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Travel interests of tourists during pandemics and outbreaks are reduced due to the prevalence of fear. It induces lifestyle changes, which may hinder efforts to recover the tourism value chain during post-COVID-19 lockdowns. Subscribing to domestic travel and domestic tourism is deemed to mitigate fear and gradually reopen the tourism industry. Although a crucial initiative, evaluating the perceived degree of exposure of tourists to COVID-19 in tourist sites operating under domestic tourism has not been fully explored in the emerging literature, which forms the main departure of this work.

The problem domain is addressed by adopting multiple criteria sorting method – the VIKORSORT. To demonstrate such application, with 221 survey participants, 35 tourist sites in a province in the central Philippines struggling to revive the tourism industry are evaluated under six attributes that characterize tourists' exposure to COVID-19. To assess its efficacy, the performance of the VIKORSORT is compared to other distance-based multiple criteria sorting methods (i.e. TOPSIS-Sort and CODAS-SORT).

Results show that proximity and volume of tourist arrivals are considered on top of the priority list of attributes. The use of VIKORSORT yields the assignment of 27 sites to the “moderate exposure” class, and eight under the “high exposure” class, with no tourist site assigned to the “low exposure” class. Sorting the tourist sites reveals some observations that tourists prefer sites (1) with open spaces, (2) with activities having limited group dynamics, (3) that are nature-based, and (4) with tourist arrivals that are not relatively high, with enough land area to practice social distancing. In addition, the assignments of the VIKORSORT with TOPSIS-Sort and CODAS-SORT are consistent at least 90% of the time, demonstrating its efficacy in addressing multiple criteria sorting problems.

This work provides an integrative approach in evaluating tourist sites in view of tourism recovery during pandemics. The findings offer crucial insights for the primary stakeholders (i.e. government, tourist operators, and tourists) in planning, resource allocation decisions, and policy formulation. Policy insights are offered, as well as avenues for future works.

This study aims to draw observations on the current status and potentials of the Philippines as a farm tourism destination and identify the underlying factors that inhibit farm tourism development. It intends to gauge the challenges that Filipino farmers face in diversifying farms and operating farm sites and uses these challenges in crafting strategies and policies for relevant stakeholders. It also provides Philippine farm tourism literature to address the limitations of references in the topic.

The study adopts an exploratory type of inquiry method and secondary data collection from various sources, such as published journal articles, news articles and reports, to gain insights and relevant information on farm tourism. The study also uses a threats, opportunities, weaknesses and strengths analysis approach to develop competitive farm tourism strategies.

The Philippines, with vast agricultural land, has the necessary base for farm tourism, and the enactment of the Farm Tourism Development Act of 2016 bridges this potential. With low agricultural outputs, the country draws relevance for farm tourism as a farm diversification strategy to supplement income in rural communities. While having these potentials, crucial initiatives in physical characteristics, product development, education and training, management and entrepreneurship, marketing and customer relations and government support must be implemented. Farmers' lack of skills, training and capital investment potential to convert their farms into farm tourism sites serves as the major drawback. Thus, developing entrepreneurial and hospitality skills is crucial.

This work presents a historical narrative of initiatives and measures of the Philippine farm tourism sector. It also provides a holistic discussion and in-depth analysis of the current state, potentials, strategies and forward insights for farm tourism development.

This paper aims to explore the causal relationship of user-generated content (UGC) on trust in UGC (TUGC), destination image (DI) and tourist visit intention (VI) guided by the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory. This work further examined the mediating effect of TUGC and DI between UGC and VI.

Data were collected through online and personal-administered surveys and randomized sampling. This work employed partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the proposed model empirically.

In line with the SOR Theory, this work found UGCs that induce positive emotions and connection to the users motivate VI rather than UGCs that are predominantly factual. Furthermore, UGCs are considered reliable, authentic and less biased than brand-generated content. The findings of this work contribute to the theoretical understanding of UGC to VI in a destination.

This work proposes that destination marketers prioritize UGC that evokes positive emotions and connections with users, as it is more effective in encouraging VI. Strategies such as incentivizing content creators, improving online presence and engaging influencers can maximize UGC. Enhancing online traffic quality, visibility and interaction and implementing content policies are crucial for UGC's effectiveness. Marketers should align destination products with tourists' interests and collaborate with influencers for affiliate marketing to increase tourist-generated UGC. Furthermore, improved connectivity encourages UGCs about the destination.

In tourism marketing, UGC has become a valuable information source for tourists in making informed travel decisions. UGC is a tourist-generated content that offers factual information and authentic experiences through images, videos or text posted through social media platforms. UGC is considered more reputable than travel firms and the mainstream media as an information source. Due to the limited works on UGC in the literature, the influence of UGC on tourists' VIs has remained unexplored at the time of writing. This work bridges this gap by empirically examining the impact of UGC on Gen Z tourists' VI guided by the SOR theory.

Despite the growing trend for single-dish restaurants in the Philippines, understanding customer loyalty for this subsector is scarce in the current literature. To address such a gap, this paper aims to identify attributes and their sub-attributes that contribute to customer loyalty for single-dish restaurants.

Using the analytic hierarchy process, the priorities of these attributes in achieving customer loyalty were generated from a group of expert decision-makers. A representative case study in the Philippines with an emerging market trend for single-dish restaurants was conducted.

Findings show that “value” is the most crucial attribute in achieving customer loyalty, followed by “food” and “service” attributes, which are straightforward implications of single-dish restaurants. More strikingly, the “atmosphere” attribute ranks last in the priority list, which may mean that customers consider fancy environments with less priority when dining in these types of restaurants. In the priority sub-attributes, “dining experience” and “tastiness” came up on top of the list, with the “music” attribute ranking last. These findings are crucial inputs to inform the design of strategies that would enhance the customer base.

This study reports the first attempt to rigorously analyze single-dish restaurants, which gain little attention in the current literature, yet an emerging type of restaurant, especially in developing economies. With significant differences in many aspects of mainstream restaurants, customer loyalty attributes may be different. This paper determines the list of priority attributes and sub-attributes of customer loyalty for Philippine single-dish restaurants. Identifying these priority attributes contributes to the extant literature by offering valuable insights for relevant decision-makers in gaining competitive advantage within their market niches.

Due to the growing dominance of the millennials in the secondhand clothing (SHC) market, it is crucial to understand the dynamics of their SHC buying behavior. Despite such significance, it has yet to be explored in the current literature. To address such a gap, this paper aims to explore the antecedents of the SHC buying behavior of millennials.

A purposive survey is conducted to establish relationships between the antecedents. As such, the interrelationships of the antecedents are modeled using the interpretative structural modeling (ISM) approach.

Results reveal that SHC antecedents exhibit several characteristics depending upon their characterization of being driving, dependence, linkage and autonomous variables.

This work pioneers the identification of SHC buying behavior antecedents specifically for the millennial market, as well as in the provision of a holistic analysis of the complex contextual relationships of these antecedents. The findings of this work provide insights that are crucial to the extant literature in developing theoretical frameworks and paradigms that help in understanding the dynamics of the SHC buying behavior. Moreover, such results are beneficial to marketing managers and practitioners in innovating their strategies to capture the millennial market better.