Junqi Li (p)

Luigi Celardo

In the context of the development of rural revitalisation as well as urban-rural integration, China attaches great importance to cultural tourism in rural areas, as it is a crucial tool to improve the condition of life of local communities, facilitate economic innovation, and promote rural revitalisation. To be more specific, the construction of cultural tourism towns is regarded as an imperative initiative to resolve urban-rural imbalance and promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, providing an effective path for rural areas to achieve sustainable development goals and new strategies for social governance. The relevant policies are also consistent with the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as the sustainable development goal 8.9 denotes: “By 2030, devise and implement policies to promote sustainable tourism that creates jobs and promotes local culture and products”.

Consequently, the Chinese government launched China’s 13th Five-Year Plan and Implementation of Rural Revitalization Strategy to develop cultural tourism towns with their unique cultural resources and tourism industry. In 2016, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development announced the first batch of 127 cultural tourism towns. The second batch of 276 towns was announced in the subsequent year. These policies accelerate the integration of tourism with cultural resources, which expands domestic demand and drives economic growth. Also, they improve the livelihoods of residents, attracting more industries, population, technologies, and capital flow into small towns, thus gradually forming a sustainable development pattern. However, cultural tourism towns are prone to challenges that have adverse impacts on their sustainability such as real-estatisation and environmental degradation, since it is a long-term project involving large investments. In this regard, this research aims to examine the sustainable level of cultural tourism towns as well as the policy efficiency by applying the mixed method. Thence, comprehensive solutions to the sustainable development of cultural tourism towns in China could be put forward.

Vasiliki Charalampidou (p)

Junqi Li

The tourism sector is an essential part of the Greek economy and a major vehicle for advancing culture because it contributes to economic growth on a local, regional, and national level.
An outline of the country’s tourism strategy for the current programming period, 2021–2025, may be found in the Ministry of Tourism’s Sectoral Development Program, which has been integrated into the National Development Program. It is a strategy paper on priorities and complementarity of touring with other sectors and policies of the EU, aimed at the eligibility of expenditure and related initiatives.
However, the Ministry of Environment and Energy has changed the way it arranges tourism in terms of space on multiple occasions over the years.
In 2009, the first Special Spatial Plan (SSP) for tourism was created, marking the beginning of the geographical planning and spatial organization of tourism in Greece. In addition to outlining various types of tourism (conference, urban, marine, cultural, religious, sports, etc.), this plan also included criteria and rules for spatial organization.
Subsequently, new classification criteria for the national territory were added to the SSP in 2013: (a) the level of tourism development, (b) geomorphological aspects, and (c) the sensitivity of natural and cultural resources. However, because the tactics were illegal, the Council of State overturned this.
Until recently, tourism operations were organized according to the new Regional Spatial Plans (RSP). Nevertheless, even these were found to be insufficient and lacking in many cases. The updated SSP for tourism, which was released today, identifies five categories of locations based on load level and sets new development directions.
The purpose of this proposal is to institutionally review the changes made to the guidelines and standards for classifying the country's PES tourism industry. The goal is to evaluate the SSP's regulations and specifications critically by using the SWOT Analysis method.
The Urban Reform Program, funded by the Recovery and Sustainability Fund (RFF), requires island space, coastal area management, and tourist destination capacities to be considered crucial factors in completing urban planning. This article offers a comprehensive and historical summary of the modifications and standards for Greece's tourism industry's spatial structure.

Antonio Almeida (p), Luís Machado da Luz

Vasiliki Charalampidou

In the tourism and regional development literature, the rural hinterland is understood as a neglected and struggling area welcoming further developments in the tourism sector and public investment to reverse the signs of potential population decline, loss of qualified human resources through emigration, lack of job opportunities and an ageing population. While most studies suggest that tourism development is a catalyst for growth, recent evidence suggests that the sector is ‘soaking up” resources, living and housing areas and talent from the surrounding areas and sectors. Based on the concept of “sponge cities”, we explore in this study the role of tourism in a holistic manner in order to identify both positive and negative impacts, beyond a mere analysis focused on environmental issues. Based on regional (panel) data, we analyze to what extent the development of the tourism sector contributes to higher levels of employment, average wages, increased participation of women in the labor market and to the sharp rise in property prices. In this study, we analyze the role of tourism in the rural hinterland of Madeira, as such areas were highly subsidized in recent years via EU grants and regional programs aiming at putting in place a road network and other critical assets aiming at reinforcing the social cohesion. However, recent evidence provided by the Statistical Office suggests the social gap is increasing again.

Marika Arena, Angela Stefania Bergantino, Alessandro Buongiorno (p), Maria Grazia Cito, Mario Intini, Francesco Scotti

Antonio Almeida

Regional development policies (RDPs) and related public funding opportunities are crucial for economic
and social development and for eliminating economic and social disparities within EU territories. Studies
to date have focused on analysing the territorial impact of all funded projects, concentrating mainly on
the regional and/or provincial level. However, it is important for policy-makers to have evidence of the
economic impact of these investments not only at a disaggregated geographical level but also with
reference to different sectors, considering that heterogeneous levels of local development can be achieved
depending on the economic activity to which RDP funds are allocated. The hypothesis is that the tourism
sector, which is so deeply rooted in the territory, can have significant spill-over effects. Indeed, RDP
investments have a potentially significant impact on the attractiveness of tourist destinations and the
profitability of businesses. Moreover, this sector absorbs an important part of these investments. In Italy,
for the 2017-2013 and 2014-2020 programming cycles, EUR 13.9 billion were dedicated to enhancing
territorial tourism attractiveness. However, among the studies that focus on the impact of RDPs, few
concern the tourism sector and none analyses their impact taking into account the municipal level.
This paper aims to assess the effects of RDP investments on territorial economic development and on the
performance of tourism firms in Italy. To this end, we focus on tourism projects financed (thematic
objective 6) or on projects of other thematic objectives that, however, refer to keywords strongly connected
to the tourism theme, using data from Open Cohesion (2007-2013 and 2014-2020 programming cycles).
The sample consists of 11,700 projects for more than 5,000 beneficiaries, of which 60% public and 40%
private, amounting to a total of 6.2 billion euro of public funds from the European Regional Development
Fund (ERDF), the National Fund for Development and Cohesion (FSC), the Action Plan for Cohesion
(APC) and the National Operational Programme (PON).
The analysis will be conducted at two levels. One is at the municipal level, aggregating the investments
related to tourism projects for each Italian municipality to quantify their impact on territorial
development and attractiveness (in terms of number of tourists, presences, length of stay, average tourist
expenditure, etc.). The second is at company level, investigating whether these funds improve
performance in terms of increased revenues or reduced costs for beneficiary tourism firms. For this
analysis, individual company profiles and performance indicators will be collected. Policy evaluation
techniques such as difference-in-differences, propensity score matching, and synthetic control will be used
to estimate the possible effects of the RDP at municipal and enterprise levels. Furthermore, spatial
analysis will be carried out to assess territorial leakages of the investments in neighboring regions/areas.
In particular, heterogeneity between territories with different territorial capital endowments and
between sets of firms with comparable characteristics will be analysed.
This analysis can provide information on more targeted and effective regional and territorial development
policies, thus enhancing the attractiveness and development of the Italian tourism sector and the
performance of tourism firms.

Nadine Levratto, Mathieu Bernard, Giuseppe Arcuri, Michelangelo Misuraca, Luigi Celardo (p)

Alessandro Buongiorno

Reputation is one of the most crucial aspects for any business today, and consumers increasingly feel involved in its creation and evolution. The analysis of digital platforms that host opinions on products and services has become fundamental both for economic operators and users. Particularly in the tourism sector, the favourable opinion of those with a travel experience can affect the price level at which services (e.g., accommodations or attraction tickets) are sold. In this work, we propose to analyse the hotel offering in Paris during the 2024 Olympic Games. Starting from a set of TripAdvisor reviews, the polarity scores of each hotel are calculated using a linguistic model called FlauBERT, pre-trained on a huge and heterogeneous French textual body. Language models have become essential for achieving cutting-edge results in many natural language processing tasks. Subsequently, the results are represented on “thermal” geographic maps considering both spatial and semantic dimensions. Attention is paid to the variation of prices before, during and after the Olympic event, jointly considering the evolution of the sentiment extrapolated for each accommodation and other key characteristics, such as the hotel rating, the hotel typology, the number of rooms, the number of reviews, the cleanliness, service, and environment ratings. The strategy proposed here constitutes a valuable tool for the organisation and the management of big events that can have a tourist interest. The approach is developed within a geographic information framework that uses social media to understand human narrative experiences and their evolution over time, and it can be usefully applied in an economic context under cost-benefit analyses and in business models to study specific areas of interest and plan possible intervention strategies.