The Tourist Experience – serie

The Adventure Tourist: Being, Knowing, Becoming brings together two broad areas of academic inquiry – adventure tourism and hospitality studies. In situating the adventure tourist within social, cultural, political, and geographic contexts, The Adventure Tourist considers the adventure experience and offers new ways in which this can be more deeply analysed and interpreted.Focused on the personal tourist experience and what it means to seek adventure through tourism in an uncertain and troubled world, Farkić and Gebbels question the dynamic interactions in modern commodified adventure tourism practice. By questioning hospitality services through philosophical and sociological concepts, focus is maintained on the agency of the individual, bringing into discussion the senses, emotions, and desires of those who consume outdoor spaces globally.The Adventure Tourist responds to the requirements of the outdoor adventure industry today and considers how engagement with theory can inform, challenge and support real-world scenarios in this sector.

The Tourist Experience is complex, intrinsically personal, and highly emotional. Consequently, it is not easy to understand what it is that drives us to continue to travel, and to return to places visited. It is important for all sides of the travel, tourism, and hospitality industries to understand what tourists are searching for as well as what they experience, with emotions playing a central role.The research outlined in Unravelling Travelling: Uncovering Tourist Emotions through Autoethnography delves into the deep, personal, and very subjective emotions experienced while travelling to foreign places. Taking an autoethnographic approach, this evocative, reflexive, critical and analytical study uncovers a range of personal emotional drivers that resonate across disciplinary boundaries.Examining the development of autoethnography in the social sciences, where the researchers often expose deeply personal experiences that cannot be directly interpreted from an outsider’s perspective, Unravelling Travelling offers an in-depth commentary on the role of autoethnography in the tourism field. This personal account from author Sue Beeton goes beyond simple memoir, exposing the practices of researcher, as well as the methodology employed. Personal travel narratives and poems not only uncover emotions that may not be evident through other research approaches, but also by being highly critical of her own work, Beeton argues the case for and against autoethnography itself.

The Mindful Tourist presents the first comprehensive theoretical perspective on mindfulness in contemporary tourist experiences. This innovative new study is based on the detailed exploration of mindful consumer behaviour and draws on insights from new cases of mindful tourism experiences, examining the potential for broader uptake across the industry.Examining the foundations of meditative mindfulness practices, mindfulness and tourism, the mindful tourism experience, and transformational power of mindful tourism experiences, The Mindful Tourist: The Power of Presence in Tourism explores key themes and issues, including the drivers of mindfulness in the tourism domain, the commodification of mindfulness, mindfulness and sustainability, and mindful tourist experiences being assisted through technology.

Previously viewed as a relatively small group of errant travellers rooted in counter-cultural ideas, backpackers have now become a powerful tourist sector of predominantly young travellers, planning and preparing their own trips, and looking for direct cultural contact, novelty and spontaneity all around the globe.The Backpacker Tourist: A contemporary perspective explores the increasing number of people traveling around the world as backpackers and analyses the great diversification of this demographic and their varied experiences while traveling.Martins and Costa highlight the conflicting interpretations in the literature on backpackers and the comparative reflexion between Western and the growing number of Eastern backpackers, particularly relating to their travel motivations and the way they experience destinations. The Backpacker Tourist presents new perspectives to researchers of Tourism Studies and the Sociology of Travel, but also to those who looking for a synthetical, contemporary and critical analysis of contemporary backpacker tourists.

Youth tourists are often defined as money poor and time rich but there are significant differences in social status, interests, and consumption behaviour within the various segments of this sector. In The Youth Tourist: Motives, Experiences and Travel Behaviour, author Anna Irimiás maps out the heterogenous segment of the ‘Millennial’ market to help illustrate the rich diversity of youth tourist motivations and behaviours.Drawing on theories found in social psychology, media, and communication and consumer behaviour to describe youth tourists on family holidays, on study and working abroad programs, and participating in pilgrimages, festivals, and media-induced tourism events, Irimiás adds significant detail to youth tourist travel patterns in light of current societal changes. She also analyses future trends in youth tourism and addresses the implications of current challenges such as climate change and digitalization, and the potential changes to the industry in light of the pandemic. The Youth Tourist presents new perspectives to researchers of Tourism Studies and the Sociology of Travel who are looking for a contemporary and critical analysis of this important market sector.

This book addresses a growing demand to hear the authentic voices and understand the lived tourist experiences of people with disability. The latest volume in The Tourist Experience series challenges what is arguably an exclusionary, marginalising, discriminatory, and ableist (tourism) world. By drawing attention to the ‘dis/’ in ‘disabled’, the authors provoke the need to change binary thinking about people who live with disability so that they may be ‘able’ to assume the role of tourist. They engage critical tourism and critical disability studies, and their respective theories, perspectives, and debates, around, for instance, models of disability that shape conceptualisations and worldviews, inclusive research and enabling language, and the ethics of care. These are pivotal to dismantling normative structures to enable a more inclusive, equitable, and socially just tourist experience that promotes a more independent and dignified tourism world for people with disability.

The Food Tourist is an essential addition to the academic repertoire for researchers, educators, and professionals in the fields of tourism, hospitality, and gastronomy. Its innovative perspectives and unparalleled insights are sure to inspire new avenues of research and elevate the discourse surrounding food and beverage tourism.The Food Tourist delves into the understanding of the food and beverage tourist as an established area of research and provides a comprehensive, holistic approach to the complexity of food tourist profiling as a new contribution to the field. The book is divided into fourteen chapters (including introduction and conclusion) that discuss the typologies of food tourists based on the understanding of tourists’ motivations and experiences. This is particularly relevant in the context of planning and development of destination attraction factors and the management and marketing of food experiences as a pathway to increase the competitiveness of destinations. These experiences are diverse, and encapsulate cultural and natural factors, engaging visitors with a place through its people and customs.Editors Francesc Fusté-Forné and Erik Wolf explore the dietary and health needs of food tourists, and expand on previous research with a mixture of conceptual and empirical chapters written by leading academics and practitioners. The result is a detailed account of customer segmentation in food tourism research which has not been earlier explored in a single book.