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Introduction While acknowledging that not all infl uential and meaningful tourism knowledge is academic and scientifi c in nature (Liburd, 2012), the academic study of tourism has now arguably reached a level of maturity that is rich, diverse and highly useful to various stakeholders and in multiple ways at a global level. Academic tourism knowledge spans several decades of sustained empirical inquiry. This period of sustained tourism scholarship started during the Second World War and is now present in over 270 tourism and related academic journals. We seem to be living in an era of refl ecting back on what we have produced in tourism studies and where the academic fi eld may be heading in the future. Lai, Li and Scott (2015) have established that there has been a sustained focus over recent years on rethinking various forms of tourism knowledge (e.g. Xiao, Jafari, Cloke & Tribe, 2013; Xiao & Smith …