World Tourism Cities: A Systematic Approach to Urban Tourism is written by two leading academics. Prof Alastair M. Morrison of the University of Greenwich and Dr Cristina Maxim of the University of West London have authored the first book that systematically introduces tourism cities on a global scale, especially focusing on urban and metropolitan tourism destinations in the 2020s. It makes a meaningful and timely contribution to the topic by collating a wide range of literature and tourism city examples. This book combines academic research, industry insights and up-to-date data. It is of excellent value to three types of audiences: students and instructors in the tourism area; professionals interested in developing and managing tourism cities; researchers in the field.
The authors’ vision was to provide a systematic approach to urban tourism management.
They take readers on a journey from the definition of world tourism cities to various aspects illustrated with examples through twelve chapters. This book begins with an explanation of urban tourism, a definition of world tourism cities and an introduction to the city rating systems. The first chapter does a commendable job of setting the context and defining the scope of world tourism cities. Chapter 2 talks about globalisation and summarises the advantages and disadvantages of globalisation for tourism and world tourism cities. This chapter especially introduces the PESTEL-RV model, which includes the perspectives of city residents and visitors, holistically evaluating the impacts of globalisation on world tourism cities. Chapter 3 focuses on the phenomenon of urbanisation and how it has contributed to the development of urban tourism. Chapter 4 explains the city destination management concept and emphasizes the multifunctional, multidimensional and multipurpose nature of urban tourism. Chapter 5 describes the tourism planning process for world tourism cities and discusses the impacts of tourism development. Chapter 6 introduces the marketing and branding of world tourism cities. This chapter also offers insights into the prominent role of city destination management organisations by providing diverse cases as examples. Chapter 7 defines the quality of life and demonstrates the importance of resident well-being for city tourism destination management. Chapter 8 discusses the impacts of tourism and presents sustainability measures and policies adopted by tourism cities. The authors also explain the contribution of world tourism cities to achieving the 17 UNWTO Sustainable Development Goals. Chapter 9 elaborates on the concepts of smart tourism and smart cities. Additionally, this chapter reviews the challenges associated with the rapid progress of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) and the benefits that ICTs bring to tourism destinations. Chapter 10 reviews the crises and disasters that influence world tourism cities and introduces crisis management approaches, such as the crisis signal detection framework and social-mediated crisis communication model. Chapter 11 is about the rise of the Asian world tourism cities, the issues and challenges for those cities and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Chapter 12 provides a comprehensive summary of this book and future opportunities for world tourism cities.
The 12 chapters are arranged in a funnel-type structure with more encompassing explanations of concepts and theories, followed by disparate sub-topics of more focused themes. It is remarkable that the authors wrote this book with a student-friendly tone. The complicated frameworks or research findings are presented in an easy-to-follow manner. Each chapter includes an abstract, keywords, learning objectives, case study, sweet tweet, summary comments and thought questions. This structure highlights the critical information, seamlessly integrates examples and cases with each topic, and inspires readers to think. Therefore, this book is highly recommended for students in the tourism management major. Furthermore, each chapter makes effective use of tables and figures to demonstrate differences in related concepts, such as the seven steps of the tourism planning process, seventeen potential tourism developments and themes for city destinations, and the 10 As model for city tourism development factors.
The case studies in each chapter are a further strength of the book, providing an international perspective by incorporating tourism cities from distinct parts of the world, such as Orlando, Cape Town, Dubai, Copenhagen, Calgary, Vienna, Valencia, Bangkok, Singapore and Shanghai. The best practices can serve as a guide for professionals to develop and manage tourism cities successfully and strategically. The cases are up-to-date and related to the topic of each chapter, which helps readers to understand the concepts and practical applications. The merit of the cases is that this book gives more prominence to smaller world tourism cities, like Málaga, which reminds readers of the diversity of world tourism cities. The topics, examples, and data offer an excellent resource for university instructors to prepare background information on tourism cities. Furthermore, this book contains both a city index and a subject index, which are seldom found in other textbooks. The indexes help readers easily locate content on specific cities or certain topics. The attraction names (e.g. CN Tower, Macao Heritage Trail and Taj Mahal) are also included in the subject index. Readers do not need to read through the whole book to learn from the examples but can use those indexes as useful guides to quickly read the book. Additionally, these comprehensive indexes enable instructors to integrate the cities and attractions as cases into classes efficiently.
Another highlight of this book is the comprehensive literature that serves as a synthesis of previous theories and research on tourism cities. For instance, the authors provide a timeline of the evolution of urban tourism research in Chapter 3, which demonstrates the five stages, including initiation, development, growth, recognition and consolidation. The academic research on the quality of life for both city residents and visitors is reviewed and summarized in Chapter 7. These literature reviews not only give insights into the academic perspectives but also provide a theoretical foundation for good practical examples.
In addition to the textbook, the extensive set of PowerPoint slides that accompany the book is another valuable contribution. The slides were designed very professionally, including concise texts, infographics, photos, diagrams, SmartArt graphs and tables. It is unusual for authors to put much effort into resources to enhance teaching and student learning, but this book does a fantastic job in offering high-quality slides, reflecting the vividness and creativity of the book’s illustration program.
One suggestion that could be made for this book would be to incorporate more of the onward thinking on world tourism cities and its research agenda. A research agenda would provide implications for researchers on the direction of future research and extend the knowledge of world tourism cities. The authors have done an excellent job in providing cases and examples from different cities around the world. This book only contains materials on a limited number of cities in Oceania, such as Auckland in New Zealand and Perth in Western Australia. As Australia plays a critical role in providing unique tourism experiences, it would be even better if more Australian cities could be included as cases.
If the authors have the opportunity to prepare a second edition, they are suggested to add more chapters, making it more of a textbook. It would enable the authors to include more detailed regional coverage such as for Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. What is more, it would be better if the publisher could produce the book in colour as this would increase the effectiveness of the images. It is difficult to fully tell the story of tourism in only black and white. The beautiful and colourful collection of photos in the PowerPoint slides could also be presented inside the textbook.
Overall, World Tourism Cities: A Systematic Approach to Urban Tourism is an important contribution to tourism scholarship and a great textbook for students who want to learn about the world tourism cities, as well as the management, planning, development, marketing and branding of those cities. It offers an inclusive range of theoretical and practical perspectives through the different cases. The goal of the book is to “address the particular situation of urban and metropolitan tourism destinations in the 2020s” (p. xii). The authors have succeeded in achieving this goal. The recent examples of tourism city management and the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic have also been provided, which is a timely and excellent learning resource for students. Instructors of classes on such topics could use this book to prepare background information or as a recommended reading. It is also a must-read for researchers whose research interests include tourism cities, destination management, smart cities and sustainability. Additionally, the diverse models and cases have implications for practitioners and policymakers on how to develop and manage tourism cities. This book is essential reading for tourism students, instructors, researchers and practitioners.
