Dr. Erose Sthapit (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
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Dr. Erose is a prolific researcher and has developed a noteworthy critical mass of outputs in the field of consumer behaviour in tourism that is globally recognised. He is a widely cited author (+5,000 citations on Google Scholar as at 22/12/2025) and has published research articles in top tourism, hospitality and marketing journals such as the Journal of Travel Research, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management and Psychology & Marketing. He has worked with high-profile UK collaborators, and a range of international collaborators as well as enjoys a prominent standing within the field of tourism, hospitality and leisure. He serves on the editorial boards of several international peer reviewed journals including Annals of Tourism Research, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management and Psychology & Marketing. He was appointed Regional Editor of Europe for International Journal of Tourism Research, Associate Editor for International Journal of Tourism Cities and Section Editor for Strategic Business Research. His global recognition of research excellence is also evidenced through honorary positions at international universities and membership of research groups and professional bodies including Sunway University, Malaysia (Adjunct Professor) and University of Eastern Finland, Finland (Docent). For more information, feel free to contact Tan VO THANH (tan.vo_thanh@devinci.fr).
Hamza Khalloufi & Fatima Zahra Kaghat (ESILV)
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Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is particularly vulnerable because it is transmitted through practices, performances, and social interactions that can be difficult to preserve and access. In this talk, I will present El-FnaVR, a virtual reality application that recreates the atmosphere of Marrakech’s UNESCO-inscribed Jemaa El-Fna square through an immersive 3D environment combining interactive activities, lifelike animated characters, and spatial 3D audio. I will describe our five-stage design and development process (content requirements, feature design, asset creation, prototype implementation, and end-user evaluation), and highlight key design choices for authenticity, usability, and comfort (e.g., points of interest, guided tour elements, and teleportation locomotion to mitigate cybersickness). Finally, I will summarize insights from a qualitative user study showing strong perceived presence, ease of use, and social appeal, and discuss limitations and future directions (personalization, intelligent virtual guides, and multi-user shared visits).
Hamza Khalloufi is a lecturer at the Higher School of Technology (Moulay Ismail University, Meknes, Morocco) and a researcher at the IMACS laboratory within the SCIA2M team. His research focuses on immersive technologies (VR/AR) for cultural tourism and heritage valorization, with an emphasis on experience design, interaction, and user-centered evaluation (UX/HCI). He also investigates the integration of AI into immersive environments, particularly for intelligent guidance, personalization, and enhanced user engagement. He has contributed to publications on VR/AR experiences for intangible cultural heritage (ICH).
This method addresses relief pattern retrieval by characterizing 3D surfaces through multiple orthographic 2D views. This approach is inspired by the work on pottery retrieval by Benhabiles et al. [1]. More specifically, six orthographic projections are extracted from each 3D model to ensure comprehensive coverage of the surface. Each view is then processed through a VGG19 backbone pre-trained on ImageNet [38], from which individual feature vectors are extracted. These vectors are concatenated into a single global descriptor and passed to an MLP classifier that predicts the presence of specific relief patterns from a predefined set. Thus, the output of the model is a probability value that the processed mesh shares at least one pattern with the query mesh.
Overtourism presents complex and often hidden challenges for urban environments, impacting residents, infrastructure, and visitor satisfaction. This study proposes a novel, data-driven methodology to detect and analyze latent overtourism—the early, subtle warning signs of excessive tourism—before visible breakdowns occur. By leveraging user-generated content from Tripadvisor, a temporal circulation multidigraph is modeled to capture tourist mobility. Using frequent subgraph mining algorithms, the approach identifies recurring tourist movement patterns across different urban scales. These patterns are then analyzed in both spatial and temporal dimensions to detect hotspots and evaluate dynamic attractiveness through a Huff-based probabilistic model. The approach is applied to three cities of varying sizes revealing consistent tourist flows and areas under increasing pressure, suggesting early overtourism.
This study examines how hegemonic ideologies shape women's participation in tourism in a theocracy. Applying Gramsci's theory of hegemony and a critical poststructural feminist lens, it analyses how Iran's politico-religious structures influence women's roles, employment, and mobility in tourism. Qualitative findings reveal strategies of compliance, negotiation, and resistance expressed through entrepreneurship, networking, and workplace practices. Concepts of ‘war of position’ and ‘passive revolution’ explain how women create space for agency without direct confrontation, reshaping visibility and legitimacy incrementally. The study advances tourism scholarship by situating women's agency within hegemonic structures of theocratic governance and extending Gramscian theory to show how gendered consent and resistance operate in tourism, while calling for gender-transformative policies that address …
Analysing and understanding tourism mobility constitutes a tremendous challenge for states, cities and companies involved in cultural heritage. Traditional methods of tourist flow analysis often rely on survey data and observational studies to map out general trends and movements, focusing on aggregated visitor numbers and basic demographic information without delving deeply into the complex interconnections and sequential patterns of tourist behaviours. This study introduces SeqPatTour, a comprehensive methodology that innovatively mines and analyses tourist behaviour through sequential pattern analysis with data from Tripadvisor. Distinguished by its ability to perform both quantitative and qualitative analysis, SeqPatTour navigates the complexities inherent in analysing sequential patterns on graphs, facilitating a deeper understanding of tourist movements. It critically assesses path extraction
What makes a fake seemingly “authentic”? The case of Rick’s Café, known worldwide for the movie Casablanca, situates that question. Rick’s was a set constructed on a Hollywood sound stage. Another Rick’s was created materially in Casablanca decades later. Consumers are aware of this liminal condition. It is the reflexivity inherent in this awareness of performative inauthenticity that makes the case both appropriate and nuanced as an opportunity to explore paradoxes of authenticity embodied in a tourist place. The authenticity-fakery relationship is considered theoretically, not as a dualism (either-or), but as a duality (both-and). Empirically, the case is analyzed through an onsite investigation and a virtual ethnography. Four paradoxical dimensions of authenticity (liminal environment, liminal interpretation, liminal affectivity, and liminal recreation) are identified. Tourists, we submit, may experience several authenticities (i.e., objective, constructed, and existential) simultaneously and paradoxically, contributing to a reconceptualization of the tourist experience.
