Tourist children, environment and sustainability: weaknesses and opportunities to educate the tourist of tomorrow

The overall objective of this project was to investigate the potentiality of the environmental education in terms of stakeholder marketing for tourism sector, with a particular focus on tourist children as catalysts of change. Indeed, the tourism research has often neglected children, leaving them aside (Poria & Timothy, 2014; Koscak et al., 2018; Canosa et al., 2019). Moreover, it has been more frequent to focus on investigate children’s thoughts through the parents’ perceptions, considering more the household (Schänzel, 2010;Carr, 2011; Khoo-Lattimore, 2015; Canosa et al., 2019). Nevertheless, recent research proposed tourist children as empowered subjects who can generate a change for sustainability and responsible tourism (Seraphin et al., 2020). In doing so, I had to considered that it was necessary to have a clear background on the development of the child before starting to consider more deeply this subject in the tourism sector, with the along potentiality connected to the environmental education and the stakeholder marketing. For this reason, the first part of the thesis is a literature review focused on explaining the psychological and sociological state of the art, and giving a theoretical contribution reinterpreting the role of the child as stakeholder child. The second part of the thesis is the Paper 1. In this paper, I conducted a scoping review aiming to find the prominent gaps of tourism research regarding tourist children. Paper 2 is the third part of the dissertation and it is partially a part of a chapter of a methodological book, regarding systematic review in business research. In the illustrated case-study I mapped the state of the art of hospitality management research and tourist children. Paper 3, the last part of the thesis, is an analysis of the work of CEAS (EECs) of Sardinia, through a series of qualitative semi-structured interviews, I found main problems, weaknesses and potentialities for adopting strategical actions of stakeholder marketing to educate the tourist of today and the tourist of tomorrow.