Touirsm Studies

Community-based tourism (CBT) is a model of community development which places the community at the centre of that development. It attempts to harness the effort of communities through their empowerment for the benefit of the community. This article develops a Community-based Visitors Affinity Index (CBTVAI) based on perusal of extant literature in which only secondary was used in terms of research methodology. The key contribution of this article is the development of a CBTVAI which is an instrument useful to owners/managers of CBT entities in evaluating their CBT businesses from a visitor perspective. The index does not include all possible items because CBT ventures exist in different contexts with different requirements. This index merely provides sample items related various basic aspects linkedto the attractiveness of CBT to visitors. As such, the index represents a flexible framework which can continuously evolve and be reformulated based on specific needs of a CBT entity. The CBTVAI has some strengths and weaknesses. Some of its strengths include the provision a visitor perspective grounded in real life experience; a framework for profiling CBT ventures; a platform for receiving visitor feedback in the form of immediate " post-trip " feedback; and a tool for assessing broad visitor/customer (dis)satisfaction with CBT offerings. The weaknesses include: failing to take into account the visitor " s demographics and psychographics; ignores prices per item; places an extra burden on communities to undertake technical data analysis which skills could be deficient in communities.

Oxford University Press (https://global.oup.com/) 2015, xix + 274 pp. (figures, references, index), Price £25.99. ISBN: 978 0 199 398980.

What do tourists do in tourist spaces? They leave traces. Some may say that the main trace of tourists' activities is their carbon footprint. For others, it may be the contribution to the local economy, or it may be the millions of photographs of tourists shared through social media. For Chaim Noy, it is the linguistic inscriptions left behind by museum-goers in the visitor book at Ammunition Hill National Memorial Site in Jerusalem. Ammunition Hill is located at the site of a battle between Israel and Jordan during the Six-Day War. The battle was won by the Israeli forces, with a loss of thirty-seven soldiers and twice as many Jordanians. Nearly 1,000 Israelis and up to 15,000 Arabs were killed during the entire war. Originating as a site commemorating the Israeli victims of the war, Ammunition Hill has established itself as one of the spaces of nation-building with a strong Zionist ethos, alongside other heritage sites in Jerusalem—the Western Wall and Yad Vashem. The approximately 200,000 Ammunition Hill visitors are almost exclusively Jewish: school tours, individuals and groups visiting Jerusalem from other parts of Israel and abroad, and local residents, predominantly ultra-Orthodox Jewish families. Ammunition Hill is a site where different authenticities are produced through the choice of the site itself (the place of the actual battle with its remaining military installations) and a wide range of physical and discursive artefacts, including armory, a sculptural installation featuring the names of the 182 fallen Israeli soldiers, maps, paintings, photographs and original or photographically reproduced handwritten notes, signatures, letters, and signs. This cursive landscape establishes a specific linguistic ideology that authenticates, individualizes, and humanizes the site through the associations of handwriting with spontaneity, immediacy, and literacy. Recontextualizing these apparently banal textual artefacts as museum exhibits, encased, enlarged and enshrined, turns them into secular relics indexing the hands of the military personnel that wrote them as well as that operated the guns used in the War. The cultured acts of handwriting mitigate the inhuman acts of killing. They are at once holy and heroic. Apart from gazing, reading, listening to tour guides, touching (e.g. the remaining bunkers and trenches), and walking about the site, the handwriting exhibited in the museum prefigures another mode of consumption of Ammunition Hill by its visitors—their own writing in the museum's visitor book. Although not unique to this site and dating back to the emergence of visitor books at the aristocratic, European collecting institutions and museums in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the invitation for the visitors to inscribe their names and reflections in the museum's visitor book creates a coherence in the way the museum is experienced as a site of consumption and production of the ethno-national narrative of remembrance and unity.