He has undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in tourism and hospitality management and a PhD in human geography completed at King's College London. His research interests include cultural and historical geographies of Eastern Europe, critical heritage studies, heritage tourism, service quality in hospitality, and innovation in tourism and hospitality management.
Amidst key emergent challenges for Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) and destinations triggered by changes in the funding and governance landscape for tourism on a global scale, Distributed Leadership (DL) has emerged as a promising concept to provide a collaborative framework for channelling resources and leadership to cope with such changes. Current evidence from academic literature discussing the importance of embedding shared forms of leadership is scarce, few studies discuss the application of DL in the context of DMOs.The key purpose of this conceptual study is to provide a critical overview of key DL contributions in the mainstream and DMO academic literature. The study seeks to examine the relevance of DL in the context of DMOs with the purpose to stimulate future empirical investigations in the application of DL in DMO organisations.
This paper provides an exploratory investigation into contemporary interpretation methods used in historic gardens and their fundamental role in enhancing the visitor experience, and sense of a place. The importance of conceptualising and operationalising interpretation in historic gardens has received relatively little attention across the extant body of heritage interpretation literature. English Heritage's Wrest Park-which is amongst England's most prominent historic gardens-is used as a case study. A series of semi-structured interviews (n = 65) with Wrest Park visitors-who had the opportunity to experience new interpretation methods provided on-site-have been carried out in an attempt to explore their sense of place through interpretation. The research suggests that interpretation has a fundamental role to play in 'telling the story' of historic gardens with 92.5% of the sample understanding elements of the place's history, significance and evolution. The findings further suggest the presence of two distinct visitor typologies-history explorers and leisure seekers. The paper concludes with a call for more empirical investigations of interpretation techniques in historic gardens and their contribution to enhancing the visitor experience and sense of place.
The research explores post-pandemic travel intentions, the availability of travel funds and accommodation preferences in Bulgaria and Azerbaijan – two countries with similar demographic and territorial characteristics but relatively different consumption patterns and tourist behaviour. In both countries, tourism forms a major part of the national economy and it has been hit by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The findings reveal major differences between the responses received in these countries in terms of how respondents perceive the current phase of the pandemic, and of post-pandemic travel intentions. The study concludes that it will be difficult to implement a common strategy for a post-pandemic tourism recovery.
The 1989 fall of the Iron Curtain marked the beginning of new economic, socio-cultural and political realities for the former socialist states in Central and Eastern Europe. Along with the economic restructuring from statecentralised to market economy, democratisation and liberalisation initiated a transformation of the socialist urban space, which was characterised by the changing role of its iconic landmarks. This conceptual paper examines these post-1989 changes, which range between the removal of these landmarks and their transition into market led iconic and flagship attractions. The paper identifies the changing role of tourism from a topbottom orchestrated to a market led activity, which explains the transformation of some of these landmarks. It introduces a new framework for studying this process by suggesting that iconisation, de-iconisation and re-iconisation processes are interrelated to other strategies and approaches to the transition of the socialist urban landscape into a western market economy. The paper identifies avenues for further research and provides some recommendations for improving the management of similar processes.
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