This study analyzed the effects of the combined psychological characteristics of risk-taking and sensation seeking on the travel behavior and preferred tourist activities of young adults on leisure trips. The results of this cross-cultural study, which was conducted among 1,429 students at 11 universities located in 11 different countries, found that respondents with high combined risk-taking and sensation seeking (RSS) scores differed significantly in their travel behavior, mode of destination choice, preferred tourist activities and demographics, from those who had low RSS scores. The study also discovered a significant difference between nationalities on RSS scores.

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The present study evaluates the value of tourists’ blogs as a research data source by using them to evaluate the tourist experience and to assess their influence on the decision-making process of prospective tourists. The blogs of 103 tourists visiting South Tyrol, 32 written in English and 71 written in Italian, were analyzed using textual and image content analysis. The text of 246 comments posted to these blogs was analyzed to evaluate the possible influence of bloggers’ narrative on prospective tourists. The results show cultural differences in the way tourists use blogs. Italian blogs appear to have more potential to influence the decision-making process of prospective visitors since their comments often contain recommendations and authors’ declaration of their own future intentions to travel to South Tyrol. They also demonstrate significant potential for revealing market-relevant aspects of tourists’ experience although they do not always convey the ‘experience essence’.

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The present paper reviews the innovation literature related to tourism and examines the twin problems of operational definitions and measurement of innovation in the tourism sector. A conceptual model is then proposed by which the most relevant aspects of innovation and the most relevant aspects of the "tourism experience" can be integrated conceptually, and which can guide the development of related operational definitions and measurements and lead to a standardization of, and therefore an ability to aggregate, tourism innovation statistics across products, providers, markets and geopolitical regions. The model first categorizes innovations along two dimensions: an "invention-adoption" continuum and an "impact-on-the-tourism-experience" dimension, which includes accessibility, affective transformation, convenience and value. How the use of these categories can direct attention to important definitional and measurement issues are discussed as is how their use can improve the comparability of tourism innovation data collected from disparate sources. Finally, a third dimension, the economic impact of the innovation, is introduced to the model. The paper concludes with impli-Serena Volo is Researcher with the

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