Cultural tourism includes experiencing local culture, traditions and lifestyle, participation in arts-related activities, and visits to museums, monuments and heritage sites. This book reviews a wide range of qualitative and quantitative research methods applied to the field. It is suitable for students and researchers in tourism and leisure.

This timely Research Agenda moves beyond classic approaches that consider the relationship between heritage and tourism either as problematic or as a factor for local development, and instead adopts an understanding of heritage and tourism as two reciprocally supported social phenomena that are co-produced.

This volume seeks to expose and illustrate new approaches and thinking in qualitative methods that are being developed and implemented in tourism research. The contributions bring together various qualitative methods and approaches while also providing suggestions for the juxtaposition of qualitative and quantitative methods in mixed methods research. The book has been written with a cross-disciplinary approach which provides an insight into the art of research development from business, sociology and tourism perspectives. The chapters provide readers with a context and practical application examples for each method. They present a distinctive opportunity for social researchers from a range of disciplines, in particular tourism, to examine how to adapt the wide variety of qualitative approaches to their particular research needs.

'This is an excellent book which significantly contributes to tourism research and education. It takes a rigorous yet readable style to address twenty five of the most pertinent quantitative and qualitative techniques applied in tourism research. the book will appeal to a wider readership of social scientists as well as to scholars of tourism as each chapter provides a thorough overview and explanation of the techniques irrespective of their tourism application.' – Dimitrios Buhalis, Bournemouth University, UK This insightful book explores the most important established and emerging qualitative and quantitative research methods in tourism. the authors provide a detailed overview of the nature of the research method, its use in tourism, the advantages and limitations, and future directions for research. Each chapter is structured to provide information on: the nature of the technique and its evolution; background and types of problems that the technique is designed to handle; applications of the technique to tourism, including discussion of studies that have used the technique and their findings; advantages and limitations of the technique conceptually and for policy formulation; and further developments and applications of the technique in tourism research. Handbook of Research Methods in Tourism will appeal to social scientists, students as well as researchers in tourism who use quantitative and qualitative research techniques.

Because few comparative data existed on European cultural tourism, when the European commission designated cultural tourism as a key area of tourism development in Europe, the European association for tourism and leisure education undertook a transnational study of European cultural tourism. The first five chapters address general themes (the scope and significance, the social context, the economic context and the political context of cultural tourism). The are followed by eleven chapters on individual countries from the European Union. Re-issued in 2005 in electronic format by ATLAS, the Association for Tourism and Leisure Education.

Stressing the interconnectedness of tourism and culture, this valuable handbook explores what tourism industry professionals need to know to succeed. Globalization, landmark attractions, and cultural heritage are among the topics discussed from both international and local perspectives. Each chapter also concludes with a comprehensive series of self-assessment questions and a proposed task that professionals and students can do to enrich their cultural learning experience.

Within the tourism industry there is a growing consensus on the need for research to investigate the economic, social and environmental impacts of tourism. However, existing research methods texts are based solely on either the business approach or the social science approach to tourism. They often fail to provide real world examples of how to plan, implement or analyse tourism related research. This book aims to address this divide by integrating theory with practice through the inclusion of specific tourism research case studies alongside research theory. It considers a wide range of research issues, approaches and techniques with contributions from both experienced and new researchers.

"This book is aimed at researchers who want to improve their understanding of the strategic role of new digital technologies in the field of cultural tourism, offering innovative research results within the scope of the interdisciplinary cross between Digital Communications, Internet of Things, and Cultural Tourism"--

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive account of cultural and heritage tourism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and the many complexities that heritage sites and tourist attractions face. The MENA region has long been regarded as the cradle of Western and Arab civilisation and is the home of many of the world’s major religions. Because of this, the region is rich in heritage sites that serve as major tourist attractions and as icons of national, cultural and religious identity. However, as this book examines, heritage in the region is simultaneously highly contested and has even become a target for terrorism creating a situation that brought major challenges for heritage management and sustainable tourism development. Many of the region’s innumerable cultural sites are threatened, in some cases by overuse, in others by neglect and, in many, simply by the pressures of economic development. This book is therefore of interest not only to heritage managers and policy makers but those academics who seek to address the delicate balance between tourism development, communities and the tourists who visit such sites in a turbulent but highly significant region of the world.

New approaches to tourism study demonstrate a notable ‘critical turn’ – a shift in thought that emphasises interpretative and critical modes of tourism inquiry. The chapters in this volume reflect this emerging critical school of tourism studies and represent a coordinated effort of tourism scholars whose work engages innovative research methodologies. Since such work has been dispersed across a variety of tourism-related and other research fields, this book responds to a pressing need to consolidate recent advances in a single text. Adopting a broad definition of ‘criticality’, the contributors seek to find ‘fresh’ ways of theorising tourism by locating the phenomenon in its wider political, economic, cultural and social contexts. The collection addresses the power relations underpinning the production of academic knowledge; presents a range of qualitative data collection methods which confront the field’s dominant (post)positivist approaches; foregrounds the emotional dynamics of research relations and explores the personal, the political and the situated nature of research journeys. The book has been divided into two parts, with the essays in the first part establishing a context-specific framework for engaging philosophical and theoretical debates in contemporary tourism enquiry. The second set of essays then present, discuss and critique specific methodologies, research techniques, methods of interpretation and writing strategies, all of which are in some sense illustrative of ‘critical’ tourism research. Contributors range from postgraduate students to established academics and are drawn from both the geopolitical margins and the ‘powerbases’ of the tourism academy. Their various relationships with the English-speaking academy thus range from relative ‘outsider’ to well-positioned ‘insider’ and as a result, their essays are reflective of a range of locations within the complexly spun web of academic power relations and social divisions.