Compassionas a neglected motivator for sustainable tourism

Abstract

Compassion is defined and identified in this paper as a powerful and universal motivator for actions that could help attain sustainable outcomes and enable aspirational forms of sustainable tourism, including just tourism, hopeful tourism and enlightened mass tourism that have not yet demonstrated real-world traction. Despite its potential, compassion has been neglected in the tourism literature. This paper reviews the 50 year quest for a "better tourism", and presents a compassion-scape as a comprehensive and systematic framework for facilitating sector engagement with compassion. "Context" factors associated with tourism settings (e.g. level of development, purpose) and agents (e.g. mindset, psychographics, motivations) influence "encounter" elements such as the relationship, type, and distress characteristics. Subsequent "response" factors such as type, recipient, timeframe and intention influence the "implications" for sustainable tourism, which in turn affect the types of "intervention" (e.g. mindful interpretation, social marketing, faith injunction) implemented to achieve sustainable outcomes. The many innate methodological challenges for the researcher in measuring compassion are discussed, along with the issues involved in operationalizing the compassion-scape to engage and reform alternative tourism forms, notably volunteer tourism, pro-poor tourism, religious tourism and fair trade tourism as well as conventional mass tourism. A paper for the thinking reader.

Exploring the antecedents of sustainable tourism development

“…This is of particular concern to destinations dependent on vulnerable ecological characteristics to stimulate tourism (Giglio et al, 2018), or those in regions where extant infrastructure, legislation, and experience is not robust enough to accommodate the impact of an influx of visitors and the detrimental effect this can have on environmental sustainability (Hashemi and Ghaffary, 2017). While there has been a concerted move to safeguard and protect the ecological and natural characteristics of many sites and destinations within both the developed and developing world (He et al, 2018), much of this is underpinned by tourist-recognition of their impact on the destinations they visit (Weaver and Jin, 2016). Nonetheless, addressing the in-situ ecological impact of tourist presence (Kuščer et al, 2017), and certification schemes (He et al, 2018) have stimulated a degree of success in promoting environmental sustainability in order to safeguard the longevity of destinations.…”

Residents Open Their Homes to Tourists When Disaster Strikes

“…With the sharing economy on the rise, this is an important area for future research. A number of factors potentially influencing residents' support could be studied which have not been included in the present study: compassion (Weaver and Jin 2016), past experience of hosting guests, frequency of general technical use, and safety concerns. It would be of great value if a comprehensive conceptual model of resident support in times of crisis could be developed.…”

Presence in affective heritagescapes: connecting theory to practice

“…An increasing body of research in tourism studies following geography's emotional turn (Birenboim, 2016;Buda, D'Hauteserre, & Johnston, 2014;Curtin & Kragh, 2014;Pearce, Strickland-Munro, & Moore, 2017;Pocock, 2015;Weaver & Jin, 2016) reveals the complexity of tourist encounters and thereby the importance of considering 'multivocal heritage processes' (Shea, 2018, p. 42). Such approaches challenge the traditional visitor experience structures dictated by what Laurajane Smith has called an 'authorized heritage discourse' (hereafter, AHD) (2006) through which 'experts' decide how visitors should engage and interact with certain sites based on different valued elements and the most common emotional responses they evoke.…”