Questioning Walking Tourism from a Phenomenological Perspective: Epistemological and Methodological Innovations

Abstract

This article aims to illuminate the overlooked entanglement of space, material practices, affects, and cognitive work emplaced in walking tourism. Walking as a tourism activity is generally practised in the open air away from crowded locations; therefore, it is being encouraged even more in this (post)pandemic era than prior to the pandemic. While walking is often represented as a relatively easy activity in common promotional discourse, this article argues that it is much more complex. It revises the notion of tourist place performance, focusing on walking both as a tourist practice and as a research method that questions multi-sensory and emotional walker engagement. While extensively revisiting literature on walking tourism and the most novel methodological innovations, the article draws from a walking tourism experience undertaken as part of a student trip to demonstrate that the emotions that arise from walkers’ embodied encounters with living, as well as inanimate elements, extend beyond what might be included in a simple focus on landscape “sights”. In conclusion, it is suggested that a phenomenological approach to walking may prove particularly useful for understanding key issues associated with space, place, and tourism mobilities.

Tour Route Recommendation Model by the Improved Symmetry-Based Naive Bayes Mining and Spatial Decision Forest Search

“…Their spatial accessibility is constrained by various factors, such as geographical coordinates, road distances, accessibility time, and transportation tools. Therefore, constructing a tour route model based on the recommended POIs is an effective way to obtain the optimal travel route [18][19][20]. We integrate the urban geospatial constraints and construct a POI tour route recommendation model based on the spatial decision tree algorithm.…”