Current debates in tourism & development studies

It is a world of accelerated economic, social and cultural change, driven by the process of globalization, rapid technological progress, and the communication and information revolutions. The world is currently witnessing unprecedented changes, including shifts in the global balance of power, people living in cities more than ever, and new technologies revolutionizing social behaviours and entire industries (UNDP, 2014). One of the industries affected by these changes is tourism, with resultant changes in the behaviour of tourists/visitors in this new era of post-industrial tourism (Hughes, 2003; Cohen & Cohen, 2012; Yang et al., 2018). When reviewing tourism and development literature, some issues stand out in current debates which are special interest tourism (Agarwal et al., 2018), virtual reality and virtual tourism (Tussyadiah et al., 2018), event tourism (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2018), tourism and animal ethics (Cohen, 2018), experience economy and tourism (Chang, 2018), vegan/ vegetarian tourism (Sermento et. al., 2018), critical consideration on tourism (Chamber & Rakic, 2018), tourism and mobilities (Cooper, 2018) gender and tourism (Wearing et al., 2018), sustainable development and tourism (Saarinen, 2018), and transforming tourism (Higham & Miller, 2018)