Local Economic Impact of COVID-19 on the Urban Tourism-Related Services: A Perspective of Kochi Heritage City, Kerala

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)

 

This is an interesting study that tackles a worthwhile topic, given the recency of the studied phenomena.

The introduction provides a good overview of the study's purpose, research questions, and its relevance. However, it could benefit from more detail on the specific context and background of the study, for instance, the economic environment in Kochi Heritage City before Covid-19. This information could help readers better understand the significance of the study's findings and contextualize its implications. Additionally, the introduction could benefit from an explicit statement of the study's hypotheses or research questions to guide readers through the study's objectives.

The study needs more engagement with the most recent literature on tourism/economic activity effects on urban environments post Covid-19, for instance

Zhang, G., & Xing, L. (2023). Research on tourism economic effect under the threshold of new-type urbanization in coastal cities of China: From the perspective of development economics. Ocean & Coastal Management, 239, 106587.

and

Fieger, P., Prayag, G., Dyason, D., Rice, J., & Hall, C. M. (2023). Exploring CBD Retail Performance, Recovery and Resilience of a Smart City Following COVID-19. Sustainability, 15(10), 8300.

and

Stan, M. I., Tasente, T., & Rus, M. (2023). Challenges and opportunities regarding the COVID-19 pandemic on urban mobility in Constanta, Romania. Technium Soc. Sci. J., 42, 1.

The data and settings section contains a good description of the study's design, data collection, and analysis procedures. However, it could benefit from more detail on the sampling method and how the representativeness of the sample was ensured. For instance, it is not clear whether sampling weights were used and whether any efforts were undertaken to determine (and possibly address) any bias.

The discussion section provides a reasonable analysis of the findings, implications, and potential explanations for the observed outcomes. However, it could benefit from more specificity and evidence-based approaches in some of its recommendations for future research and policy. For example, some of the suggestions are a bit opaque. Also, while the discussion section highlights potential explanations for the study's outcomes, it does not provide sufficient empirical evidence to support these explanations, which might limit readers' confidence in their validity.

Overall, while the study provides interesting insights into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on

Urban Tourism-related services in Kochi Heritage City, Kerala, although there are some minor areas where it could be strengthened through more detail, specificity, and evidence-based approaches to enhance readers' understanding and confidence in the study’s findings.

Some wordings sound a little odd and the paper may benefit from additional proof reading.

needs minor improvement

Author Response

Respected Reviewer,

I have successfully incorporated all the comments and updated the manuscript accordingly. Kindly find the attachment for your kind review.

Thanking you

Sincerely

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

The literature review must be improved. To better understand geographical contexts of the COVID-19 impacts on tourism industries I would advise to include studies presenting geographical impacts, including national, international and global, into literature review, see e.g. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12114697. Mind that also impact of new technologies and AI was boosted by COVID-19. This significantly mediates the impact of COVID-19 on tourism industries, see e.g. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2020.1762118. Cheer (https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2020.1765016) asked whether tourism after COVID-19 will be ready to transform itself to more sustainable, inclusive and stakeholders caring. Your paper has a potential to address this question somehow.

Description of sampling procedure could be improved. First, explain clearly who belongs to the population, e.g. owners of the entities investigated, managers, employees? Second, I do appreciate stratified sampling. However, please explain the sampling method you have used to select respondents from every group identified. Mind also, that you indicate impact only on selected group of tourism industries, economic impact on the complex economic system of the research area is not considered in your study: local authorities, local NGOs and local actors, suppliers of tourism enterprises are not included. As thus, I would advise to explain that you are targeting impact of COVID-19 on local tourism industry rather than local economy. Also, consider to change the title of your paper.

Some minor remarks. Figure 1 is completely blurry. The map presented on the study is incomplete, there is no legend, so the reader cannot understand the content.

Author Response

Respected Reviewer,

I have successfully incorporated all the comments and updated the manuscript accordingly. Kindly find the attachment for your kind review.

Thanking you

Sincerely

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)

The authors have made sufficient alterations to the paper which I now deem to be of publishable quality. Congratutlations.

Some minor editing still required.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I received the article entitled "Local Economic Impact of COVID-19 on the Urban Tourism-related Services: A Perspective of Kochi Heritage City, Kerala" for review. In my opinion, the topic of the impact of COVID-19 on tourism and the economy is of utmost importance. Although there has been a lot of research and publications on this topic, new empirical and theoretical research is still welcomed. The text I reviewed is therefore interesting and worth publication. However, the article needs to be improved before final acceptance in an international peer-reviewed journal. Below, I state my remarks on the article under review:

- In the introduction, the authors state the pre-pandemic levels of tourist revenue, tourist arrivals, and other indicators (lines 45-48). The authors should provide the year for these indicators, specifying whether it was 2019 or another pre-pandemic year.

- Moreover, some data regarding international tourism arrivals, for example, should be mentioned from UNWTO (United Nations World Tourism Organization) since they are currently taken from publications (e.g., references no. 6, 7). Details from UNWTO Tourist Highlights 2020, which presents 2019 data, can be utilized to show pre-pandemic levels of globally and regionally relevant tourist indicators. The source can be found here: https://www.e-unwto.org/doi/book/10.18111/9789284422456

- In my view, Section 2 (State of the art) is not necessary and should be merged with the next section (i.e., literature review) since it provides insights into tourism definitions, crises, and COVID-19 based on the existing literature.

- The literature review should encompass more references about the COVID-19 crisis. Additionally, references not solely focused on the disadvantages of the COVID-19 pandemic should be mentioned. Some authors believe that the pandemic has given an opportunity for degrowth and a more sustainable approach to the tourism phenomenon. This different point of view presents the pandemic as a chance for tourism sustainability rather than solely as a crisis. While it may not be prevalent in the current scientific literature, it should be mentioned based on research publications.

- There is a lack of highly cited references regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and tourism. I advise looking into the highly cited special issue of "Tourism Geographies," Volume 22, Issue 3 (2020), devoted to this topic. The URL for the volume is: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rtxg20/22/3

- In my view, a map of the study area location should be supplemented in Section 4.1.

- I have doubts about the description of the Likert scale (page 6). The Likert scale is presented as regarding the level of being affected by COVID-19 (scoring it with points from 1 to 5).  However, in social sciences, the scale is mostly used to measure respondents' agreement or disagreement with a statement or question (e.g., strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree). Please clarify this.
For reference about Likert scale, see: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Likert-Scale

- In my opinion, the language of the text would benefit from copyediting. There are some awkward phrasings and mistakes (e.g., "moder activities" - line 216) or colloquial phrasings (e.g., "meet their two ends" - line 393) that should be avoided. The text is generally quite well-written; however, some additional editing would certainly improve its weaker parts.

-I couldn't find any references to Table 3 and 5 throughout the text.

- The authors should clearly state whether the questionnaire survey was representative, as it does not represent the whole population's structure in terms of gender structure (see section 5.1, lines 304-306).

-Moreover, I have doubts about whether the analysis solely focuses on the economic impacts of COVID-19 on urban tourism services or if it also considers its social impacts on communities. Please clarify this. 

-In the last section (Discussion and Conclusion), more references should be used, and the results should be more extensively related to other publications about Covid and tourism, including highly cited ones.

In my opinion, this text is interesting, and with the introduction of proper corrections, it will be worth publishing in an international peer-review journal.

Good but should be improved - copyediting required. 

Author Response

Comments:

General: All comments have been tried to incorporate in the following manuscript. and the other specific comments from the respective reviewers are updated accordingly. 

1. Update the information as per suggested comments for the year of indicators. The data is up to 2019, however, the statistics are up to 2021.
2. Tourism highlights are reobserved and also update with the most updated available source.
3. Section-2 (previous version) is removed and merged with the Literature review section.
4. Additional sources have been incorporated in the LR section to support the statement from other highly cited sources.
5. The location map is updated accordingly in section 4.1
6. This paper is a sub-section of proceeding research, which was used to assess the level of Public participation in tourism-related urban regeneration in Kochi City, and hence, measure the extent of acceptance of statements from the participants in the study area. The 5-Point Likert Scale has been designed accordingly.
7. English has been checked and updated accordingly. The typing errors have been removed.
8. No. of Table has been updated.
9. The questionnaire survey was based on site-specific and was performed on the targeted community only (stakeholders of tourism-related services).
10. The analysis is a sub-section of the proceeding research (section one-focus on the socio-economy of the region and the impact of the pandemic on tourism-related services).
11. In the discussion and conclusion section, more references have been incorporated to support the findings of the research.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

Thank you very much for the opportunity to read the paper. Your report would have been excellent if you could have been published one year earlier. I think your presentation is quite good, but everything has already been understood, reducing your research's value. You could have discussed from the next pandemic or crisis perspectives or how heritages can be sustained from a big pandemic like COVID-19. For example, Bhatta, K.; Gautam, P.; Tanaka, T. Travel Motivation during COVID-19: A Case from Nepal. Sustainability 2022, 14, 7165. https:// doi.org/10.3390/su14127165 discussed domestic tourism could be one of the solutions for resilience in pandemics. You raised the already-understood problems but failed to discuss how your economy in heritages sites could be less impacted by COVID-19.

Specific comments:

You submitted an old figure between lines 44-63. Revise with the latest data. Rather than only discussing economic losses, you are suggested to take Kerala as a case of decreasing economic contribution; I suggest you discuss how Kerala could be better based on your data and literature.

As per my understanding, your literature review is also similar to 44-63. I suggest revising how heritages sites coped with COVID-19.

349-385, the reading is monotonous; try to highlight only main findings Avoid mentioning all the averages and values.

 

In the discussion, highlight the main findings and increase more on what could have been done and what lessons other heritages learned from the Kerala case.

 

 

 

Author Response

Comments:

General: All comments have been tried to incorporate in the following manuscript. and the other specific comments from the respective reviewers are updated accordingly. 

1. Update the information as per the suggested comments. More updated references have been reviewed and incorporated to support the statements.
2. Data (previous version-Line-44-63) has been updated with the most recent data available, and the statistics have been tried to cover the trend of the economic impact of the pandemic in the study area.
3. The literature review section has been revised as per the comments of the respective reviewers. 
4. In the findings, the author has tried to elaborate in detail, so it might give a better understanding to the readers.
5. In the discussion section, all the mentioned comments have been updated according to the reviewer's comments.

Thanking you for your kind consideration and valuable feedback.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The article deals with an interesting and topical topic. The bibliography is adequate, although more survey items could have been referenced with related bibliography. The methodology is adequate.

It is necessary to fix the layout of the tables, for example, in Table 1 the numbers appear cut into two lines.

The questionnaire should be placed, either in an annex or in the same text of the article.

Section 4.3.2. Data analysis and conclusions should be improved by indicating references to other studies and explaining its peculiarities of each item analyzed.

 

Author Response

Comments:

General: All comments have been tried to incorporate in the following manuscript. and the other specific comments from the respective reviewers are updated accordingly. 

1. Update the information as per suggested comments from the respective reviewers. More updated references have been incorporated to support the statements.
2. The layout of the table has been fixed, to better and clear understanding. 
3. Section- Data analysis and conclusion has been revised and updated accordingly. Some more supportive references have been incorporated to support the findings of the research.

Thanking you for your valuable feedback and comments that help to improve my article.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

The most pressing issue is the editing of the text to correct typos and unclear sentences is necessary. For example, the first sentence is unintelligible, compromising the understanding of the following sentences in the paragraph. This problem is reflected throughout the paper.

 

I recommend a revision of the abstract, removing the suggestion that there was a delay in the recovery of the tourism sector arising from a gap in scientific knowledge.

 

In the introduction, the objective of the study is presented very broadly. I suggest that the authors reformulate the presentation of the objective, bringing it closer to the analysis that is carried out. I also suggest that the introduction presents a gap in extant knowledge and the contributions of this research. It seems uninteresting to me to publish an article that only describes what happened in one city, without reflecting on the contributions of the study. This should also be included, in a more detailed way, in the conclusion.

 

Why do authors separate the state of the art from the literature review? I recommend merging these chapters and eliminating the b characterising the evolution of tourism and releted activities and empirical context: there is too much repetition here with what is said in the introduction and in section 4.2.

 

Table 1 needs to be edited to make the figures easier to read. Perhaps authors could present the absolute figures in thousands.

 

The authors should provide more elements on data collection procedures. Had the scales been previously used in the literature or were they developed for this study? How was the questionnaire applied (online or paper-based)? Why was the application interrupted in December 2022? How was the random selection of respondents implemented?

 

Did you run the Kolmogorov-Smirnov or the Shapiro-Wilk Test to test the Assumption of Normality? If no, I suggest that you do it.

 

How were the “impact” variables (reduction in local earnings, reduction in the working hours, and job losses) measured/computed? You mention the existence of components, but they are not provided. 

 

Lines 288-289: reference to Table 6 needs to be corrected.

 

It is not clear how ANOVA contributes to your discussion. I believe that the results are the same you have obtained with the t-tests.

The quality and interest of this paper is completely overshadowed by the quality of the writing. A revision of the English is imperative.

Author Response

Comments:

General: All comments have been tried to incorporate in the following manuscript. and the other specific comments from the respective reviewers are updated accordingly. 

1. The writing language has been checked and revised accordingly. The typing errors have been removed and other mistakes have been revised as per suggestions.
2. Abstract revision might give redirection to the research, hence, the author tried to avoid it. However, as per valuable feedback from respective reviews, the comments have been incorporated in the proceeding body of the article.
3. The introduction has been updated according to the respective reviewer's comments, and have tried to make it simple to understand in a better way.
4. Section-2 and Section-3 (previous version) have been revised and updated accordingly. 
5. Table -1, has been restructured as per the prescribed format, to be easy to understand for all readers. 
6. Data has been collected through an On-site survey with paper-based questionnaires. The questionnaire was developed accordingly and distributed on-site. A total of 450 questionnaires were distributed (in three stages-350-80-20), from which 408 questionnaires were returned back. An effective 398 samples were incorporated for the analysis.
7. the Test has been performed for tourism-related service providers (stakeholders of tourism-related services only). It was targeted to a only set of communities(tourism-related service providers), not for all. Therefore, the author only focuses on a one-sample t-test, instead of carrying multiple-tests). Time constrain was another limitation to performing this test only. However, the author might perform the Kolmogorov-Smirnov or the Shapiro-Wilk Test to test the Assumption of Normality in future, as per better suggestion from the respective reviewer (if needed).
8. the impact variable "all three" has been measured by assessment of acceptance level statements from all 398 respondents, and thus analysed descriptively.
9. Table reference no. has been updated accordingly.
10. Comments on Writing language have been incorporated. All relevant error has been removed, and the other typing errors have been revised accordingly.

Thanking you for your valuable feedback and comments that help to improve this article.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The second version of the paper, titled "Local Economic Impact of COVID-19 on Urban Tourism-related Services: A Perspective of Kochi Heritage City, Kerala," has been significantly improved. In my opinion, the authors have addressed the majority of the reviewer's remarks. The article now meets the proper standards required for scientific publication.

Author Response

General: All comments have been tried to incorporate in the following manuscript. The respected Reviewer has suggested no further changes.

Thank you so much for accepting this manuscript for final submission.

Sincerely

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

   I did not find the revised report. I was expecting the revision report to include information on what was changed, how it was changed, and where it was changed based on my comments.

Author Response

General: All comments have been tried to incorporate in the following manuscript. and the other specific comments from the respected reviewers are updated accordingly. The article is revised and tried to cover the future perspectives in the discussion section from the review of literature which are highly cited. The Author has tried to correlate the socio-economic values with tourism-related services and how it could be less impacted by any pandemic in future.

Specific:

1. The presented data is the most updated (as per available resources and government records). The data is up to 2019, however, the statistics are up to 2021. The article has discussed the future prospects towards the betterment of tourism-related services based in Kerala's heritage city.
2. As per the reviewer's comments, section-1 has been updated accordingly. Section-2 (previous version) is removed and merged with the Literature review section.
3. In the findings and discussion section, tried to explain the major findings related to each sub-class to make this article more understandable to the readers.
4. In the final section (discussion)- as per the respected reviewer's suggestions, the section has been revised and updated accordingly. the article discusses the findings based on other heritage sites which were focused on tourism-related services and further discussed how Kochi heritage city could be benefitted and also contributed to other heritage sites. In the discussion and conclusion section, more references have been incorporated to support the findings of the research.

Hence, all relevant comments have been incorporated accordingly. It is my humble request, kindly accept this manuscript for final scientific submission.

Sincerely

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

I maintain my previous decision, since I felt that most of my comments/suggestions were not considered in the revision. I should reply the comments one by one. Moreover, you say that you have made a text revision, but problems remain and in some cases got worse with repetitions of words and incomplete words, incorrect verb forms, etc.

See above.

Author Response

All comments have been tried to incorporate in the following manuscript. and the other specific comments from the respected reviewer are updated accordingly. The article has been revised and tried to cover the future prospects in the discussion section, which was supported by a literature review from highly cited sources. The English language test has been performed by an academic reader and updated accordingly. The authors have tried to make the article's language simple to understand to all levels of readers in the scientific community. 

Relevant incorporated comments:

1. Update the information as per suggested comments for the year indicators. The data is up to 2019, however, the statistics are up to 2021.
2. Tourism highlights are reobserved and also update with the most updated available source.
3. Section-2 (previous version) is removed and merged with the Literature review section.
4. Additional sources have been incorporated in the LR section to support the statement from other highly cited sources.
5. The location map is updated accordingly in section 4.1
6. This paper is a sub-section of proceeding research, which was used to assess the level of Public participation in tourism-related urban regeneration in Kochi City, and hence, measure the extent of acceptance of statements from the participants in the study area. The 5-Point Likert Scale has been designed accordingly.
7. English has been checked and updated accordingly. The typing errors have been removed.
8. No. of Table has been updated.
9. The questionnaire survey was based on site-specific and was performed on the targeted community only (stakeholders of tourism-related services).
10. The analysis is a sub-section of the proceeding research (section one-focus on the socio-economy of the region and the impact of the pandemic on tourism-related services).
11. In the discussion and conclusion section, more references have been incorporated to support the findings of the research.

It is, therefore, my humble request to you, kindly accept this article for final acceptance. Your kind cooperation will be highly obliged.

Thanking you

Sincerely

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 4 Report

1. The first sentences of the paper (Cities are considered as the center for the regeneration of economy and contribute to making cities, functionally stable. In the case of heritage cities around the globe, it acts as 35 new opportunities in socio-economic regeneration in terms of commercial, industrial, lei-36 sure and artistic, recreational activities which have been serving as the most popular tour-37 ist destinations throughout the regime of history of art and architecture [1].) are unintelligible. Please rewrite them.

 

2. The introduction needs to present the research problem. The objective of the study is presented very broadly and there is no research question neither the identification of the research gap. The contributions of the research need to be presented.

 

3. Sometimes you use cov-19 and other times COVID-19. Please standardise the terminology.

 

4. Please indicate the source of Figure 1.

 

5. How were the “impact” variables (reduction in local earnings, reduction in the working hours, and job losses) measured/computed?

 

6. Please identify the limitations and the contributions of your research in the conclusion.

 

7. Please respond to my comments one by one and mark all changes in the manuscript.

The paper needs an extensive proofreading.

Author Response

Respected Reviewer,

With all due respect, it is brought to your kind notice that, I have successfully incorporated all the mentioned comments and updated the manuscript as per your valued suggestions. Kindly find the attachment.

Thanking you

Your Sincerely

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf