Alongside interest in motivation and the typological structure of tourism, the need to understand the nature of tourist experience has also been a recurring theme in the development of tourism studies (see, e.g., Cohen, 1979; Urierly, 2005). However, it is important to recognise some significant changes in the way in which tourist experience has been viewed. Urierly (2005) suggests that this shift is reflective of transitions from a modernist perspective in which tourism was seen as essentially distinct from everyday life, to a postmodern perspective in which tourism becomes an embedded facet of life and where the meanings attached to the act of touring are negotiated at an individual level and are contingent on the context.
The seminal work in the modernist tradition is probably Cohen’s (1979) essay on the phenomenology of tourist experience. Here Cohen proposed five ‘modes’ of experience (recreational, diversionary, experiential, experimental and existential) that he envisaged as spanning a spectrum from the outwardly simple pursuit of pleasure acquired through the experience of difference (the recreational mode) to a quest to establish a meaning to life through exposure to the lives of others (the existential mode). In articulating the experimental and existential modes in particular, Cohen suggests a number of parallels with MacCannell’s (1973: 591) interpretation of tourist experience as a quest for authenticity – a desire ‘to see life as it is really lived’ and which is pursued as an antidote to the perceived inauthenticity of the modern lives that are lived out by tourists in their home settings.
The conceptual understandings developed by writers such as Cohen and MacCannell typically frame the tourist experience as a bounded event that stands apart – and is therefore distinct – from the routines and the geographical spaces of day-to-day life. However, even a simple analysis of how a tourist event is constructed and experienced challenges this assumption. Figure 1.5 illustrates a theoretical summary which proposes a tourism event as comprising a series of key phases and related processes:
● An initial phase of planning the trip in which destinations, modes of travel, preferred styles and levels of accommodation are evaluated and a destination selected. The
planning phase is informed by a number of potential inputs (including previous experience, images and perceptions of places and suggestions made by others) and will be reflective of motives and intentions for travelling.
● Outward travel. All tourism involves travel, and it is important to realise that travelling is often more than just a means to an end. In many tourism contexts, getting there is half the fun, and in some forms of tourism – most conspicuously in sea cruising – the act of travelling rather than visiting places often becomes the central element within the tourism experience as a whole.
● Experience of the destination. This element is normally the main component within the visit and most clearly reflects the category or categories of tourism in which the trip is located and the motivations of the visitors. In general forms of tourism, experience of the destination will typically include elements of sightseeing, leisure shopping and the collection of souvenirs and memorabilia. It may also include varying levels of contact with host populations, society and culture, the extent and significance of which
REMINISCENCE
&
ANTICIPATION OF NEXT VISIT
Photo / film Souvenirs
Conversation
Accommodation Local travel
Memories Sightseeing
Motives
Activities Costs
Shopping
TRAVEL HOME TRAVEL TO DESTINATION CHOICE OF DESTINATION
Experience of others
RECALL Previous
experience
Media promotion
P L A N N I N G
EXPERIENCE AT DESTINATION Figure 1.5
Structure of the tourist experience
will vary. Other forms – for example, adventure tourism – may reveal a more overt focus on activity and engagement with pursuits.
● Return travel, which, as with the outward journey, may be an integral part of the tourism experience, although it may not realise the same degree of pleasure, anticipation and excitement, as the trip is nearing its end and fatigue may have begun to affect the tourist.
● Recall. The trip will be relived subsequently and probably repeatedly, in conversation with friends and relatives, in holiday photographs and/or videos, or in response to the visual prompts offered by souvenirs that may now be arranged around the home. The recall phase will also inform the preliminary planning of the next visit and may be a positive, mixed, or negative stimulus, depending upon the perceived levels of success or failure of the trip.
This approach to understanding the structuring of experience around a specific tourism event makes three fundamental points. First, by emphasising how the actual visit is prefigured by a planning phase and then subsequently relived through memory, the model demonstrates the holistic nature of experience and the fact that the total experience of tourism is much more than the visit itself. Second, the model shows how experience is strongly grounded in geography since the places in which the experience is located and the geographic transitions between those places are seen as central to the overall process.
Finally, the model shows how important aspects of the tourist experience occur in the home environment and thus become enmeshed in aspects of daily life, rather than being confined to the trip itself.
The tendency to question conventional wisdoms regarding the separate nature of tourist experience and its grounding in concepts such as authenticity has become much more pronounced within recent and contemporary tourism research. Passing reference has already been made to some of the ways in which globalisation (especially in areas such as the media or in wider patterns of material consumption) infuse tourist experiences of difference into daily life. In turn, daily life directly shapes much of tourism experience. Ritzer and Liska (1997: 99) note that ‘people increasingly travel to other locales in order to experience much of what they experience in their day-to-day lives’, or as Franklin (2004: 10) observes, we travel ‘within the realm of the familiar’. Moreover, in societies that are increasingly formed around mobilities (Urry, 2000), tourism becomes an expression of that way of life rather than a form of resistance to it.
Tourism has also become a more overtly embodied and sensual form of experience (Macnaghten and Urry, 2000; Crouch and Desforges, 2003) (e.g., through the development of adventuresome forms of tourism) and has acquired a diversity (e.g., in visiting friends and relatives, in beach holidays, in nature tourism, in activity holidays or visiting theme parks) that defies adequate explanation through conventional concepts of authenticity.
Indeed, in a world in which tens of millions of people base their tourist experiences in what Eco (1986) describes as the ‘hyper-reality’ of Disney-style theme parks or the artificial environments of resorts such as Las Vegas, the notion of authentic experience seems, at one level at least, to be very out-dated. However, as Wang (1999) explains, such forms of tourism may acquire a different form of authenticity that is no less important (see Chapter 6).
But although we have clearly moved into an era in which tourism has acquired an embedded place in (post)modern lifestyles and the boundaries between tourism and other aspects of life have become blurred, we should not assume that the activity of touring has surrendered all meaning or all its claims to distinction. Tourism – especially in the form of holidays – remains a prominent component in the ordering of individual and family life and a very significant area of personal expenditure. Despite the outward familiarity of many forms of contemporary tourism, most tourist trips still deliver experiences of varying
degrees of difference and of change from routine. Consequently, tourism still endows most people with experiences that are sufficiently distinct to form memories that survive long after other (routine) events are forgotten.