Understanding the tourist-resident relationship through social contact: progressing the development of social contact in tourism

Social contact becomes an essential agenda of tourist-resident relationship research. However, the development of social contact in tourism and how it could influence the tourist-resident relationship is still ambiguous. This conceptual study addresses those research gaps by providing an overview of the current development in tourist-resident social contact; developing a tourist-resident social contact axis to understand different tourist-resident relationship through social contact; and delineating the future research directions of tourist-resident social contact. This research contributes to the theory by clarifying the development of the concept in terms of contact antecedents, contact types and contact impacts, proposing a social contact axis to understand the tourist-resident relationship through four contact scenarios and offering directions to guide the future investigations. Practically, results benefit different stakeholders regarding how to jointly develop a favourable and sustainable tourist-resident relationship.