Tourism Geographies

The IGU Commission on Tourism, Leisure and Global Change & the IGU Commission on Islands cordially invite you to submit an abstract for consideration for the 2026 Joint Pre-Meeting, 14 - 16 August 2026, Büyükada, Princes' Islands, Istanbul, Türkiye.

The Pre-Meeting usually serves dual purposes: as a test lab for nascent ideas in progress or as a rehearsal for the wider congress that follows.

Arrival, 14 August - Delegates arrive in Büyükada
Day 1, 15 August - Pre-Meeting Symposium, Anadolu Kulübü Hotel
Day 2, 16 August - Büyükada Fieldtrip.

The 2026 Joint Pre-Meeting is dedicated to two of our staunchest supporters and long-serving members, the late Prof. Dieter K. Müller and the late Prof. Theano Terkenli.Dieter and Theano have made considerable contributions to the sub-field, tourism geographies, and their seminal works have guided particular areas of research on topics including polar tourism geographies, second home tourism, Sámi tourism, Arctification and regional change and labour geographies (Dieter), and cultural geography and landscape studies, critical tourism geographies, island studies, sustainable tourism and development, and everyday life and mobilities (Theano).

Accordingly, the overarching theme of the 2026 IGU Commission on Tourism, Leisure and Global Change & IGU Commission on Islands 2026 Joint Pre-Meeting, draws from the title of the book, Tourism, Mobility and Second-homes: Between Elite Landscape and Common Ground, (Hall & Müller, 2004) that presages the economic, social and environmental impacts of second homes, as well as their planning implications, placing discussions within the context of contemporary human mobility.

The Pre-Meeting usually serves dual purposes: as a test lab for nascent ideas in progress or as a rehearsal for the wider congress that follows.

Pre-Meeting Location:
In 2026, the IGU Commission on Tourism, Leisure and Global Change and the IGU Commission on Islands are jointly organising the 2026 Pre-Meeting to be held on the island Büyükada, situated in the Princes' Islands, Sea of Marmara, Istanbul.

Büyükada, is the largest of the Princes' Islands in the Sea of Marmara, with an area of about 5 square kilometres. It comprises the Maden and Nizam neighbourhoods in the Adalar District of Istanbul Province, Türkiye.

Call for Abstracts Deadline
The CFA will open from 18 May and close on 10 June 2026, and abstracts should be submitted to an online repository – see submission instructions below.

To submit an abstract, complete the online form or scan QR code:

https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=-aZLWjH1Mk-UZzmPGead5L_pR1DVy0JJpcq-kVQxi7dURDRSSUtSQURRVlNZQ1IzWTJDUUNYWjVTWC4u&route=shorturl

SAVE THE DATE

PRE-MEETING of the IGU Commission on Tourism, Leisure and Global Change in partnership with the IGU Commission on Islands, Büyükada, Princes’ Islands, Istanbul, Türkiye, August 14-16, 2026.

In 2026, the IGU Commission on Tourism, Leisure and Global Change and the IGU Commission on Islands are jointly organising the 2026 Pre-Meeting to be held on the island Büyükada, situated in the Princes' Islands, Istanbul.

The venue for the Pre-Meeting will be the Anadolu Kulubü Hotel on Büyükada https://www.anadolukulubu.com/en/.

Arrival, 14 August Delegates arrive in Büyükada
Day 1, 15 August Pre-Meeting Symposium, Anadolu Kulübü Hotel
Day 2, 16 August Büyükada Fieldtrip

Call for Abstracts to be released on 18 May 2026.

Please stand by for the Call for Abstracts announcement.

🎙️ In this week's episode of the Tourism Geographies Podcast, we feature the work of Tara Ruttenberg, Department of Sociology and Anthropology of Development, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands

🌊 Critical localisms and commons governance in occupied surfscapes

🏄‍♂️ The niche field of critical surf studies examines localism as a ubiquitous phenomenon wherein experiences of place and belonging are negotiated through surfers’ differentiated positioning relative to surfing’s cultural imaginaries and geographical territories, or ‘surfscapes’. Beyond conventional explorations of localism as a response to common pool resource dilemmas provoked by overcrowding of wave resources, critical perspectives account for power dynamics related to race, class, and gender in contested surfing space produced through Global North/South relationships within the colonial-patriarchal foundations of global surf tourism. This body of critical surf tourism literature acknowledges diverse localisms as enacting entitlement and/or resistance in occupied surfscapes built on historical legacies of structural violence and settler colonialism. Engaging with novel frameworks of communal governmentality, commoning and translocalism in Global South surf tourism communities, critical surf tourism scholarship suggests that certain localisms represent subversive modes of commons governance and/or emancipatory politics in occupied surfscapes. The state-of-the-art narrative review of critical surf studies concepts offered here centers localism in surf tourism contexts as a lens for recognizing critical surf tourism studies as its own nascent subfield of inquiry in sport tourism geographies.

🆓 The paper can be downloaded at the link below, if you have library access, or you can email the author directly. Ruttenberg, T., & Brosius, J. P. (2025). Critical localisms and commons governance in occupied surfscapes. Tourism Geographies, 27(8), 1509–1533. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2594716

🎧 Listen to the podcast here from Friday, 1 May
https://lnkd.in/g3XBfitP

☑️ Podcast Producer: Maartje Roelofsen
☑️ Podcast Executive Producer: Stephen Pratt

🎙️ In this week's episode of the Tourism Geographies Podcast, we feature the work of Jérémy Lemarié, University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (URCA), Reims, France.

🏝️ Hawai’i is shifting toward regenerative tourism, yet extractive logics persist

💥 Mass-tourism destinations are under criticism for intensifying climate risk, biodiversity loss, and social inequities, yet practical alternatives remain scarce. Hawai’i typifies this problem: since the 1970s, the archipelago has relied on a high-volume model that drew 10.4 million visitors in 2019 and continues to generate more than one-fifth of the state’s GDP, while concurrently eroding beaches, exhausting freshwater supplies, and commodifying Native Hawaiian culture. Recognizing these pressures, Hawai’i adopted regenerative tourism as a strategic objective in 2019 to pursue net-positive outcomes, including ecological restoration, cultural revival, and community wealth. However, the application and feasibility of regenerative tourism in mature, mass-market settings remain unclear. To address this gap, this research is a qualitative case study of the Waikīkī beachfront hotel corridor. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2023 with hotel sector stakeholders, state planners, not-for-profit leaders, cultural practitioners, and consultants. Interviews were analyzed with reflexive thematic coding and interpreted through an adapted regenerative tourism analytical framework. Findings reveal uneven but significant movement toward regenerative approaches. Public-sector actors and Kānaka Maoli practitioners articulate multi-capital definitions of wealth and pilot participatory supply-driven innovations. Conversely, for-profit operators retain a demand-driven approach, rebranding experiential add-ons as ‘regenerative’ while maintaining extractive infrastructures. The study thus demonstrates both the promise and the limits of implementing regenerative principles in high-volume contexts, recommending Indigenous co-governance and transdisciplinary learning loops to move beyond branding.

🆓 The paper can be downloaded at the link below, if you have library access. Otherwise, you can email Prof. Johnson directly and request a copy of the paper.Lemarié, J., & Bellato, L. (2025). Hawai’i is shifting toward regenerative tourism, yet extractive logics persist. Tourism Geographies, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2582648

The paper features in the upcoming special issue, "Regenerative Development and Tourism Geographies: A Timely Turn?"

🎧 Listen to the podcast here from Friday, 24 April:
https://lnkd.in/g3XBfitP

☑️ Podcast Producer: Jamie Gillen
☑️ Podcast Executive Producer: Stephen Pratt

🎙️ In this week's episode of the Tourism Geographies Podcast, we feature the work of Henry Johnson, University of Otago, New Zealand.

💥 Okinawa prefecture is an archipelago in southwestern Japan. This article examines the urban musical soundscape of Kokusai Street in Naha City, Okinawa’s capital, where tourism, identity and sonic performance intersect to create a dynamic acoustic space of local cultural representation. Drawing on the fields of sound studies, tourism, cultural geography, and ethnomusicology, this article investigates acoustic design through three representative musical sound worlds within Kokusai Street’s sonic touristic milieu. The first explores sound in motion, examining how the city’s various monorail’s chimes serve as auditory markers of Okinawa’s identity; the second considers the mediated and performed sounds of the commercial streetscape, where traditional music, contemporary consumer culture and urban sound converge for tourism consumption; and the third focuses on the vibrant live house entertainment scene, where performances of traditional and neo-traditional Okinawan music engage audiences in an interactive sonic experience that firmly positions Okinawa within the touristic gaze. The article highlights how this particular micro sound world in Okinawa’s urban soundscape functions as a performative space that constructs and communicates local musical identity within the broader framework of island tourism.

🛜 The paper can be downloaded at the link below, if you have library access. Otherwise, you can email Prof. Johnson directly and request a copy of the paper.

⛓️Johnson, H. (2025). Cultural performance in the Okinawan urban soundscape: music, sound, tourism. Tourism Geographies, 1–18.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2578620

The paper features in the upcoming special issue, "The Tourism Geographies of Soundscapes: Theory, Methods, and Praxis", edited by:

❇️ Daniel Laven, European Tourism Research Institute (ETOUR), Mid Sweden University
❇️ Rose Keller, Norwegian Institute for Nature Research

🎧 Listen to the podcast here from Friday, 17 April:
https://open.spotify.com/show/4O0M23Ub1jGgqWIelpTQ01

☑️ Podcast Producer: Joseph M. Cheer
☑️ Podcast Executive Producer: Stephen Pratt

✅ If you are interested in learning more about the latest insights published in the journal Tourism Geographies, the Tourism Geographies Podcast takes a deep dive, giving you a firsthand commentary, straight from researchers' mouths.

❇️ Episodes feature a diversity of topics and authors from across the globe.

🎙️ Season 4 of the Tourism Geographies podcast is now out with over 30 new episodes. Additionally, there are around 150 episodes available for your reference.

🎧 To listen in, see https://open.spotify.com/show/4O0M23Ub1jGgqWIelpTQ01

🙏 With thanks to authors for allowing us to feature them, and to the production team, including Stephen Pratt, Maartje Roelofsen, Jamie Gillen, Afiya Holder, Jaeyeon Choe and Joseph M. Cheer.

https://www.facebook.com/share/1KNhCfDUiP/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Travel boycotts and symbolic rebordering: discursive and moral governance of tourism mobility Borders in tourism are commonly understood through territorial control and state regulation, yet contemporary mobility is increasingly shaped through non-state forms of power. This paper develops a...

🎙️ In this week's episode of the Tourism Geographies Podcast, we feature the work of Chloe King, University of Cambridge, UK, and colleagues.

💥 In tourism literature and practice, pro-growth tourism management discourses argue that tourism growth can decouple from its negative impacts through improved management, whereas heterodox approaches reject tourism’s growth ethic and argue decoupling is infeasible and unlikely. Heterodox tourism scholarship increasingly seeks to imagine what a ‘beyond growth’ transition may entail, through concepts such as regenerative tourism, degrowth, and buen vivir. Among the first UNESCO World Heritage Sites and most iconic Biosphere Reserves, the Galápagos Islands in Ecuador present a critical case study, having experienced a 260% increase in tourism arrivals over the past two decades while attempting to enact a heterodox transition. The purpose of this paper is to examine how diverse stakeholders in these islands construct and contest discourses of tourism growth, with implications for transitions towards ‘post-growth’ or heterodox tourism paradigms. Building upon decades of combined research in Galápagos among our author team, this paper draws most specifically on data gathered from a three-day participatory workshop in August 2023 involving sixty key Galápagos tourism stakeholders. Findings identified two primary discourse coalitions—those critiquing and those defending land-based tourism growth—and compares how pro-growth and heterodox management discourses manifest among them. Findings reveal that although these coalitions adopt different discursive strategies where growth is most contentious, there is shared consensus around strategies for managing growth that align with heterodox paradigms. A key contribution of this paper is to highlight how managing tourism growth in Biosphere Reserves—of increasing concern as overtourism challenges proliferate globally—cannot rely solely on technical interventions. Our findings show how divergent discourse coalitions construct prosperity in competing ways, revealing why inclusive engagement with plural values, contested meanings, and local power dynamics is indispensable for navigating overtourism challenges in fragile island settings.

🆓 The paper is available Open Access and free to download.

King, C., Hunt, C., Barragán-Paladines, M. J., Muñoz-Barriga, A., Santa Maria, V., Cárdenas Díaz, S., … Sandbrook, C. (2025). Navigating the Galápagos paradox: tourism growth management discourses in protected areas. Tourism Geographies, 1–26.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2025.2582669

🎧 Listen to the podcast here from Friday, 10 April:
https://shows.acast.com/tourism-geographiess-podcast

Podcast Producer: Joseph M. Cheer
Podcast Executive Producer: Stephen Pratt

🎙️ In this week's episode of the Tourism Geographies Podcast, we revisit another classic Tourism Geographies Podcast episode featuring the esteemed Professor Richard Butler, University of Strathclyde.

💥 The tourist area life cycle has been in existence for over four decades since its publication in The Canadian Geographer and was described as ‘one of the most cited and contentious areas of tourism knowledge….(and) has gone on to become one of the best known theories of destination growth and change within the field of tourism studies’ It was noted as one ‘Of the most influential conceptual models for explaining tourist, development’. The model was developed primarily from the Product Life Cycle model used in business and management studies and modified to explain the process of development and change that took place in tourist destinations throughout the world. The model has received considerable attention over its life span, but has often been cited from second hand sources or misquoted on many occasions. Its appearance in a non-tourist journal has resulted in it often not appearing in various early literature surveys based on tourism-focused sources and for its first decade access to the original article was limited and difficult, as demonstrated by many requests to the author for copies of the article. Electronic access to journals and libraries have resolved this problem, but its considerable visibility (in excess of 56,000 reads on Research Gate) and use (close to 5000 citations) mean that it has possibly entered the realm of tourism myths and become part of accepted dogma in the field of tourism development. This could present problems to those challenging the original concept and introducing alternative or contradictory ideas and propositions, and it is perhaps appropriate to briefly review the history of the concept.

🆓 The paper is available Open Access and free to download.
Butler, R. (2025). Tourism destination development: the tourism area life cycle model. Tourism Geographies, 27(3–4), 599–607. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2024.2325932

🎧 Listen to the podcast here:
https://shows.acast.com/tourism-geographiess-podcast/episodes/tourism-destination-development-the-tourism-area-life-cycle-Podcast

Producer: Afiya Holder
Podcast Executive Producer: Stephen Pratt

🚩 Please be advised that the Call for Papers deadline for the conference Tourism and Global Change: Resilience, Transformation and Sustainable Futures, July 2–3, 2026, in Wuhan, China, has been extended to 30 April 2026.

✅ This is organised by the IGU Commission on Tourism, Leisure and Global Change and the Geographical Society of China-Commission on Tourism Geography. The host for this event is the School of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Central China Normal University.

✅ This conference is a major international academic event of the IGU Commission on Tourism, Leisure and Global Change, and the annual international symposium of the Geographical Society of China-Commission on Tourism Geography. It brings together scholars from geography, tourism studies, sustainability science, and related disciplines to critically examine tourism as both a driver and outcome of global change.

✅ The conference will provide a high-level forum for researchers, practitioners, journal editors, and policy-oriented scholars to exchange ideas, present cutting-edge research, and develop new conceptual and methodological perspectives on tourism and allied topics, including climate change, digital transformation, geopolitical uncertainty, and socio-environmental restructuring, among other pertinent and pressing matters.

Publication Opportunities
Submitted abstracts and papers will undergo a rigorous double-blind review process. In addition, selected high-quality full papers will be encouraged to submit to leading international journals and associated initiatives to be announced, potentially including (but not limited to):

Regional Studies, Regional Sciences - https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rsrs20
Tourist Studies - https://journals.sagepub.com/home/tou
Discover Sustainability - https://link.springer.com/journal/43621
Sustainability in Tourism and Hospitality - https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/sth
Journal of Responsible Tourism Management - https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/jrtm

(Final publication decisions remain subject to journal editorial policies and confirmed initiatives)

Conference Programme
Day 1 – July 2, 2026Opening Ceremony International Keynote Speeches Parallel Academic Sessions Two Special Workshops - Publishing in International Tourism and Geography Journals + AI and Digital Methods in Tourism Geography Research

Day 2 – July 3, 2026 Field Excursion: Digital Culture, Smart Tourism, and Regional Development in Hubei Province

Conference Topics
The Organising Committee welcomes conceptual, empirical, methodological, and comparative studies on the following topics (but not limited to):
Tourism and climate change adaptation
Destination resilience and crisis recovery
Tourism and sustainable development transitions
Tourism labour, migration, and precarity
Digital platforms, AI, and smart tourism geographies
Tourism mobilities, borders, and geopolitical change
Cultural heritage, identity, and tourism globalisation
Urban tourism, overtourism, and spatial inequality
Rural tourism, community resilience, and place-based development
Tourism governance and policy under global change
Comparative tourism geographies and Global South perspectives

Important Dates and Deadlines
Extended deadline for abstract submission (500 words) April 30, 2026
Notification of abstract acceptance: May 20, 2026
Deadline for early registration: April 30, 2026
Conference dates: July 2–3, 2026

Registration Fees
On-site Registration: CNY ¥1500 (approximately $USD220)
On-site Graduate Student Registration: CNY ¥800 (approximately $USD120)

Registration fees include conference materials, proceedings, meals during conference days, and access to all academic sessions. Accommodation is not included.

Submission Guidelines
Abstracts of up to 500 words should be submitted through email ([email protected]) and should clearly indicate:
Research objectives
Theoretical framework
Data and methods
Key findings and contributions
Guiding reference list of 3-4 key sources
Conference Secretariat

For all enquiries regarding submissions, registration, or institutional cooperation, please contact: Honglei Zhang ([email protected]); Yajuan Li ([email protected]).