• Energy Research

Urbanization in China is considered an important force for global sustainable development. In particular, China’s urbanization is of great significance to achieve the Millennium Goals of the UN. Hence, an in-depth understanding of China’s urbanization sustainable development process and model of sustainable development is urgently needed. As a result, this study examines the sustainable development of urbanization using China as an example through a survey method. Specifically, sustainable development of urbanization is examined from the following five perspectives: economic development, basic public service quality, ecological environment development, urban–rural heterogeneity, and population urbanization. Differences in the sustainable development quality of different urbanization models and regional urbanization were analyzed. Findings showed that the difference in urbanization quality between different models is not obvious, while the difference in urbanization quality between regions is more obvious. Furthermore, the quality of urbanization development in the eastern region is better than that in the central and western regions, and the level of urbanization development with high administrative levels is superior to regions with low administrative levels.

Identifying the tourist flow of a destination can promote the development of travel-related products and effective destination marketing. Nevertheless, tourist inflows and outflows have only received limited attention from previous studies. Hence, this study visualizes the tourist flow of Tibet through social network analysis to bridge the aforementioned gap. Findings show that the Lhasa prefecture is the transportation hub of Tibet. Tourist flow in the eastern part of Tibet is generally stronger than that in the western part. Moreover, the tourist flow pattern identified mainly includes “(diverse or balanced) diffusion from the main center”, “clustering to the main center”, and “diffusion from a clustered circle”.

To systematically understand the evolution of health tourism in China, the present study visually analyzes the theme evolution and frontiers of Chinese health tourism research on the basis of the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database through bibliometric analysis. The findings reflect the existence of diverse clustering themes in health tourism research, and the formation time of each theme is different. The findings also indicate that the change in the theme is led by government policy. Theoretically, the findings of the present study can, on the one hand, contribute to the health tourism literature by comprehensively exploring and summarizing the themes and topics of health tourism development in China since its appearance (i.e., 1981), and, on the other hand, provide references for future health tourism exploration directions. Findings of the present study can provide references for effective future development directions of the health tourism industry.

Recently, robots have been widely adopted in the hospitality and tourism industry. Efficient robots can help hoteliers and tourism suppliers with their repetitive or manual labor. Due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, there is an increasing number of publications on robotic applications in hospitality and tourism. However, a comprehensive literature review of this realm remains lacking. Therefore, to provide a holistic view of the existing literature on robotic applications in hospitality and tourism, this study reviewed 86 extant robotic application-related articles by conducting descriptive analysis and content analysis. The findings of this study showed that most of the existing relevant studies were conducted from the perspective of consumers in the hospitality context. Potential future research directions for academics are identified herein. Practical implications on robotic adoption are also provided for industry practitioners.

The rapid development of tourism has put forward new requirements for the training of tourism talents. This study conducted a cross-regional questionnaire survey on tourism management undergraduate students from 28 tourism colleges in seven regions of China. PLS method was used to explore the relevant influencing factors of students’ learning gain. The study concluded that: (1) Students’ gain in professional knowledge reserve, learning ability, innovation ability, teamwork ability and social ethics have a significantly positive impact on students’ employment situation. (2) Internship and employment guidance plays an important role in the influence of college investment on students’ learning gain. (3) Student engagement plays an important mediating role in the relationship between teaching factors (such as learning curriculum and teachers’ teaching quality) and students’ learning gain. (4) The college’s learning guidance and advice collection can effectively improve students’ learning gain, but the impact of the college’s environmental facilities on the sense of acquisition of tourism management students is not significant. This paper provides important implications for the improvement of talent mechanism of tourism education.

Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has had a huge impact on the global tourism industry over the past couple of years. Most previous studies investigated tourism crises after the pandemic period. Hence, to minimize the research gap, the present study investigates the impact of COVID-19 on tourism during the pandemic period. By assessing this impact, this paper proposes a D (big data) I (impact module) S (strategy module) E (evaluation module) model to cope with the crisis in order to bring about feasible implications for tourism practitioners and governments. This paper is to provide real-time destination management adjustments. This model is based on a crisis management framework and governance theory through retrieving big data from China Unicom and major travel information delivery sources. The major finding shows that the detailed time points of pandemic information release in the early stage of crisis. In conclusion, through proposing a DISE model, the present study assesses the impact of the major emergency public health crisis, assists destination managers in adjusting tourism-related policy and reflects the priority of recovering tourism after the crisis for effective tourist destination management.