Guest editorial

Citation

Albayrak, T. and Caber, M. (2011), "Guest editorial", Journal of Modelling in Management, Vol. 6 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jm2.2011.29706caa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Modelling in Management, Volume 6, Issue 3

As guest editors of Journal of Modelling in Management for this special issue on “Modelling in Tourism Management”, we are pleased to introduce this research work which might be of interest to academics and practitioners who follow the latest research topics and developments in tourism management. We also hope to receive feedback and any criticism from the readers of the journal about the articles included here, so that we can encourage the authors to improve their work. This might also benefit other researchers who want to extend their studies in the area of modelling in tourism.

In the last five decades especially, the role and importance of quantitative research in tourism has been well understood because of the emerging need for methodological evidence related to theoretical assumptions. Furthermore, the inter-disciplinary characteristics of tourism management enabled tourism researchers to undertake more collective studies with researchers from other disciplines (such as economics, psychology, sociology and biology). With its growing scope of research and complex characteristics, tourism management has become therefore an attractive research field for all researchers. In the near future, it should be expected to see more model proposals, modelling techniques and monothetic research perspectives in the tourism literature which may generate new pursuits in return. In this special issue, the main aim of the editors was to demonstrate the importance of tourism modelling in the managerial success of companies and tourism destinations. In this publication, readers can find two macro-economic analyses (Guy Assaker, Vincenzo Esposito Vinzi and Peter O’Connor; Ruth Rios-Morales, Dragan Gamberger, Ian Jenkins and Tom Smuc), one application of theory of planned behavior (Theera Erawan, Donyaprueth Krairit and Do Ba Khang), one modelling approach dealing with the cost-control in restaurants (Hara Kostakis, George Boskou and George Palisidis), and a numerical simulation of seawater intrusion (Sarva Mangala Praveena, Mohd Harun Abdullah, Ahmad Zaharin Aris, Mazlin Mokhtar and Kawi Bidin), all prepared by notable researchers. These studies are carefully selected from many submissions that were evaluated in terms of their academic contributions to the existing literature and reviewed by two anonymous referees. It took us more than a year to complete the evaluation of reviewers, chosen to decide which were the best articles for this special issue. For us, each of them has the strength to influence the existing pattern of thought, and are expected to be cited by many scholars in the near future.

Hara Kostakis, George Boskou and George Palisidis, for example, in their study entitled “Modelling activity-based costing in restaurants”, offered an integrated model to estimate cost drivers in restaurants by integrating three analytical techniques; simulation modelling, activity-based costing and association rule mining. The study contributes to the literature in the areas of cost accounting and cost driver estimation, and presents some amazing findings with regard to the most favourite menu items of a restaurant.

Guy Assaker, Vincenzo Esposito Vinzi and Peter O’Connor examined economical, environmental and societal variables of 162 countries by using the Euromonitor International 2004 data and estimated the effects of those variables on tourism destination flows in the article “Modelling a tourism causality network for tourism development: an empirical analysis”. The analytical findings show that the economy has indirect effects on the tourism flows of countries via the infrastructure and environment, but does not directly affect tourism flows in contrast to previous studies. These authors suggest that missing data and environmental quality measurement issues should be taken into consideration in future studies.

Ruth Rios-Morales, Dragan Gamberger, Ian Jenkins and Tom Smuc on the other hand, generated a predictive model to detect relevant and meaningful relationships between government policies and tourism investments in the article entitled “Modelling investment in the tourism industry using the World Bank’s good governance indicators”. These authors investigated the good governance (GG) indicators of 30 countries (ten developed, ten developing and ten emerging tourist destinations) with the help of the GG indicators of the World Bank (2009) and the tourism gross capital formation (TGCF) from the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC, 2009) data. They grouped the countries into A and B groups. A group countries (with a high relative increase in TGCF) and B group countries (slowly increasing countries with respect to TGCF) are compared to each other. In this way, the most relevant correlations between significant TGCF changes and GG data are examined, in addition to the:

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  influence of GG on TGCF changes;

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  influence of TGCF changes on political stability; and

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  long-term sustainability of investment in the tourism industry, which are also identified.

The findings point out that regulatory quality is the most relevant indicator of the top performing countries and there is a strong correlation between TGCF and government effectiveness.

Theera Erawan, Donyaprueth Krairit and Do Ba Khang investigated the role of information search in consumer decision with an adaptation of the theory of planned behavior in tourism management in their article entitled “Tourists’ external information search behavior model: the case of Thailand”. They preferred to examine consumer external information behavior and its determinants, instead of analyzing the durable or tangible product categories. Based on the literature review, expert interviews and an exploratory field study, a reliable set of new scale measurements was developed. The structural equation modelling results and the goodness-of-fit indices provided have shown that these new scale measurements should be taken into consideration in the further studies about tourists’ external information search.

Finally, Sarva Mangala Praveena, Mohd Harun Abdullah, Ahmad Zaharin Aris, Mazlin Mokhtar and Kawi Bidin study has an exceptional status for this special issue. Although their study entitled “Numerical simulation of seawater intrusion in Manukan Island, East Malaysia” looks directly unrelated to tourism management, its modelling technique and approach to the geographic and biological threats of the world is a good example of practice for other tourism destinations. In their study, the authors attempt to define the current and potential extent of seawater intrusion in Manukan Island under different scenarios of varying recharge and pumping rates. A simulation technique was carried out using SEAWAT-2000 (the latest modelling software) which couples flow and transport together.

We hope that the readers of the Journal of Modelling in Management would find useful the content of this special issue for their studies in tourism management and modelling.

Many thanks to Professor Luiz Moutinho who gave us this opportunity. We always admire his energy, devotion and gentleness.

Tahir Albayrak, Meltem CaberGuest Editors