This special issue expands discussion on the role and relevance of critical approaches in tourism and hospitality studies. The goal of the issue was to reflect upon the opportunities, ambiguities and struggles related to researching and teaching in the critical tourism and hospitality field. The complexities and entanglements of working within ‘new’ and critical tourism knowledges have previously been noted (Ateljevic, Harris, Wilson, & Collins, 2005; Tribe, 2005; Wilson, Harris, & Small, 2008).

Being reflexive about the conditions and claims underpinning academic knowledge is a defining aspect of critical tourism and hospitality studies. In this article we explore how criticality has been conceptualised and consider the implications for addressing a major challenge in the field: that is, surfacing the power–knowledge relations that underpin mainstream or normalised ways of thinking. We aim to be reflexive about some of the dangers that exist in relation to the oppositional stance of critical perspectives. By drawing on examples from our own and others’ critical research and teaching practices we examine how a reflexive approach can enable different types of dialogue, spaces and relationships. We draw on related work in critical management studies and debates within tourism and hospitality to argue for a critical pedagogy that embraces reflexivity as a ‘practice’ — a way of doing, thinking and transforming knowledge as we live it.

Reflecting on my own experiences conducting ethnographic fieldwork within the international backpacking community and the metaphorical (as well as physical) journey this entailed, this article provides an account of the fieldwork process as it is lived and focuses on the interplay between the academic as observer and the academic as observed. In particular, drawing on key excerpts from the author's fieldnotes, the article opens up the fieldwork process to closer scrutiny, examining the emotional, corporeal and social dimensions of research. In so doing, the article explores some of the tensions that can emerge for the tourism studies scholar, who as researcher, traveller and tourist may frequently occupy multiple roles and identities within an individual research project. However, rather than viewing these convergences as an obstacle or limitation, I suggest that when viewed through the methodological approach of autoethnography, they are in fact conducive to developing a more reflexive and critically orientated approach to tourism studies.

In this article, travel is considered as offering moments of encounter with difference that generate new ideas and therefore new perceptions of being in the world for the individual. The role of the Other — of difference and the unknown — is important in the examination of the travel experience of encounter and Levinas's philosophy of the face-to-face encounter with the Other provides a conceptual framework for understanding the responsive relation to difference. This article also addresses the difficulty of writing about the experience in travel. It takes a critical approach through a flexible and interpretative method that attempts to represent the ephemeral nature of the travel experience in a manner that brings the traveller's interactive response to place and encounter to be part of the research. Three ‘voices’ — theory, critical-creative and narrative — reveal aspects of the relationship of the individual and difference for both traveller and researcher, and together offer a three-dimensional tool for tourism studies. This article aims to contribute to understanding the travel experience and, in the experimentation with mixed methodologies, to contribute to our theoretical frameworks through encouraging the reader to take a different journey of exploration.

This article applies a critical, deconstructive lens to examine the assumptions underpinning research in Indigenous tourism. The authors propose a conceptual typology to explore the presence, role and voice of Indigenous people within this body of research. The typology consists of four main positions, namely: invisible, identified, stakeholder, and Indigenous-driven. Examples of Indigenous tourism literature are then used to illustrate this paper's main argument, which is that although Indigenous tourism has been a topic of academic interest for over three decades, it is still predominantly driven by the needs and priorities of non-Indigenous people. Ultimately, it appears that Indigenous voice and presence as scholars and researchers within the Indigenous tourism literature remain elusive.

Indigenous tourism is an increasingly significant sector that can empower, encourage and promote Indigenous peoples and cultures. Defining Indigenous tourism remains open, as some definitions focus on Indigenous cultural products and experiences while other definitions emphasise Indigenous involvement and control. What is absent, however, is any definition that includes Indigenous peoples as tourists. This article employs an inductive approach to fill this gap in knowledge and uses the techniques of an evolving Indigenist paradigm that fits within the recognised ‘critical turn’ in tourism, and reflects the broader postmodernist shifts in research methodologies. It is based on a research collaboration between an Indigenous researcher and a non-Indigenous researcher who offer a preliminary exposition of topics that are made visible by examining Indigenous tourism through the lens of Indigenous peoples as active touring and travelling agents, through both historical and contemporary examples.

Indigenous researchers continuously challenge the structure of western-based research agendas in order to reframe and decolonise research. Integral to an Indigenous research paradigm is an understanding that researchers bring a particular world-view that is predicated on factors such as their gender, culture and socioeconomic status. For non-Indigenous researchers working in an Indigenous context the imperative to understand one's impact and position within the research becomes even more important. This reflective article considers the practice of reflexivity in an Indigenous context and discusses whether it enables the non-Indigenous researcher to contribute to the decolonising and reframing of research. Also considered is whether reflexivity can appear to contribute to reframing research, but still fail to address important issues such as interrogating the researcher's position in relation to the dominant western system of knowledge creation. In this article, I firstly outline an Indigenous research paradigm. Secondly, I make the link between engaging in reflexive practice and an Indigenous context and identify some limitations. Finally, I conclude that reflexivity will only lead to reframing and decolonising research if it also addresses deeper issues such as interrogating the systems of the dominant White culture.

This article presents an investigation of the embodied air travel experiences of people with disability. The study was informed by human rights frameworks, social approaches to disability and critical tourism. The research design included a review of newspaper articles, human rights complaint cases, open-ended responses to a survey on the tourism experiences of people with disabilities and semistructured in-depth interviews. The findings revealed that the air travel practices routinely contravened disability discrimination legislation and identified a series of socially constructed constraints across the air travel chain from the preplanning of trips through to disembarking after a flight. What emerged from these experiences was that the embodied individuals became (dis)embodied at each stage of the air travel chain. The inequitable, inaccessible, undignified and dependent practices resulted in heightened anxiety, increased helplessness and, in some cases, humiliation to which they were not subjected in their everyday lives.

The objective of this study was to contribute to the understanding of small tourism businesses (STBs) through an analysis of selected aspects in an urban setting, namely Akçakoca, Turkey. Particular attention was given to the characteristics of businesses, finance, marketing, human resource management, involvement of residents in the industry and management of STBs. The study employed a comparative research methodology using a survey instrument similar to those used by Thomas et al. (1997) for a study of tourism and small business development in the United Kingdom in 1996, and by Page et al. (1999) for a similar study in New Zealand in 1997. A sample of 87 businesses in Akçakoca was examined and their role in tourism evaluated. The findings of this study reveal that STBs carry significant deficiencies and inadequacies and face a common set of problems. The contribution to comparative research methodologies to tourism studies was also considered.

This purpose of this study is to ascertain U.S. hospitality and tourism management student's perceptions of jobs in the industry. To undertake this, students were asked to identify which factors were important when choosing a career and whether the hospitality and tourism offers these. Additionally, students were asked their perceptions towards a number of dimensions relating to careers in the hospitality and tourism industry. Overall, it is clear that respondents are generally happy with the careers being offered in hospitality and tourism and are committed to pursuing careers in the industry.

This study examines five important beneficial factors of cross-functional training for frontline supervisors in front office, restaurant and housekeeping departments in a sample of international tourist hotels in Taiwan. The research initially involved a Delphi technique with a panel of industrial experts and scholars to identify industrial domain skills and define multiskilled employees in the Taiwanese hotel context. A survey was then constructed and t test was used to explore any significant differences between multiskilled line supervisors and nonmultiskilled line supervisors. Five beneficial factors, namely service quality, retention, job satisfaction, higher payment and promotion, were examined in the study. Findings reveal that four of these factors are significant for front office and restaurant line supervisors, and two factors are significant for housekeeping line supervisors. These findings provide some useful ideas for attracting and retaining staff in Taiwanese hotels.

The purpose of this study was to explore the differences in initial status and growth trajectories of college students who did and did not participate in a voluntourism experience. A key objective of the study was to explore the backgrounds of the participants, comparing them to similar nonvoluntourists, to better understand what compelled them to spend their spring break engaged in community service in a distant location. The participants were 617 students at a university in the Midwestern United States, half of whom participated in a voluntour. Voluntourists reported higher levels of yearly civic engagement, civic attitude, openness, compassion, cognitive drive and reflectivity. The developmental disparities evident before the tour continued to grow over the course of five weeks. Implications for marketing, program design and education are discussed within the context of the burgeoning voluntourism industry.

This study proposes and tests a conceptual model that investigates whether customer orientation acts as a mediator of the relationship between job resourcefulness and hotel employee outcomes. The results from a survey of 145 frontline hotel employees in Iran suggest that customer orientation has a full mediating role in the relationship between job resourcefulness and role-prescribed customer service. Contrary to the hypothesised relationships, there is no empirical support for customer orientation as a mediator of the impact of job resourcefulness on job satisfaction and turnover intentions. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

This article critically reappraises a key concept in hospitality management (and specifically food and beverage management) — that of the meal experience. Focusing primarily on the commercial sense and applications of the concept, while recognising the many other contexts that provide a basis for much wider study of the phenomenon, the discussion questions the status of the meal experience as part of the ‘received wisdom’ of hospitality management on the grounds that empirical support for the concept, as represented in the published research literature, is limited both in quantity and evidential persuasiveness.

In a study seeking to understand destination choice, focus group participants consisting of travellers, mentioned the importance of ‘bragging rights’. Additionally, tourism marketers when interviewed about destination choice also referred to bragging rights. An online search of ‘travel’, ‘tourism’ and ‘bragging rights’ revealed thousands of links. Despite this, bragging rights has received limited attention in tourism research. This paper defines bragging rights, discusses its relevance to tourism and proposes a conceptual model suggesting how bragging rights can be managed by destination marketers to enhance destination image and consequently increase visitation.

This paper estimates the potential economic effects on the Australian tourism industry from the introduction of an economy wide carbon tax to be introduced in July 2012. The manner in which the tax is expected to work is examined together with a discussion of some concerns that have been raised by the tourism industry regarding its impacts on Australia's destination competitiveness, industry profitability and employment. Dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) modelling projects that the tax will lead to changes in key macroeconomic variables, reducing growth in real GDP, real consumption and employment. The simulation results also indicate that while some tourism industries in Australia will gain from the tax, most will experience contractions in output relative to baseline values in line with a general shrinkage of the tourism sector as a whole. In the light of the modelling simulations, the paper concludes with an assessment of the validity of the main stakeholder concerns regarding the implications of the tax for the Australian tourism industry.