Tourism Dynamics: New Perspectives and Changing Directions

The travel, tourism and hospitality fields have seen dramatic changes during the last four decades (Gursoy & Sandstrom, 2016). These fields are considered as fairly young academic disciplines, whilst their brief history has ended up in a lack of consensus on their exposure and scope (Kandampully et al., 2014). According to Min et al. (2016), tourism and hospitality have been recently identified as independent academic categories (Web of Science), showcasing the substantial progression of the disciplines. This is due to the widespread contribution of tourism in local societies and national economies through the provision of economic development, the creation of job opportunities, the inclusion of locals in community participation and the enhancement of participatory democ- racy, the increase of income, the improvement of life quality, the creation of infrastructure, and the provision of opportunities for the preservation of natural and built environment (Farmaki, 2015). However, the tourism and hospitality industries are susceptible to risks and crises (Pappas, 2018), and tourism planners need to carefully take under consideration any current and future dynamics that may result in considerable change and create new challenges and opportunities (Pappas, 2021).