Non-human elements are increasingly taking on an important “actor” status as a significant component of tourist experiences. However, the existing tourism experience research often neglects the subjectivity of non-human elements and their complex role in dynamic relationship with human elements. Taking “beach-combing” as the research object, this study analyzes the complex generative process of beach-combing experiences influenced by non-human elements from the post-structuralisms’ assembly theory perspective. The study finds that: (1) the perspective of assembly theory has strong explanatory applicability to beach-combing experiences, which can be seen as a relational social space actively assembled by diverse heterogeneous elements such as discourse, tides, marine life, and sea chasing tools. (2) The “tourist-body-tide-marine beach-combing tools” forms an immersive beach-combing experience assemblage where non-human and human elements coexist, and the assembly relationships and meanings of the assemblage will dynamically change due to the dynamic, unpredictable, and emergent nature of non-human elements such as marine life and tides. (3) The process of assembling experience before, during, and after beach-combing involves the awakening of the bodily subjectivity guided by discourse, immersive coexistence relationships, and the dynamic generation of tourists' acquired well-being and meaning. (4) “Primary domainisation-Secondary domainisation-Tertiary domainisation” is the evolutionary logic of the beach-combing experience assemblage generative process. The “assemblage” thinking, oriented by “things” and “relationships”, places the relationship between beach-combing activities, tourists, and experiences in a flattened, decentralized, and complex social environment for exploration, which is conducive to further reflecting on the “binary” logic of “subject-object” and “society-matter” in previous tourism experience research, providing a useful reference for the construction of the tourism experience assembly theory system and marine tourism development.

The rapid development of cruise tourism has made it one of the most competitive sectors in the modern tourism industry. Seasonality is a primary characteristic of tourism activities, significantly shaping cruise tourism operations and development. However, existing research on the seasonality of cruise tourism continues to follow traditional paradigms, often neglecting the distinctive nature of cruise tourism compared to other types of tourism, particularly the crucial influence of shipping factors on cruise tourism seasonality. In addition, current literature often on seasonal characteristics of the measurement method is also relatively one-sided. In light of this, this study examines the Mediterranean region, integrating seasonal types, seasonal concentration, and seasonal variation structure to depict the seasonal characteristics of cruise ports. It further analyzes how shipping factors shape port seasonality from the perspectives of interregional complementary cruising, port hierarchy, and shipping functions. The results show that: (1) three primary seasonality types characterize Mediterranean cruise ports: multi-season operation-relative concentration-bimodal pattern in summer and autumn, year-round operation-relative balanced-bimodal pattern in summer and autumn, year-round operation-relative concentration-bimodal pattern in summer and autumn. (2) Year-round and multi-season ports are predominantly located around the Apennine Peninsula; the spatial distribution of seasonal concentration shows a basic pattern of “low in the west and high in the east”; and the spatial pattern of port seasonality show a “dual-peak in center, single or no peak in the east and west” spatial pattern. (3) The unique locational condition of market centrality underpins geographic clustering of ports offering multi-regional complementary cruising during specific seasons. Port market positioning in competitive contexts shapes distinctive seasonal preferences by port hierarchy. Dual-functionality as both transport hubs and tourism destinations distinguish the seasonal traits of home ports and hub ports from transit ports. This study analyzes the seasonal characteristics and spatial distribution of cruise ports, clarifies the significant influence of shipping factors such as complementary cruising, port hierarchy, and shipping functions on port seasonality, and provides theoretical guidance for cruise tourism planning, route allocation, fleet deployment, and development strategies in China.

Enhancing the safety of cruise tourism is crucial for preserving the reputation of cruise ships, safeguarding the healthy development of the industry, preventing accidents, and enhancing public confidence. Based on data from 3 376 global cruise accidents from 2000 to 2024, this paper employs chi-square tests and categorical regression methods to statistically analyze the types and consequences of worldwide cruise tourism accidents. It further examines the correlation among catastrophic accidents, social security incidents, public health emergencies, natural disasters and other contributing factors. The findings indicate that: (1) the number of cruise accidents aligns closely with the growth trajectory of the cruise industry; accident probabilities are elevated in busy maritime areas and ports; catastrophic incidents represent the most prevalent category of cruise-related mishaps with a wide array of subclasses exhibiting their complexity and diversity. (2) There exist variations in both nature and severity regarding accident outcomes across different incident types; public health emergencies and natural disasters tend to cause higher casualty rates. (3) Significant disparities are observed in the causative factors behind cruise tourism accidents. Personnel factors are closely related to the occurrence of catastrophic accidents, public health accidents and social security accidents; equipment factors are also important triggers of catastrophic accidents; environmental elements predominantly drive natural disasters as well as numerous catastrophic events; management factors have a great impact on the development of public health accidents. Accordingly, this paper proposes several suggestions on risk control measures for cruise tourism to serve as guidance for effective safety management and sustainable development of cruise tourism.

The construction of domestic cruise brands is of great significance in enhancing the national image, supporting the strategy of building a maritime power, and accelerating the upgrading and transformation of cruise tourism. The study takes the domestic cruise Adora Magic City as a case study, based on first-hand interview data and second-hand online text data, uses grounded theory to construct three dimensions of domestic cruise brand ethnicity-consumer behavior, national sentiment, and market competitiveness, and then adopts a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method to explore the influencing factors among various dimensions of the brand ethnicity of domestic cruise. The results show that: (1) tourist experience has a significant impact on shaping brand ethnicity, with tourist satisfaction being the driving force for enhancing brand loyalty of domestic cruise; (2) Chinese traditional culture establishes an emotional bond between domestic cruise brands and consumers, and the inheritance of identity and cultural elements plays a key role in this process; (3) Technological innovation and market performance are the two core factors in enhancing brand international competitiveness, providing continuous momentum for consolidating the market position of domestic cruise brands. Research can help reveal the unique advantages of shaping domestic cruise brands, thereby promoting the sustainable development of China’s cruise industry.

Marine tourism is an important type of marine economy. The enhancement of marine tourism and related research is a fundamental task to serve China’s Strategy of Building a Maritime Power. In this paper, 619 Chinese journal articles collected by the General Database of Chinese Academic Journals Online Publishing are systematically analyzed to understand the evolution of marine tourism research in China. It is found that the number of publications related to marine tourism in China from 1992 to 2021 is characterized as “starting gradually, increasing sharply, and shrinking with fluctuation”. The reasearch has gone through a resource-oriented exploration phase (1992-2002), which focused on marine tourism environmental elements and resource value assessment; an industry-oriented comprehensive promotion phase (2003-2010), which focused on the expansion of diversified issues and the innovation of integrated methods; and a strategic-oriented expansion phase (2011-2021), which is closely linked to national strategic needs and enriched by practical applications. Previous research has focused on five areas: theoretical connotation and scope of marine tourism, resource development and evaluation, social and economic impact, resources, environment and sustainable development, and destination development and management. Based on the theoretical and practical needs of China’s marine tourism development in the new era, emphasis should be placed on the integration of disciplines, the integration of technical tools and the construction of data platforms, so as to enhance the suitability of theoretical research to the national strategy, local realistic needs and practical development of the industry. Therefore, this paper provides theoretical and decision-making guidance to promote the high-quality development of marine tourism in China.

The green development of tourism in China’s coastal areas is conducive to protecting the marine ecosystem of tourist destinations, reducing the pressure of tourism on resources and environment, and leveraging the sustainable development of tourism and ecology. Taking the panel data of 11 provincial-level regions in China’s coastal areas from 2011 to 2020 as the research samples, this paper uses the spatial econometric model estimation method to analyze the impact of green tourism development in coastal areas on ecological environment quality. The results show that: (1) The level of green development of tourism and the quality of ecological environment in China's coastal areas have been continuously and steadily improved, and spatial agglomeration and correlation are predominant characteristics in geographical space. (2) The green development of tourism has significant positive impacts and spatial spillover effect on the ecological environment quality. For every 1% increase in the level of green development of tourism in China’s coastal areas, the local ecological environment quality will increase by 0.302%, and the neighboring provinces will increase by 0.139%. (3) The interaction between green development of tourism and tertiary industry and scientific & technological expenditure can effectively enhance its positive impact on ecological environment quality, but the interaction with secondary industry and population will reduce its positive impact. In order to realize green transformation and development of tourism in China’s coastal areas, emphasis should be placed to the development of marine tertiary industry and the improvement of scientific and technological level, so as to promote the overall decrease of pollutant discharge and improve the quality of ecological environment.

The rapid growth of the tourism industry has driven the development of the tourism equipment manufacturing industry. However, the development of the marine tourism equipment manufacturing industry is relatively lagging. The analytical framework informed by the industrial dynamic matching theory is constructed to identify the individual obstacles of marine tourism equipment manufacturing industry, discuss the individualized manifestations of general obstacles, and figure out the relationship among these obstacles. Meanwhile, the corresponding strategic paths are proposed to remove or overcome these obstacles. The main research conclusions are as follows: (1) The marine tourism equipment manufacturing industry has its own individual obstacles, as well as its general obstacles with personalized manifestations. (2) The relationship between the development obstacles shows that from high-level to low-level the matching distortion obstacles exist among the subsystems at the macro, meso and micro levels. The existence of obstacles in the high-level subsystem will hinder the development of the low-level subsystems. On the contrary, the existence of obstacles in the low-level subsystem will make it fail to adapt to the development of the high-level subsystems and the deliberate behaviors of their managers. (3) In addition, strategic paths are proposed for the development of marine tourism equipment manufacturing industry. The strategic path support of “regional centralization” should be provided by the competent government departments. The following strategic paths guidance is supposed to be conducted by the industry, such as “establishing an industry association, striving for policy support”, “establishing an industrial alliance, perfecting the industrial chain”, and “cultivating leading enterprises, building regional brands”. The original “low-cost strategic path” of the enterprise should be converted into “product differentiation strategic path”, “technological innovation strategic path” and “capital focus strategic path”. The research contributes to the industrial efficiency improvement of marine tourism equipment manufacturing industry, and the high-quality development of marine tourism.

Based on the index of Baidu search volume, this paper adopts spatial classification, kernel density, exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) and other methods to analyze the spatial differences and influencing factors of Baidu's attention on A-level attractions in China’s coastal zone and to explore the differences in the network soft power of tourist attractions in the study area and its relationship with the physical construction of those attractions. The results show that: (1) The overall pattern of “dual core development” is presented, and the trend of “stars crowding the moon” is formed in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai. Low level attention attractions account for 95% of the total and the value of the level is distributed continuously. High level attention attractions are mainly distributed in the northern Yellow Sea and Bohai Bay. (2) The spatial association type is dominated by LL agglomeration, while HH agglomeration only takes Bohai Bay and Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai as the center to form a dual core agglomeration trend. The number of HL types is small and mainly near the HH region, reflecting the local polarization effect. (3) Compared with the tourism economy, the degree of coincidence between the two is high as a whole, but the gathering ability under Baidu’s attention is stronger and local core areas have significantly contracted, reflecting the polarization and multiplication effect of cyberspace. Compared with that before the epidemic, most attractions have undergone network transformation and paid attention to the improvement of operation level in the near future. The Bohai Bay and Yangtze River estuary attractions have shown outstanding performance, followed by eastern Liaoning and Fujian, with no obvious effect in other regions. (4) Physical construction level and short video promotion act as the core influencing factors. The coupling effect of tourist evaluation and public opinion diffusion also has a great impact, while the basic factors such as transportation, communication and location have no obvious effect.

As a special region, the islands of Changhai County has excellent natural tourism resources and unique island culture, which is highly favored by tourists. As the tourism destination with residents, the island is not only the residence of the islanders, but also the destination of the tourists. It bears the dual functions of life and tourism. Clarifying the contents and ways of the activities of different people is the fundamental to optimize the island resources and maximize the function of island facilities. Based on the investigation and related theoretical knowledge, this paper classifies the activities of tourists and islanders, dividing tourists into three patterns: sightseeing tourism, beachcombing tourism and swimming tourism; dividing residents into three types: employment oriented residents, leisure oriented residents and family oriented residents. The kernel density estimation is used to show the activity density and spatial scope of islanders and tourists. We take the tourism patterns and residents patterns as dependent variables, through multivariate logistic regression. The results show that: Firstly, for tourist behavior patterns, age has a significant impact on swimming tourism, and tourists less than 30 years old are more likely to belong to this type; tourism companionship has a significant impact on sightseeing tourism and swimming tourism. Tourists traveling with parents are more likely to belong to the sightseeing tourism pattern. The tourism purpose and informatization background mainly have a significant impact on the sightseeing tourism pattern, tourists who use mobile phone navigation during the trip are more likely to belong to this mode. Personal preference mainly affects beachcombing tourism pattern, especially those who are keen on the traditional lifestyle of the island are more likely to belong to this type. Secondly, for residents' behavior patterns, age and travel mode have significant influence on employment oriented residents; income and employment status have significant influence on leisure oriented residents; family oriented residents are mainly affected by family members, the elderly, children and other family care pressure. This study attempts to provide reference for alleviating the spatial behavior conflict of tourism, optimizing infrastructure construction, and improving social spatial efficiency and land spatial planning.

Travel itinerary is affected by the spatial distance between destinations, tourism experience and traffic conditions. The traditional travel itinerary design is mainly based on the spatial distance between destinations with the application of ant colony algorith. Based on ant colony algorithm and Pareto optimal model, this paper constructs a multi-objective optimal tourism route planning and design method considering the factors of spatial distance between destinations, weather conditions and transportation. Through MATLAB simulation experiment, with the fixed travel time, the improved method is comprehensively evaluated from the perspectives of spatial distance, traffic experience index and browsing experience index (based on weather conditions). The results show that in the experiments of multiple tourist cities (scenic spots), the traditional ant colony algorithm sacrifices a lot of optimization of the two indexes in order to obtain the shortest distance. Although the improved ant colony algorithm increases the route distance, tourists can obtain more tourism experiences, which verifies the effectiveness of multi-objective optimal tourism itinerary planning and design under the Pareto optimal model.

Industrial transformation is the key process for traditional fishing villages to break through the bottleneck of development, and it is also the necessary way to realize the development of rural revitalization. However, due to the long-term influence of insufficient rural statistical data, traditional studies usually adopt indicators such as residents’ income composition to indirectly measure the development process of rural industrial transformation, which has certain limitations. Based on the theory of rural industrial transformation, this paper uses enterprise attribute data to construct an evaluation index system of industrial development in traditional fishing villages, and takes 22 fishing villages in coastal areas of Fujian Province as research objects to explore the process, types and influencing factors of industrial transformation of traditional fishing villages. It is found that: from 1989 to 2020, the industrial transformation of traditional fishing villages in Fujian Province can be divided into three stages, which are the initial stage, the intermediate stage and the later stage. In each stage, not only the number and scale of enterprises continue to grow, the fishing villages without dominant industry type gradually disappear, but the dominant industries of fishing villages in each stage show the characteristics of growing step by step. According to the characteristics of industrial transformation, about 60% of fishing villages belong to the ready-transformation type, the percentage of transformed fishing villages is only 31.8%, and the untransformed fishing villages face the dilemma of difficult transformation. The industrial transformation of traditional fishing villages is mainly influenced by resources (fishery resources) and market (population size), and the strengthening of policy factors and the optimization of environmental factors are also conducive to promoting the further transformation of fishing village industry. The findings of this study can contribute to the industrial transformation development of traditional fishing villages in coastal areas.

Leisure fishing and maritime tourism serve as an important orientation for fishermen’s livelihood transformation. Therefore, it is of great significance theoretically and practically to investigate the influencing factors in the process of fishermen’s livelihood transformation, and fishermen’s decision on tactics selection. This paper adopts the push-pull theory and sustainable livelihood framework to study the factors that influence fishermen’s livelihood transformation and to uncover the veil of fishermen’s livelihood reconstruction through tourism. Qualitative data were collected in Xiangshan, Ningbo, through interviews and no-participatory observations. The research findings indicate that: (1) The push factors including functional change of natural capital, the change of human capital, the upgrade of physical capital and the dysfunction of cultural capital from the “fishery livelihood mode” and the pull factors including policy support, improvement of job environment, the optimization of family relationship and attachment to maritime culture from the “tourism livelihood mode” are leveraged to promote the transformation. (2) The livelihood capitals of sea-lost fishermen include natural capital, human capital, social capital, financial capital, physical capital and psychological capital; yet, the absence of psychological capital in the framework hinders the livelihood transformation. (3) The sea-lost fishermen have four types of tactics to cope with the livelihood transformation according to the matrix of livelihood capital’s coverage and richness: escape, exploration, focus, and innovation. The paper theoretically extends the application of sustainable livelihood theory, identifies the factors that affect sea-lost fishermen’s livelihood transformation, and verifies the possibility and unique value of the livelihood transformation via practicing tourism.

The place image of homestay settlement reflects tourists’ general understanding of the placeness of the specific area. Following the image system construction logic of “expectation-experience-perception-mental image” in island homestay settlement, this paper aims to analyze the construction process and internal mechanism of lace image system, based on the internet comments, travel notes and the interviews. The results of the study show that the construction of the image of the island homestay settlement is a process from consumers’ place expectations before the consumption, the place experience during the consumption, and the behavioral intentions after the consumption, in which the emotions of consumers vary from the different consuming stages ranging from positive, neutral to negative. A comprehensive understanding of the place formed through the local expectations and local experience, consequently the three mental images of homestay settlement emerge with the subjective logic analysis. From the perspective of region integrity and placeness, the study explores the significance of consuming homestay settlement, which is of great significance to the qualified development of island homestay settlements, the enhancement of consumers’ lodging experience, and the inheritance and development of local culture.