Taking a Road Less Travelled: Welcome to Tourism and Hospitality

Editorial Taking a Road Less Travelled: Welcome to Tourism and Hospitality Brian Garrod 1, * , Jarkko Saarinen 2,3 , Sergio Moreno-Gil 4 , Svetlana Stepchenkova 5 , Dimitrios Buhalis 6 , Alan Fyall 7 , Tazim Jamal 8, * and Lori Pennington-Gray 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 * School of Management, Swansea University, Bay Campus, Fabian Way, Swansea SA1 8EN, UK Geography Research Unit, FI-90014 University of Oulu, P.O. Box 3000 Oulu, Finland; jarkko.saarinen@oulu.fi School of Tourism and Hospitality, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, Johannesburg P.O. Box 524, South Africa UNESCO Chair on Touristic Planning and Sustainable Development, Institute of Sustainable Tourism and Economic Development—TIDES, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 35001 Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain; sergio.moreno@ulpgc.es Department of Tourism, Hospitality and Event Management, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA; svetlana.step@ufl.edu (S.S.); penngray@hhp.ufl.edu (L.P.-G.) Department of Marketing, Strategy and Innovation, Faculty of Management, Bournemouth University, Bournemouth BH12 5BB, UK; dbuhalis@bournemouth.ac.uk Rosen College of Hospitality Management, University of Central Florida, 9907 Universal Blvd., Orlando, FL 32819, USA; alan.fyall@ucf.edu Department of Recreation, Park and Tourism Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-2261, USA; tjamal@tamu.edu Correspondence: brian.garrod@swansea.ac.uk Received: 24 September 2020; Accepted: 24 September 2020; Published: 27 September 2020



 Message from the Editor-in-Chief: Prof. Dr. Brian Garrod It is my privilege to serve as founding editor of our new journal, Tourism and Hospitality, and my pleasure to welcome you to its pages. Our goal as a journal is to serve the academic community by providing a forum for cutting-edge scholarly papers in the broad areas of tourism and hospitality, as well as at the intersection between the two. Tourism and Hospitality may feel like a departure from the usual journal model and format, but I believe that is a good thing. The poet Robert Frost wrote: “Two roads diverged in a wood and I–I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” I believe that Tourism and Hospitality is indeed taking a less-travelled road but also that the journey will be an exciting one and that getting to the destination will be worthwhile. As an open-access journal, we offer truly global readership, wide exposure for your ideas, and the potential for your work to have the highest possible impact. We also offer rapid publication while not compromising on production quality. We do all this while maintaining the strictest standards of scholarship and peer-review. I invite you, therefore, to travel with us by submitting your papers. We seek to publish not only applied and theoretical research papers, but also critical review papers and short communications. Interdisciplinary approaches are especially welcome, as is the submission of papers that will also be of relevance to industry and practitioners. A journey made in good company is always more pleasurable. Message from the Editorial Board Members Prof. Dr. Jarkko Saarinen: Tourism and hospitality are widely known as highly dynamic and transforming economic activities with diverse social, environmental and political impacts and implications in various scales. Nowadays, the world around tourism and hospitality is also changing rapidly, Tour. Hosp. 2020, 1, 20–22; doi:10.3390/tourhosp1010002 www.mdpi.com/journal/tourismhosp Tour. Hosp. 2020, 1 21 demanding a greater understanding of the sectors and their needs, impacts, resilience and adaptative capacity. Changing environment and external shocks, like COVID-19, challenge many of the traditional approaches on how we plan, develop and manage tourism and hospitality and the ways the sectors can contribute to sustainable development. All this calls for prompt and cutting-edge research on issues such as planning, development and management of environmental, economic and social impacts, social innovations and responsibility, sustainability, ethics and partnerships in tourism and hospitality. These are among the key issues the journal welcomes us to think about and advance in our research. Prof. Dr. Sergio Moreno-Gil: New times, new methods, new insights. This open-access journal publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research across the broad fields of tourism and hospitality. This brand-new journal offers a great opportunity for rapid publication in the current context, where evolution and fast changes are critical. We count on your contribution to keep improving our global knowledge on tourism and hospitality, and in designing a better future. Dr. Svetlana Stepchenkova: Recently, we have been once again reminded how deeply the tourism and hospitality industry is affected by politics, epidemics, and environmental disasters. Problems are never ending in our fast-moving world and they require fast but well-researched responses. Theory development, creative research design, and new methods of data handling and analyses are some of the ways in which our research community can respond to the challenges that the industry faces. The open-access Tourism and Hospitality aspires to be an outlet where industry problems can be introduced to the innovative ideas needed to solve them. Prof. Dr. Dimitrios Buhalis: Tourism and Hospitality has been expanding rapidly as an emerging discipline. COVID-19 has made many people realise how important tourism and hospitality is for many communities around the world. On a personal level, it made everybody realise how important tourism and travel is for connecting with people, exploring the world and supporting mental health. The rapid development of tourism and hospitality research not only helps us understand the tourism phenomenon better but also brings techniques and methodologies to help manage the ecosystem in a more sustainable way. Using a range of multidisciplinary approaches, we need to explore innovative ways to recover from COVID-19 and ensure that tourism is developed, managed and marketed sustainably. This open-access journal offers an opportunity to advance the knowledge in this area. Prof. Dr. Alan Fyall: The world of tourism and hospitality continues to change, with the current pandemic set to transform the industry, management practice, and academic research long into the future. Traditional research methods, research questions, and modes of academic publication, will all be subject to change as the world readjusts and refocuses its efforts on the issues that matter most. Tourism and Hospitality is thus very timely in its arrival and in its ambition to be inclusive, critical and agenda-setting for the future of research in this most dynamic and impactful industry. Prof. Dr. Tazim Jamal: Today more than ever, spreading research and knowledge through openaccess platforms is gravely needed. This new journal offers such an opportunity on the very subject for which communities and destinations, businesses and governments, are seeking guidance and insight: tourism and hospitality. Join us in the search for resilient futures and communal well-being through tourism and hospitality, share your critical and applied research worldwide! Dr. Lori Pennington-Gray: Tourism and hospitality is a rapidly evolving field thanks to new advances in transportation, access to destinations, and new technologies, to name but a few factors that have allowed greater travel to destinations, both developed as well as emerging. A wide range of actors in the industry allows for a multi-sectoral, interdisciplinary approach to examining complex, dynamic problems. Answers to these problems can aid in the advancement of our industry in an everchanging world. The editorial board of this journal welcomes new innovative, multimethod, multidisciplinary work to progress our knowledge of the field. Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest. Tour. Hosp. 2020, 1 22 Short Biography of the Editor-in-Chief Brian Garrod is Professor of Marketing at Swansea University. He has published more than 50 papers (Scopus h index 68) in the area of tourism and hospitality, as well as a large number of book chapters and eight books. His book “Managing Visitor Attractions”, with Alan Fyall and Anna Leask (who both serve on the editorial board of Tourism and Hospitality), is soon to be published in its third edition. He has worked as a consultant to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) as well as with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Prof. Garrod has also undertaken research for several government bodies at the European Union, UK, Wales and local levels. He is a member of the UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund and has also served as an expert reviewer for the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme. He is a member of the National Jury of the Green Key eco-labelling scheme in Wales. His particular academic interests include ecotourism, heritage tourism and the relationship between photography and tourism. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).