The key to rural revitalization lies in vitalizing rural industries. The development of the rural tourism industry - under the requirement for green, low-carbon and sustainable growth - is an important path for rural revitalization. To achieve high-quality development of rural tourism, it is necessary to follow the triple logic of system, reality and practice, with the overall aim being to achieve a “green and low-carbon ecological foundation, innovation-driven intelligent transformation, cultural empowerment of spiritual inheritance, and industrial optimization of integrated development.” The bottleneck of rural tourism’s development is that it is difficult for industrial factors to flow to, and gather in, the rural areas. The key to success lies in re-understanding the contemporary rural regions and re-constructing the local comprehensive entities, starting from tourism factor clustering, specialty of development, effective utilization of resources, green development, scientific and technological empowerment, institutional innovation, personnel training, and reconstruction of local comprehensive entities. Indeed, the purpose of this is to be able to forge a new combination of rural tourism development factors, create rural tourism products with unique features and vitality, and promote the high-quality development of the rural tourism industry.

The essence of tourism is the most fundamental issue in tourism research and plays a crucial role in the discipline of tourism studies. However, academics have not reached a consensus on the nature of tourism, which has a restrictive impact on the definition of the concept of tourism and even on the independence of disciplinary development. Based on the literature review on the nature of tourism, this study discusses and speculates several controversial issues related to the nature of tourism in academic circles. Using multiple perspectives and academic definitions, this study puts forward the concept of “tourism is the experience of physical and mental freedom in places other than daily life, study, and work environments (namely, the non-customary environment) with leisure as the main purpose,” and holds that the essence of tourism is the experience of physical and mental freedom in a non-customary environment. The conclusion of this study is helpful for deepening the understanding of and reflecting on the key issues of tourism research, and is expected to provide a reference for the construction of the tourism discipline and for the healthy and sustainable development of tourism.

Tourism, a typical representation of the green economy and quality services, is an effective way to improve the efficiency of the urban green economy. This study selected 279 prefecture-level cities in China from 2006 to 2019 and used the GMM to empirically test the impact of tourism development on urban green economic efficiency based on the green economic efficiency of each city, measured using the EBM model. The results show that tourism development generally contributes to the improvement of urban green economic efficiency, and that this process presents an inverted U-shaped relationship. The heterogeneity of regions and the tourism economy scale show that the inverted U-shaped relationship only occurs in the east and west, and regions with a low tourism economy scales. Further research found that industrial structure upgraded and technological innovation strengthened the improvement effect of tourism development on green economic efficiency and played a significant positive regulatory role. This study provides an important practical basis for tourism development to improve the urban green economic efficiency.

China’s hotel industry has accumulated valuable experience by introducing advanced management methods from Western countries. However, owing to the overemphasis on the single instrumental role of the economic exchange relationship, kinship management in traditional Chinese culture has received insufficient attention. Based on the theory of kinship-like exchange relationships and the perspective of kinship management, this study considers the Blue Water Bay Resort as a case study and analyzes the impact of KM on the stability mechanism of hotel staff through in-depth interviews and text analysis. The conclusions of this study are as follows: (1) KM is a management model featuring a kinship-like exchange relationship and humanized system. Idiosyncratic organizational culture plays an important role in promoting the construction of KM; (2) KM acts on emotional commitment through emotional management, promoting organizational commitment and influencing the formation of staff stability mechanisms; (3) the kinship-like exchange relationship enhances the undertaking of corporate social ethics and responsibilities; and (4) the influence of KM on the emotional commitment of staff members can be diversified, multilayered, and interactive. By surpassing the instrumentality of the economic exchange relationship, KM can improve the emotional factors of the staff towards the hotel and shed light on the stability of hotel staff and the sustainable development of the hotel.

Tourism flow is one of the main focuses of tourism research. The application of big data technology to tourism flow research is gradually becoming a trend. This study aims to understand the state-of-the-art tourism flow research from the perspective of big data application. We selected articles published in international academic journals as the research objects, summarized the research progress in relevant fields, and proposed research prospects. The analysis indicates that (1) since 2013, research on tourism flow, from the perspective of big data application, has shown a rapid development trend. Relevant research involves tourism, management, economy, information technology, and other fields with a development trend of diversified achievements. (2) based on keyword co-occurrence network analysis, it was divided into five condensed subsets. In terms of research themes, we found that achievements mainly focused on the measurement and characterization of tourism flow, the spatiotemporal pattern and effects of tourism flow, influencing factors, and prediction of tourism flow. In terms of application data, user-generated equipment and management data were the main data sources for analysis. The main methods included spatial statistics and analysis, network analysis, model construction, and interactive integration of different research methods. (3) existing research results show an imbalance in terms of themes, data, and methods. In the future, it is urgent to continue to explore and deepen the expansion of research themes, the fusion of big and small data, and the integration of multidisciplinary methods.