The tourism and hospitality industries have been particularly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, with widespread closures and later re-opening times than other areas of economic activity. However, little is known about the resilience of these industries in light of the current pandemic, within the context of English towns. This paper surveys businesses dependent on tourism located in English towns, to explore perceptions of resilience in this crisis context. We consider the nuances involved in resilience to disturbances such as Covid-19, revealing the temporal dimensions of resilience. Moreover, we identify influences informing differing resilience levels within and between industries. The paper also contributes a novel Business Resilience Composite Score, which enables academics, practitioners and policy-makers to draw comparisons between tourism and hospitality industry resilience and other economic activity in urban locations.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual framework based on an understanding of the principles of popular mobile-enabled games, indicating how organisations in the tourism sector could meet the needs of Millennials and Generation Z through engaging with the existing gamified location-based practice of geocaching as an information and communication technology enabled gamified enhancement to the destination experience. Design/methodology/approach: As a primarily conceptual paper, the authors take an inductive qualitative approach to theory building based on the understanding of an existing practice (geocaching) that is undertaken among a community of practitioners (geocachers), which results in the presentation of a conceptual framework, which is the theory itself that the authors have constructed from the understanding of what is going on and which principles can then be applied across other tourism practices. Findings: Findings indicate that through engaging with geocaching, smaller entrepreneurial businesses even in non-urban destinations that fall outside of the remit of smart city developments, and in tourism destinations on the less technologically enabled or resource-rich side of the digital divide, can reap the benefits associated with employing the principles and practices associated with smart tourism to meet the needs of this new generation of tourism consumers who seek richer digital and often gamified tourism experiences. Originality/value: This paper fills a gap in the literature regarding the way many different types of tourism destinations could meet the needs of Millennials and Generation Z tourists.

While there is a growing interest in the tourism and hospitality literature on authenticity, evidence is scarce regarding how tourists judge the authenticity of restaurants at the pre-purchase stage in a tourism destination. Our results identify the key criteria by which authenticity is judged in these settings, evidencing the importance of eating where the locals eat, in restaurants offering limited menus, with local wines and freshly prepared local speciality dishes. Authenticity relies less on interior design and restaurant décor than is the case for ethnic-themed restaurants. While localness is valued more than authenticity, the two concepts are linked.

A focus on continued year-on-year economic growth was beginning to be seen as unsustainable even before the COVID-19 crisis forced many tourism destinations to rethink their marketing and branding. This paper adopts a critical marketing stance to explore the relationship between place branding and two recent extreme conditions affecting the tourism industry: overtourism, as exemplified when the issue became headline news in popular media from the summer of 2017, as many examples were offered of places struggling to cope with their success; and the COVID-19 crisis that effectively brought global tourism to a standstill in 2020, as the industry attempts to rebuild from this current unprecedented crisis. This article is not designed to suggest normative place-branding strategies. Rather, through the presentation of an original model that conceptualizes the cyclical process of rebuilding from crises and coping with success, it aims to provide a warning that whatever place-branding strategies are implemented in a post-pandemic world, for whatever type of tourism, in whatever type of destination, a rein must be employed in order that the drive for recovery from undertourism through successful place branding does not lead to the return of overtourism.