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Accessible tourism is evolving as a field of academic research and industry practice, set within a dynamic social context. The field is interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary. The purpose of this paper is to examine key concepts and global initiatives that will shape accessible tourism futures.

Three of the authors have extensive academic experience in the area and the fourth author is the Managing Director of the pre-eminent European Network for Accessible Tourism. In taking a limited Delphi approach to canvassing key areas likely to shape accessible tourism futures, the following concepts and policy initiatives were examined: motivations, dreams and aspirations of people with disability; demography; UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; destination competitiveness; universal design (UD); and the UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.

A discussion of each of the above areas was placed in context to accessible tourism futures and to contextualise the papers that were selected for the special issue. The latter part of the paper outlines the contribution of each empirical paper to the issue discussing the approach, findings and implications. Stakeholder collaboration was identified as the key common theme of the papers and the factor for developing accessible tourism solutions, recognising the value of the market and capitalising on it. A collaborative approach is required to recognise the complementary nature of the different paradigms; to re-shape and transform the future of the accessible tourism industry. To assist in the development of accessible tourism futures, UD principles should provide a foundation to enhance the future competitiveness of tourism destinations and organisations.

The paper’s examination of the concepts and global policy considerations provides a strong academic and practitioner foundation for considering accessible tourism futures. In doing so, accessible tourism futures are shown to be affected by key concepts related to core tourism considerations and major policy initiatives on accessibility and sustainability. Yet, accessible tourism futures also have the potential to create their own momentum and contribute unique learnings on the diversity of tourism markets that will shape tourism concepts and global policy initiatives in their own right.

Equality of rights for individuals who identify as being lesbian or gay (LG) have emerged over recent years, and significant advancements have been made in recognition and support of LG rights in Ireland. Given the recent change in legal rights for the LG population, Civil Partnership 2010 and Marriage Equality 2015, this paper aims to explore the lived experience of daily occupations of LG adult’s in Ireland today, by applying an occupational justice lens.

A qualitative phenomenological research study, examined the concept of occupational justice as experienced by eight adults, who identified as being LG. Data was collected through face to face, semi-structured interviews.

Four themes capturing the complexity of each participant’s experience of daily occupations and occupational justice emerged, namely, transitions and personal journeys, celebrating differences, empowerment through occupation and inner conflict. Findings demonstrate how occupational justice is experienced as a complex, contextually embedded and dynamic process specific to each individual.

Future research in this area should aim to explore the experiences of both a younger and older LG population, along with those who identify as bisexual, transgender, queer or intersex to continue to raise awareness of the potential for occupational injustice within this minority population.

Using retail banking as a setting and focusing specifically on elderly customers (i.e. individuals aged 60 or more), this study aims to deepen the current understanding of how the physical context and the need for human interaction influence elderly customers' attitudes toward self-service technologies (SSTs) and their behavior.

Using face-to-face questionnaires, a sample of 505 elderly bank customers was collected. Data were analyzed using a multi-method approach, combining a moderated mediation analysis with a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis.

The findings suggest that a pleasant retail space may result in a positive attitude toward SSTs, which increases their co-creation intention. It also highlights that need for interaction of elderly customers with employees has detrimental effects on their attitude toward SSTs.

The current analysis was carried out among Italian elderly banks' customers. Thus, the results are highly dependent on the context of the analysis. In addition, it does not consider the different degrees of knowledge and experience the elderly may have with technology.

This study suggests that providing access and support for using technology may be essential for banks to facilitate SSTs adoption in elderly customers.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study represents the first attempt to examine the influence of the physical context on elderly customers' attitudes toward SSTs and their consequent behavioral intentions. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of the human touch for these particular customers.

Intangible legacy encapsulates the essence of Olympism and its manifestation, the Olympic Games. Despite significant interest in the capacity of the Olympics to produce notable changes in society, conceptual difficulties in defining and measuring intangible legacy persist. The study develops a conceptual definition of intangible Olympic legacy.

The study follows a four-step concept definition approach. It examines and integrates three strands of literature including intangibles, social interactions and public value, which is combined with insights from a longitudinal empirical investigation of intangible Olympic legacy for National Sport Organisations (NSO).

The proposed concept of intangible legacy defines it an emerging combination of attributes, interactions, processes and technology, with the goal of creating public value which is the ultimate goal of the Olympic Games. Since intangible legacy is qualitative rather than quantitative, a reconsideration of the current research paradigm is also proposed.

The study develops a new analytical device for the investigation of intangible legacies for specific publics such as NSO.

The study carries practical implications for Olympic and events/festival promoters as it allows defining and operationalising the key attributes of the concept.

This is the first study to conceptualise intangible legacy of mega events.

Tourism on wellness is a rapidly expanding segment of the travel industry; nevertheless, it is still in its infancy, and more study research is needed to develop a scientific foundation for health and wellness tourism. The study uses bibliometric indicators like as citations to determine the field structure on wellness tourism from 1998 to 2021, and the VOSviewer software to map the significant trends in wellness tourism (WT) area, to examine the present situation.

To reach this objective, the theme of “wellness tourism” was searched in the “Scopus” database, and bibliometrics data on the publications were obtained. In total, 414 papers were found during the initial search, which was then narrowed according to the criteria. Using this strategy, the author discovered 386 records, and after removing 4 duplicates and 1 irrelevant document, the refining produced 381 related documents. The most-cited papers, significant authors, co-citation of references, sources and authors were all investigated for the publications related to WT.

According to this report, research into wellness tourism has increased in recent years. The authors discovered two papers with over 238 “Scopus” citations and a total of 10 studies with 1414 citations. According to Scopus, the document Napier et al. receives 36.5% of citations each year. There were a total of 804 authors who published about WT between 1998 and 2021, with Smith, M, Voigt, c, and Puczkó, L being the most-cited reference authors in the subject. Han h. has the highest index of 56 of all the authors.

The “Scopus” database was used for bibliometric analysis, although the VOSviewer was used exclusively. This considered as a first study to utilize a bibliometric method to address this research gap, identifying the tools, journals, and, most crucially, conceptual subdomains like spa, yoga, therapy, spirituality and trekking that will be significant in future research.

Using a bibliometric analytic approach, this article looked at papers on wellness tourism published between 1998 and 2021. Thus, its goal is to learn more about wellness tourism and to enlighten wellness tourism scholars on the field's structure.

Halal and Islamic tourism is gaining attention in the tourism literature in recent years. This study uses bibliometric analytical techniques to explore all the publications indexed in the Scopus database in the broad subject of Halal and Islamic tourism from 2004 to 2021.

The authors found 238 publications that fit the function, subject and set criteria. The papers were analysed in terms of publication by knowledge area, number of studies published every year, contribution by countries, number of authors and most influential journals. VOS viewer was used to perform a visual analysis on co-occurrence of keywords and document citations.

According to the findings, the Scopus database includes 151 (34.40%) documents on business, management and accounting, and 89 (20.27%) documents on social science. It was reported that 29 documents were published in 2018, followed by 54 documents in 2019 and 56 documents in 2021. Malaysia has contributed 86 documents on Islamic tourism, whereas Indonesia has contributed 64 documents. The paper also discusses other interesting findings.

The bibliometric analysis carried out was confined to Scopus data. Other national and international databases were not taken into account for this research.

Between 2004 and 2021, this study examined relevant studies on Halal and Islamic tourism. The study presents a concise review of the literature accessible to researchers working in this area and provides recommendations for future research.