences against sustainable development goals. Such may assist communities to move beyond their current “constraints” focus to that of “contextual experts” in local community assets. The study demonstrates a need for research, practice, and policy stakeholders to move CBT beyond theorization to a genuine sustainability tool.

Gastronomic (food) tourism is crucial for visitation and destination choices. Thailand tourism and its reputable cuisine can utilise the potential of online platforms as a channel to connect tourists to local communities. Despite massive online textual data in tourism, employing such insightful knowledge in theory and practice is still insufficient. This research explores gastronomic tourists’ experiences and their impacts on local communities in Thailand by conducting a qualitative approach to analyse local food experiences of gastronomic tourists’ reviews from five different online platforms. The results from 461 online reviews reveal positive tourists’ gastronomic experiences in Thailand. The gastronomic tourism offers and their contributions to local community destinations vary across online platforms. Additionally, all five online platforms facilitate the connection of gastronomic tourists and local people differently. In addition, the local online platforms offer a greater variety and uniqueness of gastronomic tourism experiences, including authentic food experiences, local interaction and community benefits, tailor-made cultural learning with locals, and social aspect of food that benefit local communities. This research benefits both tourism scholars and practitioners in filling the knowledge gap of employing available online tourism platforms to better understand, plan and design gastronomic tourism experiences in local communities.