The Role of Niche Tourism Products in Destination - Repository ...

insights into wine tourist motivations and preferences. The research presented here also only focuses on two areas of wine tourism
provision – education and festivals – more research is needed to examine other parts of the wine tourism experience.
Finally, in the niche area of festival and event tourism, research is again limited by sample size and geographical scope, especially
in the case of the work with Festival leaders in Edinburgh. Although the stakeholder research employs a cross cultural approach,
more insight is needed into the environmental, social and cultural dimensions of event impacts on destinations. Much of the
research presented here has a supply side perspective and there is limited insight into festival and event tourist motivations and
experiences and demand side influences at the destination.
5.4 Further Research Opportunities
Completing the PhD by publication route has been an incredible personal learning journey. The act of revisiting and reflecting on
past work in this way, has enabled me to recognise its strengths and limitations, and helped in setting the future directions of my
work. It has enabled the identification of a number of key opportunities to extend this work through further research.
One of the key benefits of completing this process has been an awareness of my development as a researcher. In epistemological
and ontological terms I have progressed from a concentration on using a quantitative approach, perceiving the tourist world to be
real and predictable, to embracing using more mixed methodologies with a focus towards a more qualitative/interpretative approach
to research. This can be seen in the context of Davies (2003) who stresses the complementarity of quantitative and qualitative data
as an important facet of tourism research. Because of the diverse nature of the research presented here, I have tended to adopt a