Exploring the neglected voices of children in sustainable tourism development: A comparative study in six European tourist destinations

Abstract

For years, sustainable tourism has commanded the attention of academics and practitioners given its achievement through participatory planning. However, much research in the area has neglected to consider all voices of those (i.e., children) affected by tourism. This study, employing a post-test only experimental design, addresses this gap by including the voices of 498 children from six diverse European destinations concerning perceptions of tourism. Results show that children are willing to express their opinions given the opportunity. Moreover, their attitude towards tourists is negative, while they perceive locals to hold a subordinate position to tourists. In general, this study offers insight into children's attitudes to tourism from the host perspective, demonstrating that there is a unique insider's perspective that needs further research.

Specialty grand challenge: wherever tourism arrives, society notes it first!

“…Young people are often perceived as not significantly contributing to family tourism businesses (Canosa and Schänzel, 2021), and our knowledge of child labor issues within tourism is limited (Yang et al, 2020). Yet, there is a generation of young people whose lives have been affected by tourism from birth resulting in holding negative attitudes toward tourists and seeing little future in tourism employment and businesses (Koščak et al, 2023). As part of a broader social justice agenda, children's roles, as economic and social actors in tourism, need to be addressed, by taking a child-inclusive approach to research, which is considered critical in tourism policy, and planning to privilege children's rights, their participation, and wellbeing (Canosa and Schänzel, 2021).…”

Innovation Research in Tourism and Hospitality Field: A Bibliometric and Visualization Analysis

“…In this study, cooccurrence of keywords, co-citation, and collaboration bibliometric visualization techniques have been used to show the various structural characteristics of tourism innovation research such as conceptual and intellectual structure. This would likely help researchers interested in tourism innovation research after pandemic, to comprehend the topic from different dimensions with sustainability goals and technological environment [31,[78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87].…”

Adult children traveling with parents: exploring travel conflict and parents’ subjective well-being

“…However, existing research on family travel for young children, whether it is the “touristic fun centered” family travel activities (Bakir and Baxter, 2011) or the “kids centered” parent-child travel activities (Ren et al , 2019), can see the “dominant” role of parents in tourism activities (Zhong et al , 2020). Although these studies are all about children, they ignore children’s voices from the perspective of parents, treating children as passive actors (Koak et al , 2021; Poria and Timothy, 2014; Yang et al , 2020b).…”