According to the World Health Organisation, 16% of the world’s population lives with a disability, and this number is expected to rise, primarily due to the advances in medical science. People with disabilities are emerging as a new segment of tourists, and new technologies are creating new opportunities for people with disabilities to participate in tourism. The paper aims to assess the key concerns of tourists with disabilities, by analysing the range of topics they search for and comment on collaborative tourism platforms, as well as how these topics have changed over the past five years. Data was collected from the Accessible Travel Forum from Tripadvisor, and the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model was used for the analysis to identify the key topics that concern disabled travelers, emerging from the sample of 588 comments in the forum. The findings indicate that the most frequent topics are accessibility needs in air travel, cruise travel and in relation to accommodation services. The intensity of these topics has shown some fluctuations in the recent past; potentially due to travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, when air travel was restricted resulting in more interest in cruise travel. The findings bring implications to the industry as they provide an insight into a yet relatively underserved tourism segment.

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With the founding of the Belt and Road Initiative by China in 2013, a global project was created with the aim of shaping geopolitics and tourism. This position paper intends to investigate how German narratives about the BRI influence geopolitical and touristic imaginaries along its routes. The researchers of this study formulated three objectives, namely the identification of the importance of narrative in tourism, German narratives on the BRI and China and greater understanding of narration shaping processes along the BRI and its implications on tourism and geopolitics. The purpose of this paper is to analyse tourism and the BRI through a lens of public discourse, narratives and storytelling, understanding narratives as the ‘shapers’ of nation and tourist destination. Drawing on a mixed-methods approach, interviews and an online survey were conducted, whereby pieces of narratives on BRI, China and its relations to Europe were captured and then analysed. We argue that the Belt and Road Initiative as a malleable project, formed by geopolitics and tourism, has the potential to be part of a na(rra)tion building process, shaping tourism imaginaries as well as international relations, going far beyond the idea of a nation.

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In recent years, news media channels have been a central means to distribute touristic advertisements directed at young people. While the politicization of media and the shift in consumer habits in democratic and authoritarian countries have been documented in the fields of political science and media studies, its repercussions on tourism have not been studied yet. This position paper bridges this gap by examining how shifting media consumption patterns influence the effectiveness of touristic advertisements through a literature review and documents these changing consumer habits through a mixed methods study conducted with Russian and German university students. Key findings of this research reveal that a significant number of young Russians prefer using various private media for news, whereas Germans still tend to prefer state media. Despite this divergence, both groups engage heavily with social media, suggesting that it is the most promising means of tourism marketing.

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The objective of this study is to assess how employee outcomes in front office departments of Hungarian hotels are affected by the implementation of a standardized maturity model. The focus is to analyze the effects of maturing stages on job performance, job satisfaction, and personal and professional growth. In this study, front-office employees in Hungarian hotels were invited to provide feedback on their job performance, satisfaction, and growth as individuals and professionals regarding the implementation of a standardized process maturity model. The scope of the study was on the employees' perspectives on organizational maturity and its implications for service quality and continuous improvement. In this study, employees from independently owned Hungarian hotels are examined using a modified version of Humphrey’s (1988) 5 stage maturity model. The quantitative methodology used an online questionnaire, which was used-to gather data from 104 employees as part of a descriptive cross-sectional survey design. Data analysis included multiple regression and ANOVA. The findings revealed that employee outcomes are significantly enhanced by increasing the 5 maturity levels, especially in the areas of professional growth and job satisfaction, with the fifth optimal stage showing the biggest impacts. This study provides novel insights into the importance of the process maturity, in service quality management by reorienting the focus from management to employee perspectives. While the practical implications offer managers useful advice for improving both operational efficiency and employee engagement, the theoretical contribution of this study offers a greater understanding of the application of maturity models in the hotel sector.

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As our society changes rapidly in the face of digital imperatives, environmental concerns and social upheavals, we need to pose new questions to reflect on diversity, value, growth and transformation in this emergent global world order. This EATSA 2024 Germany conference assembles academics and practitioners from different backgrounds in tourism, culture and mobility research and practice to work within a narrative space to create a dialogue and ask – what is Europe? Why is Europe the most visited region on the planet? What are the imaginations that construct this idea of Europe? How do key cultural institutions and ritual practices such as food, religion and sports (and specifically football in this conference) contribute towards the making of European identity.