Fundamental Accessibility and Technical Accessibility in Travels—The Encounter of Two Worlds Which Leads to a Paradigm Shift
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I really liked your paper and your idea of applying philosophical theory to the interpretation of tourism and tourism life-style. I think that your account of philosophy of travel, based on mainly existentialism is important for understanding tourism so I think that you indeed should go on with this.
Nevertheless, I do not find that you really do all this as good as it can be done so I suggest that the following should be improved.
- You need to explain much more the philosopher's concept of travel. Here, I think that you could do more to focus on the concept of existence and the view on travel of the different philosophers. This should be much more systematic, both in relation to the philosophical tradition from Plato to Nietzsche. But indeed also in relation to your discussion of contemporary existential philosophy. For example Sartre has a lot about travel in his philosophy so this should be more focussed. In fact, I think that Heidegger would be skeptical towards travel and finds that travel is more inner travel than physical travel. Indeed, you could also go more into how this concept of travel differs from the point of view of the different philosophers.
- In this context, I think that you need to say more about authenticity which I find is the key concept in relation to tourism. You travel because you want to be authentic. Here, you could do more to include the postmodernism approach, for example of the French sociologist and philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky, who refers to authenticity. I can also make a reference to the idea of authenticity in the experience economy. You could try to include the concept of the experience economy in your discussions.
- A further remark is that you need to integrate your empirical research with you theoretical research. After the imporant philosophical discussion you present your interesting empirical results, but you do not combine them or apply the theory to the empirical case. Could you please do more to accomplish this. You need to apply philosophical concept to the analysis of the empirical results about tourism discussing why people travel. So please do this.
- Good luck with your work. It was an interesting paper to read!!
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
I would like to congratulate the Authors on choosing an interesting and important topic. The considerations in the article are important because they allow for reaching a new perspective on the phenomenon of fundamental accessibility and technical accessibility in travels. That new perspective constitutes a real value added of the paper. I evaluate the conceptual part of the paper highly. At the same time, some doubts are raised by the size of the empirical sample which is too small to be considered representative. The authors should clearly indicate this and consequently treat the results of empirical research only as examples - this must be corrected. However, this does not significantly diminish the value of the article, as its purpose was not empirical research. I also ask the Authors for paying attention to the technical side of the article and keeping its form consistent with the journal's requirements, e.g. footnotes are not allowed, the references list should be in the form of a numbered list, references to the literature in the main body of the text should be given in square brackets as consecutive numbers, the figures should be legible and formatted in accordance with the pattern in the template file. In its current form, the text gives the impression of being prepared for another journal and hastily pasted into the Sustainability template.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
Point 1: The paper builds on a clear research question (accessible tourism) and has set up a clear aim. The challenge of the research is to collect information from 5 different countries and make a joint and comparative theory. However, this objective is diluted given the unequal structure of the sample.
Point 2. Introduction and chapter Theoretical framework should be improved with more references in the field of accessible tourism... For example, reinforce the theoretical framework in the field of tourist motivations.
Section 2.1. It should be part of the theoretical framework and not the methodology section.
Point 3. At the methodological level, it is quite a challenge to compare 5 countries on travel habits. Despite its complexity, it is necessary for the sample to be similar in order to be able to make comparisons. In this case the sample is very unbalanced (both by country and by age range)
In the Methodology chapter, the authors must write an explanation of why they opted for the questionnaire in their research and what such a methodology provides. Further, It is important to state how the answers will be collected from the respondents, by written or online questionnaire.
This is certainly a good contribution to the literature but you should better explain how you identified the indicators included in the survey.
Point 4: The results are very revealing and I agree with the need to continue researching accessible tourism. However, a greater link with the theoretical framework is necessary as I mentioned above.
The chapter Results and discussion should be expanded with a description and structure of respondents (socio-demographic characteristics).
It is desirable to change the titles of Figures without question form.
Point 6: Insert in the conclusion the link with the theoretical framework.
Minor issues:
Point 1: Throughout the entire article, grammatical errors such as expression and punctuation errors have been found. A thorough review of these aspects is recommended.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
Dear authors,
I'm afraid I did not perform a positive review of your text.
Overall it seems that the authors tried to connect research of their field, and I'm referring to philosophy and respective sub-branches, with the topic of tourism.
However, the analysis is disconnected. Moreover, the reader is not led to understand what is in fact the aims of this paper and results in a twofold text: a first part with a philosophical presentation of existential disability (still, although the authors say it, the issue of disability is secundary in the attention given); and a second part, where the results of an international survey is presented. There is no connection between both parts, not in the empirical section, nor even in the conclusions.
Below, I will detail some comments that form tha basis of my decision.
Major comments:
- It is definitely important to set the background of the research field, especially in a study such as the current, that focus on an approach that differs from the traditional. However, there is an immensity of discussion and establishment of the background. The authors recognize this on page 5 (line 187); nevertheless, they keep going on page 6 to page 9.
- This leads to one main concern. Not arguing the validity of what is said, up to the end of page 9, where one would expect to find the theoretical framework, nothing is established regarding tourism, the research field to which I would expect the authors to connect, even more because this paper is submitted to a section on Tourism, Culture, and Heritage. This is further consubstantiated because this part of the text is intitled as the ‘material and methods’ section, which precedes the empirical section that is labeled as such by the sub-section 2.3 title on page 9. Nevertheless, the sub-section 2.3 is a mix of theory and methodological issues.
- Despite the extensive length of the part dedicated to the methodology, it remains to be unveiled, how was the survey developed, by whom and where; how where the persons selected to be part?
- Performing a quantitative analysis with small samples, such as the ones used for the countries other that Hungary is a high risk. This is even more questionable for the case of Spain, with just 22 respondents. Can the authors perform some generalizations from this data per country. Perhaps the authors may wish to consider the grouping of the 4 countries (this obviously depends on the comparability of the data and the survey sample extraction, of which we are not informed).
- There is a fundamental antagonism between the initial philosophical and existential discussion performed by the authors and the subsequent presented data, that is mainly descriptive and does not engage on the former discussion.
- What is the scale used on figure 7 and 8 and why 254 and 252 answers? Are all the answers from Hungary?
- Small grammar typos: Line 567/568. End of sentence
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you for an interesting paper. I find that the paper is ready to be published. I liked your strong philosophical analysis in the paper.
Reviewer 2 Report
After the second round review process, I can mention that you made many required changes. Now, I can see that the quality of your article has been highly improved.
Reviewer 3 Report
The comments of the first revision have been taken into account and have been resolved.
Reviewer 4 Report
Dear authors,
I realize and acknowledge the effort made in this revision, especially with the new text in section 2.1.1. Nevertheless, the concerns I’ve expressed in revision 1 remain because they are structural and can’t be solved with incremental amendments.
All of my previsions comments still remain valid at this point. The authors somehow point that you are trying to open and a research field, and possible the long up to page 12 are a consequence of that. At this point, the goals and the text orientation seems to be more about the authors’ personal thoughts and a personal endeavor than the efforts to engage with established scientific community. You also refer that you expect this text will be used as the basis for further research on the field. That’s possibly why you’ve chosen to keep the long personal considerations, resorting to some authors that you consider to be key. However, by doing this, you are distancing the text from the structure it is supposed to have. And, again, it remains the distancing from this initial discussion and the extreme practical data presented in the empirical section.
Do consider the possibility of, first, write a working paper or perform the initial discussion in a journal whose aims and scope fit a philosophical perspective, and only after try to engage with a broader journal, such as Sustainability.
Apart from this, check text size of pages 249-255
