This conceptual paper discusses the potential of blockchain technology for Smart Tourism Destinations. The main focus is placed on Smart Tourism Destinations’ four major goals that can be achieved by using blockchain technology, namely: enhancing tourism experience, rewarding sustainable behaviour, ensuring benefits for local communities, and reducing privacy concerns. The paper also outlines the major challenges that need to be overcome to successfully implement this innovative technology. This paper attempts to further advance the current knowledge about the possible implications of blockchain technology within the smart tourism domain, and especially Smart Tourism Destinations.

The paper discusses the benefits of blockchain technology for medical tourism. The major focus is placed on pre-procedure and post-procedure of medical tourism. The authors argue that blockchain technology can facilitate several stages of medical tourism by enabling disintermediation, allowing cryptocurrency payments, ensuring secure data sharing and privacy, and empowering trusted review systems. With regard to COVID-19 pandemic, the paper outlines the current challenges of the medical tourism industry and prop oses the opportunities for blockchain technology use. The paper attempts to provide important insights regarding the positive implications of blockchain technology use within the medical tourism industry as well as to further advance the current knowledge about blockchain technology’s effects for medical tourism.

Achieving sustainable tourism is a process that focuses on numerous goals and faces many challenges. The advent of disruptive technology like blockchain could help to tackle some challenges in sustainable tourism development and address its goals. This conceptual paper aims to discuss how blockchain technology could contribute to sustainable tourism. Precisely, the authors investigate the potential benefits of blockchain technology to disrupt tourism operations and boost local economy, manage food supply chain and mitigate food waste, achieve tourists’ satisfaction, affect the tourists’ sustainable behaviour, and address awareness rise issues. The authors conclude that blockchain technology has a potential to contribute to sustainable tourism development as well as the SDGs and propose the directions for future research.

Traditional travel agencies and tour operators are recognized as relevant stakeholders in the tourism distribution chain, even though their role as transforming agents in the achievement of more sustainable tourism is beginning to be accepted. This study aims at reviewing the main topics and the most recent approaches from the academic literature in its analysis of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices developed by these intermediaries. The work has been structured around six recurring themes in most of the studies carried out: the new intermediaries that operate on the Internet; the role of travel agencies and tour operators in tourism sustainability; the influence of the size of the company; CSR as a disruptive innovation in this sector; the potential of the sustainable tourism supply chain; and the motivations and attitudes of the managers of these businesses when they engage with responsibility. This last topic is developed in greater detail since it is closely linked to the previous ones and dictates, in most cases, the meaning and function of the sustainable performance. The conclusions show how tourism intermediaries have only just begun to develop CSR policies, and those that are committed to their implementation mostly opt for actions aimed at the environment.

Conflictos en la ciudad turística desde la perspectiva de los movimientos sociales localesEsta investigación aborda los conflictos generados por el crecimiento turístico reciente en la ciudad turística desde la perspectiva de los movimientos sociales locales. Para ello primero, se revisan estos procesos de crecimiento, con especial atención a la percepción del exceso de turismo y al papel de las viviendas con fines turísticos. En segundo lugar, se reflexiona sobre los conflictos y las reacciones sociales que responden a la percepción de impactos negativos del turismo en su espacio cotidiano. Se contrasta la revisión teórica de manera aplicada a las ciudades de Málaga y Marbella. Los resultados evidencian que en las ciudades con turismo clásico de litoral ya existía la vivienda de alquiler desde sus orígenes como destino y ahora se ha visibilizado porque las plataformas digitales lo han puesto en el mercado global; en ciudades con turismo urbano-cultural las viviendas son una nueva forma de alojamiento que genera nuevos conflictos; por último, los resultados contrastan las características del modelo crecentista en la ciudad turística frente a las reivindicaciones de los movimientos sociales que cuya base es la compatibilidad del turismo con la preservación y mejora de la calidad de la vida cotidiana. Los tres resultados constituyen oportunidades de investigación.

Existing tourism-destination investigations of Chinese texts remain weak, and no approach is available to realize Chinese context semantically and automatically. To resolve this, we provide a novel method based on qualitative analysis for studying the online opinions of Chinese tourists regarding the destinations to which they travel. Both traditional and simplified Chinese forums were chosen as the object of study. Spain was selected as a travel destination to evaluate the proposed method. After processing the natural language, unstructured Chinese content is analysed to derive the general sentiment and relevant topics regarding the destination through user comments on social media. The proposed method allows us to understand what tourists are interested in and how they form opinions about tourist destinations.