Governance offers valuable guidelines to steer and direct destinations. Recent tourism governance research has explored the role of multiple actors in governing destinations but has not comprehensively investigated the underlying collaborative governance (CG) processes such as face-to-face dialogue, trust-building, shared understanding, or supporting factors such as institutional setting or leadership. The objectives of this paper are to determine the drivers and barriers of CG in a community-oriented destination in South Tyrol (Italy). This aims to reveal the processes that drive collaboration between stakeholders. For this reason, the paper builds on a qualitative case study with 20 semi-structured interviews with key informants. The results highlight that destination leadership is an essential driver of CG. However, several barriers to CG emerged. First, the findings show that institutional transformation led to a lack of trust and increased insecurity. Second, the inclusion of salient actors such as residents in the decision-making and implementation phase is scarce. Third, our findings highlight that a shared understanding of future development directions is missing between stakeholders. The contribution of this paper is a refined assessment of CG in tourism with special attention to the role of leadership and institutional settings. The derived implications target the role of leadership to foster the development of a shared understanding and to embark on a collaborative learning process that provides visible and tangible outcomes in turbulent times.

Purpose: Adventure activities have become the core products of many tourism destinations. Hiking, which is known to be a soft adventure activity, represents an especially important product for many tourism destinations around the globe and in the European Alps. However, little research has explored hikers’ underlying motivation and experiences, which are expected to differ from the hard adventure context, as mountain hiking provides a low risk, but high immersion. This paper aims to determine and explore the underlying dimensions and dynamics of mountain hikers’ soft adventure motivation (SAM). Design/methodology/approach: A concurrent mixed-method design that builds on a quantitative survey (N = 379) and qualitative interviews (N = 14) was used to explore SAM factors. This study combined exploratory factor analysis and regression analysis with semi-structured interviews and template analysis. Findings: The quantitative results provide six SAM factors and emphasize that “relaxation,” “socializing” and “discovery” contribute to hiking satisfaction, while “recognition” has adverse effects. By triangulating these findings with hikers’ experiences, this study underlines the associated recreational meaning of hiking and provides an in-depth qualitative discussion of SAM factors and the subordinate role of “recognition.” Originality/value: The contribution of this paper is a refined understanding of SAM in the hiking context by emphasizing the recreational meaning of mountain hiking. As a result, this study adds an important missing link to previous outdoor tourism and leisure studies by showing the special composition and dynamics of SAM. The findings also support the creation of tailor-made touristic products.

Regional business development is driven by family firms, which are generally deeply embedded in their region, particularly in rural areas. This study explores how family entrepreneurs’ embeddedness drives an entrepreneurial ecosystem as a regional context for innovation. For this purpose, the study brings together entrepreneurship research on embeddedness and on ecosystems, and develops the entrepreneurial ecosystem embeddedness framework to better understand the connection of entrepreneurs to their local environment along three dimensions. Analyzing qualitative interviews from the hospitality context with a pattern matching approach, we highlight the role of family entrepreneurs’ (1) horizontal embeddedness in the economic and socio-political environment, their (2) vertical embeddedness in industry regimes, in particular the family, and their (3) spatial embeddedness in the region for value creation. Thereby we contribute to a differentiated understanding of how embeddedness as a social fabric relates to entrepreneurial ecosystems. The propositions of this study recommend raising awareness for managing entrepreneurs’ embeddedness along these three dimensions since unilateral engagement and a lack of coordinated embeddedness can restrict value creation.

Purpose: Quality in foodservices has become essential, and new methodological ways of determining service quality enable a better representation of service processes and help to increase revisits. This paper focuses on the foodservice context and explores the relationship between staff-related service dimensions, atmosphere, food quality and revisit in a full-service setting.Design/methodology/approach: This study combines an often neglected mystery guest approach with partial least square–structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to shed more light on customers' service perceptions. The mystery guest approach has been updated with a digitally supported smartphone questionnaire (e-mystery) that provides more reliable results since previous measurements experienced difficulties of feasibility in time-limited settings (N = 247).Findings: The findings of this study confirm the direct effects of the service quality dimensions reliability, attentiveness and atmosphere on revisit intention and highlight the mediating role of food quality. In detail, the findings showed significant results for service employees' reliability and attentiveness and underlined the role of atmosphere for revisit intention.Originality/value: The contribution of this paper supplements that mystery guest approaches represent a reliable alternative to convenience sampling, especially in combination with a digitally supported questionnaire (e-mystery). Thereby, this paper suggests the further application of e-mystery for the hospitality and tourism industry. In terms of implications, this study highlights the importance of securing food quality by fostering specialized schools and training programs for career starters. Since the findings stress the importance of service quality and atmosphere, managers need to ensure that employees are trained in culturally sensitive communication and services to excel in service-related dimensions.