International tourists’ perceptions of the destination’s image, travel satisfaction and revisit intentions are crucial to effective destination marketing and overall destination competitiveness. Tourist destinations often compete through their image in potential tourists’ minds. Therefore, a destination image is central due to its influence on tourists’ decision-making and destination selection. Successful destination marketing depends on the in-depth understanding of the destination image held by tourists. This study investigates the destination image changes of Mongolia for specific periods of time. The research examines the attributes of destination images through a longitudinal comparison of data sets from 2004 to 2019 to determine if any change in destination images existed over time. The research model was developed on the attributes of cognitive and affective images, tourist satisfaction, and revisit intentions. The first set of data was obtained from the 280 international tourists who travelled to Mongolia in 2004. The second set of data was obtained from 310 international tourists who travelled to Mongolia in 2019. The research model was validated using structural equation modelling. Independent sample t-tests were performed using two data sets to examine changes in the destination image over the years. The result shows that there are positive changes in the cognitive and affective image of the destination in a given period of time, which influenced tourist satisfaction and their revisit intentions. The implications of the research findings for the travel intermediaries, destination marketing organizations, and potential future research are also discussed.

It is a positive phenomenon that more and more studies are being published on the diverse relationship between accessibility and tourism nowadays. This indicates that now at least tourism researchers are showing an interest in the examination of the different aspects of accessibility. Nevertheless, it is a well-known fact that service providers still do have much room for development in this respect. It is sad the examinations mentioned practically totally neglect the definition of accessibility from a philosophical perspective—or its need to be defined, so evidently its applicability in practice and its empirically justifiable positive impacts are not discussed, either, though in the authors’ view it is a prerequisite for the realisation of a traveller’s good and independent experiences. Unfortunately, very little is said in the previously mentioned scrutinies about the philosophy of accessibility which, in the authors’ opinion, is a prerequisite for the accomplishment of adequate accessibility. Coming from all these and also on the ground of their previous researches, and also from the international empirical research conducted in five countries on the travel habits of people with disabilities by the authors, they are convinced that accessibility in itself shows, and leads to crisis phenomena, because the spirit of accessibility is simply missing from both the professional and everyday practical thinking. One explicit manifestation of this is the fact that travel becomes free from experience as a result of partial accessibility—or it generates “specific experiences” that can be interpreted as the negative pole of Michalkó’s paradigm of beatific travel. The conclusion of the paper is that the creation of the paradigm of fundamental accessibility is a justified must.

Turisztikai és Vidékfejlesztési Tanulmányok Folyóirat

The modern science of thinking in networks and the interpretation of human activities made in networks are almost as old as the science of tourism, or as this paper calls it, travel science. The basic background of the paper is provided by the accessibility scrutiny performed in travel science and frequently referred to in the article. The paper is definitely of a theoretical focus; it is a research methodology mix of emptiness and life philosophy, and also hermeneutics, meant to inspire a discussion and evoke thought. The paper is not based on empirical data, given that it is a review paper; however, the analysis of this limited set of data supports the scientifically verifiable relevance of this specific philosophical scrutiny as well, i.e., the theoretical framing in the classic sense is manifested through this special philosophical and hermeneutical dimension: it implicitly frames the thoughts of the authors, the fundamental objective of which is to induce more in-depth and sophisticated discourses on the correlation of networks and accessibility. The authors observe that their brief theoretical research may lead to a few surprising conclusions for the future, and hope that they have met the academically relevant expectations that they defined.

The authors have made an attempt in this case study, which is based on ‘subjective’ travel and existence experiences, for the indispensable separation of technical accessibility and fundamental or ‘deep’ accessibility—in both interpretation and application—and then to reconsider these concepts in their special philosophy-centred study, which is at the same time built on empirical inquiries and analyses. This is in line with a series of their publications in high-class periodicals. The authors are aware and understand at first sight that this hybrid analysis method has several shortcomings concerning objectivity expected by the academic community, and also concerning the verification of the findings with exact data. Nevertheless, they are convinced that in today’s world of transdisciplinarity, subjective and objective viewpoints are no longer dimensions mutually excluding each other in research. Accordingly, the ‘artificially’ created boundaries between ontological and epistemological philosophical approaches are not of substantial character either. In fact, their very necessity and even their existence can be questioned at certain types of applications (e.g., hermeneutical and Buddhist analytics). The experiences gained and analyses made by the authors make it clear that technical accessibility, and the interpretation and implementation of fundamental accessibility, as well as the control of these by the actual users, are still hindered by several obstacles. Additionally, the existence or lack of fundamental accessibility is a more significant issue than the mere fact of providing accessibility by technical solutions. Last but not least, it should be remarked that it is just the spirit of fundamental accessibility and its implementation in the real world that is capable of mostly meeting the personal needs for accessibility, which seems to be partially impossible. The paper is hermeneutic in nature, so it seeks to understand and interpret a phenomenon, and not to causally explain something. Accordingly, the reported data (both subjective and objective facts) serve the purpose of hermeneutics and not that of providing empirical proof.