We welcome you to join us in Osaka, Japan on Friday and Saturday, March 27-28, 2020 for the 6th Conference on Sustainable Tourism in Asia (COSTA 2020), to be held at the Osaka Corona Hotel in Osaka City, Japan. This event is being organized alongside the 6th Conference on Human Development in Asia (COHDA 2020).

COSTA 2020 will coincide with the cherry blossom viewing period around Osaka. The good weather and blooming cherry blossoms is a time ‘hanami’ celebrations around the city. Hanami, which means cherry blossom viewing, is an important ritual in Japanese culture dating back hundreds of years. It is customary for people to gather in parks and spread tarps beneath the cherry trees, admiring the splendor of the blossoms, while eating, drinking and enjoying time with family and friends. The most popular spots for hanami get crowded with food and drink stalls, and sometimes there are festivals and events of all kinds. Plus, hanami in Osaka can be enjoyed not only during daytime, but also at night, when the cherry trees are lit up and offer a completely different scenery.

This is a small, international, peer-reviewed conference with a limited number of oral and poster presentation time slots. We encourage all interested participants to submit presentations as early as possible. Please note that submissions and registration will close when the event has reached its capacity.

About COSTA 2020

Our theme for COSTA 2020 is Tourism for Peace & Sustainability and Osaka, with its close proximity to Kyoto, Kobe and Nara, serves as the ideal venue for this special event, which supports the notion that the travel industry, in general, exists for people from different beliefs, cultures, social and economic backgrounds to have opportunities to share in the awe and wonder of this amazing world, to explore new cultures and gain positive impressions, which they will take back to their country. Through COSTA 2020 we believe that by creating a platform for dialog of peaceful ideas for the tourism industry, we can work together to better promote and achieve peace through tourism.

While many academic institutions, government agencies and members of the travel industry focus on the economic or environmental aspects of tourism, few have recognized the growing importance of tourism in promoting, securing and preserving global peace. Conventional tourism, especially in developing countries, is more vulnerable to the industry’s adverse effects from environmental risks like compromised ecosystems to socio-cultural conflicts arising from failure to respect, communicate and include local communities in the planning and benefit sharing.
According to the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), both travel and the tourism industry have often been recognised for the ability to drive peace, security and understanding. In fact, research conducted by the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) in partnership with the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) illustrated that countries with a more open and sustainable tourism sector tend to be more peaceful. Moreover, a sustainable and open tourism sector brings about a higher level of positive peace: namely the attitudes, institutions, and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies. Also, countries with a more sustainable and open tourism sector are more likely to enjoy higher levels of positive peace in the future. Finally, the more sustainable a country’s tourism sector, the lower the country’s level of violence and conflict is likely to be and in non-conflict-affected countries, tourism is resilient to deterioration in violence and conflict, even when terrorism is targeted at tourists. COSTA 2020 offers a platform for scholarly and applied conversations among a wide variety of stakeholders concerned with the continual challenge of advancing peace through tourism.

We welcome proposals of 250 words in English by Friday, January 17, 2020.

COSTA 2020 Streams

Cultural and Heritage Tourism
Dark Tourism
Destination Branding and Marketing
Eco-Tourism and Geo-Tourism
Halal Tourism
Hotel Management and Sustainability
Medical Tourism
Popular Culture & Contents Tourism
Religious Tourism
Sustainable Tourism
Tourism for Peace
Tourism Technology
Other Areas (please specify)