This grounded theory research seeks to understand stakeholder attitudes towards tourism development and ecological restoration around a landscape-scale ecological restoration project in Montana, USA. Due to the limited number of landscape-scale ecological restoration projects across the globe, research on stakeholder attitudes and the relationship of tourism with such projects is missing. Only recently have researchers begun to take an interest in the relationship between tourism and rewilding, a subfield of ecological restoration that involves the restoration of wildlife. The results derived from interviews with various stakeholder groups, including nonprofit conservation groups, a national wildlife refuge, the local ranching community, a county commission, and local residents working in the tourism industry demonstrate important, emerging themes, such as contrasting worldviews, ecological paradigm, landscape-scale land management, and lack of shared community vision. As local ranchers are particularly threatened by landscape-scale ecological restoration efforts, integrated threat theory is used to describe intergroup conflict in a tourism and ecological context. A revised tourism area life cycle (TALC) model using a tourismscape framework and core-periphery concept is proposed to understand the interrelationships between regional tourism and landscape-scale ecological restoration areas. The importance of bottom-up solutions, community-driven initiatives, and stakeholder engagement in the planning process is emphasized.

The purpose of this study is to obtain a deeper understanding of how the media frames the recent overtourism phenomenon and to theorize the impacts of such framing on policy making and mitigation by using framing theory. We conducted a content analysis of 85 media articles to compare the negative impacts of overtourism across destination types. The results revealed media reports of critical environmental impacts at national parks, beach destinations, and archaeological sites; high socioeconomic impacts at archaeological sites, island destinations, and urban destinations; and high infrastructural impacts at national parks, archaeological sites, and island destinations. Differences in the severity of impacts by destination type have implications for destination planning and management frameworks. We also used Entman's classification of frames to analyze the media's portrayal of the phenomenon. Results revealed that the media overemphasizes redefining overtourism and fails to cover a range of possible solutions for properly managing the complex issue, especially by major news sources. These findings suggest that the media continuously redefines overtourism as a new phenomenon and oversimplifies its complexity, which prevents addressing the root cause of the problem and misleads policy implications. Theoretical implications of media framing are discussed, as are remedial strategies for destination management.

This study aims to understand millennials’ nature-based tourism experience through their perceptions towards technology use and travel constraints in a nature-based tourism context by drawing upon technology escape and digital-free travel conceptualizations and leisure constraints theory. Data were collected using surveys from 276 millennials and nature-based tourism providers, and two focus groups consisting of 21 providers and 13 millennials. The findings revealed that millennials perceived laptops with WI-FI access, virtual/ augmented reality, digital cameras, and WI-FI access at campsites to be significantly less enhancing of the nature-based tourism experience compared to the providers’ perceptions. An exploratory factor analysis identified four dimensions of travel constraints among millennials, including intrapersonal, interpersonal, time, and destination attributes. The findings highlight millennials’ conflicting need to escape from day-to-day technology use while remaining connected to basic technology services. Both the theoretical contributions of these findings and practical implications are discussed.

As the tourism industry faces a long road to full recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study utilized a scenario planning method to depict widely contrasting conditions in which tourism recovery in the U.S. state of Arizona will need to navigate. To collect data, we held a scenario planning session in June 2020 with 24 participants representing various stakeholder groups, such as public land management agencies, tourism businesses, destination management organizations, and a multidisciplinary panel of experts from the fields of public health, transportation, travel and tourism, and epidemiology. Six critical drivers of tourism recovery were identified, which included public health status, performance of the economy, destination availability, government policy, consumer confidence, and leadership messaging. Among these six critical drivers, public health status and performance of the economy were determined to be the two most influential and most uncertain determinants of tourism recovery and were used to develop four plausible scenarios consisting of a worst-case, best-case and two mid-level scenarios. As social inequities and economic and public health devastation appeared in the scenarios, the crucial methodological contributions and implications for tourism stakeholders, including destination communities, destination managers and local governments, are discussed.

This study applies human ecology theory to examine community resilience and adaptive capacity in a nature-based tourism destination. Data were collected through a survey of 207 residents in Corrientes, Argentina in communities where internationally recognized efforts to drive tourism, protect large landscapes, and restore natural resources have taken place. The results of the analysis revealed six domains of community resilience through a confirmatory factor analysis and illustrated that tourism and conservation investments increase tourism involvement, which leads to direct and indirect paths of increases in community resilience and adaptive capacity. Multivariate relationships were detected between tourism involvement and four of the six identified community resilience domains, and between tourism involvement and adaptive capacity through three community resilience domains acting as mediating variables. Using human ecology theory as a framework, this study provides insights into how communities’ adaptive capacity develops through residents’ engagement in entrepreneurial and self-organization opportunities offered by tourism.