This paper examines winery owners’ attitudes and perceptions regarding the use of social media in marketing and promoting wine tourism online. Empirical evidence is provided by a sample of 20 winery owners in the North Italian region of Langhe, who have engaged to a greater or lesser extent in social media. The findings show that while the majority of winery owners recognise the social, economic and emotional benefits of social media, they are far from exploiting its full potential, partially due to barriers such as their agricultural mentality and the time-consuming nature of social media.

Rural tourism is considered a high potential form of tourism, enhanced by the demand for more sustainable and nature-based solutions, and able to contribute to territory resilience. A rural area is not necessarily a tourist destination, but it might become one, if agricultural enterprises are willing to diversify their economic activities by investing in rural tourism, and local actors provide active support and co-participation. This research focuses on the development of rural tourism in hinterland, mountainous, and hilly areas of the province of Savona in Liguria (North-West of Italy) in order to gather the farmers’ perspectives about local rural tourism destination development. Liguria is known above all as a seaside tourist destination. In recent years, policy makers have initiated a debate with local actors to relaunch Ligurian tourism by trying to develop alternative forms of tourism, such as rural tourism. A sample of 32 farmers already proposing rural tourism activities such as agritourism were involved in a mixed methodological approach aimed at validating local interest toward rural tourism and collecting information for designing future local development policies. At first, a questionnaire set up by a panel of experts was carried out, followed by one-to-one semi-structured interviews, and finally the Nominal Group Technique (NGT) was used to identify local priorities, strategies, and tools. The results highlight the willingness of farmers to invest in the rural tourism sector, the presence of heterogeneous interests, and the complexity of management of the relationship among the various stakeholders. Findings are partially explained by the early stage of development of rural tourism in the analyzed area, a phase in which starting a constructive dialogue on objective and project ideas among all stakeholders seems to be a crucial priority among the farmers taking part in the study.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of social media (SM) in supporting international research. The study is based on a sample of 797 scholars who published their papers in the Financial Times Top 45 management journals in the years 2013–2015. Data were collected through observations conducted mainly on SM and university sites and analyzed by using negative binomial regression. It was found that the international collaboration of the research team is positively associated with the presence of the first author on Academic Social Networking Sites (ASNSs) as ResearchGate and Academia.edu. Despite the fact that juniors are more likely to be present in SM platforms, the senior position of the first author was positively associated with the international collaboration, which can be explained by the fact that senior academics have accumulated more extensive bridging social capital. The identified relationship indicates that professional SM serves as a tool to establish a digital footprint not only in business but also in academia. As well as the need for further investigation of the role and potential of ASNSs to foster newer and more efficient forms of international research collaboration.

Commercial space tourism is being developed and this trend is expected to continue and accelerate. Although opportunities and threats of space tourism attracted the interest of academia, literature on potential demand, attitudes and people's motivations for space tourism is scarce. In this context, this paper investigates young generations’ interest and motivations towards different forms of space tourism. The cluster analysis on 2,207 respondents highlighted an interest in space tourism although motivated by different reasons, levels of budget and sustainability aspects. Interest in space tourism varies according to how far it is perceived as potential, possible or sustainable, or to people's personal feelings. The paper adds to contributions in the tourism field by investigating the opportunities space can offer this industry.