As one of the world’s fastest and most dynamic industries, tourism remains the primary engine of economic growth and sustainability that generates a vast number of employments, leading to poverty alleviation. The tourism industry also remains as a complex environment made of different sectors with their own complex environments. Thereby, any changes significantly impact the stakeholders, either in a positive or negative way. For example, the unfortunate event when one of the world’s oldest and biggest tour operators abruptly ceased all its operation recently illustrates the scope of the damage for stakeholders when a change turns out to be of a negative stance. In this case, thousands of vacationers left frustrated and thousands of employees lost their job.
Furthermore, the leisure, tourism and hospitality environment are impacted by instances of the financial crisis and the industry is constantly being reshaped by the deployment of robots, artificial intelligence, and blockchain, as well as instances value co-creation and co-destruction. These fast-paced changes and the way they reshape the development of the tourism industry create concern among stakeholders.

Additionally, consumers continuously reshaping the industry as well. For example, the fastest-growing segments of Muslim tourists, with their own expectations regarding tourism products and services, created the rise of Halal tourism in recent years. Consequently, in order to investigate the significant changes of the industry, new methods such as tourism neuromarketing, artificial intelligence, and big data analysis are being developed but so far there is no evidence on how these current issues are affecting stakeholders’ psychological factors. More of that there is no clear indication of how these new methodologies can provide additional knowledge regarding psychological aspects usually rise in the field.

As psychology is of vital importance to tourism, leisure, and hospitality professionals there is a strong need to develop new conceptual frameworks and empirical investigation that not only advance the theory but also lead to practical implications for practitioners of these sectors. Therefore, in this Research Topic, we seek to shed light on the current academic and practical perspectives within the sectors. Additionally, we aim to investigate contemporary concerns relative to leisure, tourism, and hospitality and how they interrelate with psychology concerns.

We welcome manuscripts from various disciplines that cover current issues in these sectors while they are interconnected with psychological science, such as:
• Consumer and organizational buying behavior and marketing trends
• Assessing marketing effectiveness and management efforts
• Decision-making processes
• Work-life balance
• Methods of employee training and learning
• Problem-solving, mediation, and counseling, in the work environment
• New methods to evaluate emotional intelligence for leaders
• Tourism neuromarketing
• Brain activity (cognitive and emotional)
• The use and the impact of robots and artificial intelligence
• Smart environments, augmented, or virtual reality environments.
• Social media use and interaction.
• Big data analysis of social media use and digital platform
• Engagement and impact of social media interaction

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Frontiers in Psychology

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