Rethinking tourism work: bridging gaps, making connections and exploring new frontiers

Tourism is often associated with movement, leisure, and pleasure. Yet behind every journey lies a dense and uneven infrastructure made up of routines, spaces, and workers that sustain the rhythms of travel and leisure. From hotel rooms and dining services to cleaning, entertainment, transport, and emotional care, tourism rests on a labour force that is highly segmented and exploited, and often rendered invisible, both in public discourse and in academic research. This special issue begins from that blind spot. It brings together contributions that share a common concern: to foreground labour as a central category for understanding tourism. Labour is conceived as a constitutive element that defines what tourism is, how it functions, and how it materialises in practice. Consequently, the authors approach tourism not merely as an economic sector or a cultural practice, but as a field in which specific social relations, institutional arrangements, and spatial hierarchies are produced and contested. By situating tourism within the world of work, the five articles that compose this special issue move beyond celebratory accounts of creativity, mobility, and experience. They examine instead how tourism labour is produced, managed, and contested across different geographies and through diverse empirical and theoretical lenses.