Community-based tourism (CBT) is a popular approach to tourism development in developing countries. Community-based homestays are a form of CBT initiative that involves tourists staying with host families to experience local socio-cultural and natural resources. This study examined a community-based homestay in the buffer zone community of Bardia National Park (BNP), Nepal. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with homestay owners to understand their perceptions of the homestay programme. The interviews were analyzed using a thematic analysis approach. The findings reveal positive contributions from the homestay but with ongoing issues. Detailed findings and their policy implications on community-based homestays are further discussed.

This study examines the degree of macroeconomic recovery of the Nepal tourism industry after a natural disaster using the autoregressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA). The study investigated the case of Nepal’s earthquakes in 2015 and examined the impact of the earthquakes on tourism inflows and GDP using time series data from 1990 to 2018. The results show that the increasing trend in the number of tourists changes in the post-earthquake period. In particular, the excess in tourist demand by age and purpose of visits after the earthquake indicates natural disaster as a potential reason for a tourism demand boost, often described as dark tourism in literature. This research shows the process of a heritage tourist destination assessing macroeconomic recovery from a natural disaster and fills the gap in the literature regarding purpose-based tourism demand and a link between dark tourism and disaster recovery on a heritage tourism destination.

This study highlights ongoing issues in protected area (PA) tourism and presents management suggestions for PAs, given the growing popularity of PA tourism. This study takes a conceptual approach to discuss the ongoing issues within, and the sustainable future of, PAs. The expansion of PAs is a biodiversity conservation strategy. As PAs expand globally to promote conservation, new opportunities for ecotourism development will also evolve, further contributing to the challenge of balancing conservation and tourism. As many PAs operate without management plans, the development of regulations to foster sustainability is necessary, which is even more important now that the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted PA tourism, challenging PAs across the globe. This study provides an overview of PA tourism, discusses ongoing issues, and offers strategies for managerial improvement. Given the substantial growth of PA tourism, the relationship between PAs and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) should be explored further.

Tourism has been recognized as an important economic sector, requiring a high degree of involvement from the entrepreneurial sector to diversify tourism products and services to meet increasing demand. Tourism is often considered a tool for economic development and a strategy to improve the livelihoods of rural citizens. Specifically, nature-based tourism, such as wildlife tourism, is growing faster than tourism in general, providing a myriad of opportunities for small-scale entrepreneurial engagement. However, several obstacles exist for these small-scale tourism enterprises, such as a lack of social capital. This study examined a network of wildlife tourism microentrepreneurs for bonding and bridging forms of social capital using a social network analysis approach, where bonding and bridging social capital have their own interpretation. Thirty-seven in-person interviews were conducted with wildlife tourism microentrepreneurs from North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound Region. The study revealed that microentrepreneurs interacted with each other in a bridging network structure. The ability to reciprocate with other members of the network was essential for business success. The results identified four key bridging ties connecting potential sub-groups in the network, connected to each other in a redundant fashion. We concluded that the formation of a bridging network structure was a function of entrepreneurial phenomena that may not promote a highly trusted, well-connected network. The findings and implications are further discussed in the paper.

Understanding the perceived importance and performance of various components of ecotourism to residents living in the area it is undertaken is crucial to the overall success of an ecotourism development project. This study examines residents’ perceptions of the importance and performance of ecotourism components (i.e. environmental conservation, economic wellbeing, promotion of local arts and culture, local participation, and fair share of resources), including overall ecotourism development, at the Gaurishankar Conservation Area (GCA) – a recently implemented ecotourism development project in Nepal. This study also examines the effect of socio-demographic, economic, and psychological factors on a perceived gap between the importance and the performance of ecotourism components. Findings suggest that the ecotourism development project at the GCA should concentrate on improving the economic wellbeing of residents, and on overall ecotourism development. Findings also suggest that residents’ inclusion in benefit-sharing mechanisms was associated with a reduced perceived gap between the importance and performance of ecotourism components. A comparison among different geographical segments of residents indicated that the perceived gap between importance and performance varies across different locations.