Pathways to Understanding

Introduction

Smart tourists everywhere plan carefully for a successful holiday. They develop a clear sense of their destination and take with them only the luggage needed for the pursuit of their focused purposes. Astute preparation is also required to enjoy the benefits of this volume. Readers, in common with the tourists they study, need to know what locations will be visited and how the time spent at these destinations will be used. Where will we travel in the following pages? The major academic destinations in this volume include a consideration of technology and its influence on tourist behaviour; tourists' experience of safety and the responsibility they have for their own well being, individual perspectives on sustainability, and aspects of tourists' personal development. Tourists' concern for connecting to others through volunteering, their perceptions of poverty and the uses of humour will also be considered. In the final chapter a small set of supplementary topics will be noted including the experiences tourists have in the area of slow tourism and patterns of tipping and bargaining. This concluding section will also provide an overview of the linkages among the topics reviewed.

This chapter offers a gentle guide to this journey by outlining key foundation concepts pertinent to researching tourist behaviour and experience. The terms behaviour and experience will be considered and their close alignment in this volume explained. It will then be suggested that it is desirable for students and scholars of tourism to think about what constitutes theory in tourism studies and how researchers in this area approach the topic of relevance. These concerns will also be reviewed in this chapter together with an overview of the guiding schemes or paradigms in which research is conducted. Further, it is valuable for all researchers to build a familiarity with key organising concepts that illuminate much observed tourist behaviour and experience. Some of the key conceptual schemes used in the book will be briefly noted in this chapter.

Throughout this volume, key and solid references for many conceptual schemes of interest will be provided but we will attempt to avoid inundating the pages with exhaustive citations available in other locations. It is our aim to travel efficiently but not superficially. In earlier reviews of the psychology of tourist behaviour it was almost possible to catalogue the full array of pertinent studies to the many themes. That is no longer possible. The surge of publications and their availability reflects one key aspect of the world with which we will be concerned – the new levels of information access which shape how so many people now think and interact in the contemporary world. By adopting a light luggage approach to the journey it is hoped that readers will find space for their own souvenirs and emerge with fresh ideas from their reading.

Behaviour and Experience

The title of this volume refers to tourist behaviour and throughout the volume there is also a consistent concern with the topic of tourist experiences. What if any are the distinctions between these terms? To answer this question requires a short excursion into the history of psychology and the more recent rise of tourism studies. When psychology was established as a separate area of inquiry from philosophy in the late 19th century the new discipline was built on forging a scientific approach to the study of behaviour (Boring, 1950). Here the term behaviour included all external actions of human beings as well as all internal mental processes and reactions to the world – thus effectively embracing and including the concept of experiences. The term behaviour was therefore the inclusive or umbrella expression. For the decades from the 1880s to the 1930s it was unambiguous that the study of behaviour included the study of experience.

Behaviourism as an approach to the study of psychology commenced in the 1930s and persisted as a powerful influence until the 1970s. This style of work, which is most closely associated with the founding figures of Watson and Skinner, placed its emphasis on studying only externally visible and readily observed acts. Behaviourists did not disavow the existence of experience but for them it had no place in a scientific dialogue. Their efforts muddied the use of the terms behaviour and experience as the approach they advocated disassociated behaviour from experience.

The study of tourism emerged as a significant area of academic interest in the 1970s. For the geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, marketers and economists who first wrote about tourists and who were largely interested in the mental world of the tourist, there was wariness about using the term behaviour because of its restrictive use by some branches of psychology. While not fully conversant with the changing uses of the term in psychology they certainly did not want to limit their interests to observable actions. The concept of experiences became the preferred expression and was reinforced at the end of the century by the business authors Pine and Gilmore (1999) writing about the experience economy. This adoption of the new term of experience was particularly powerful in some parts of Europe. As studies of tourists' experience became more popular, some authors stressed that experience was also embodied, that is there is a need to consider the physical dimensions of human acts and actions (Morgan et al., 2010; Uriely, 2005). In many ways those who had adopted the term experience recognised that behaviour mattered as well.

In the last two decades of the 20th century and in contemporary times the power of the behaviourist movement in psychology has diminished, some would say all but vanished. In the broad discipline of psychology the term behaviour has been consistently redeployed in the original way to mean both observable actions and the internal cognitive and affective world of individuals. The use of the term behaviour in the title of this volume is in line with its inclusive meaning. More specifically, the use of the term behaviour in this work asserts that we need to look at what people do and how their bodies function in time and space but we also need to link this examination with how they think, feel and react to tourism settings. Behaviour then in this volume will embrace observable actions as well as both the on going and reflective but less observable psychological reactions to all the contexts and stimuli which tourists may encounter.

Much recent tourism writing uses the term experience as the core expression to embrace these same areas of interest (Morgan et al., 2010). While our brief historical review sees this use as redundant if behaviour is used in its fullest sense, it is the intent of this volume to communicate with all those interested in tourists' mental lives and travels so both expressions will be deployed in subsequent work. In summary, the compass of our interest thus includes tourists' sensory systems and emotions, their attitudes and their understanding as well as how they interact with others and move in space and time.

As a theme to help readers grasp the approach to experience adopted in this book the nature of experience may be likened to the music produced by an orchestra. There are multiple contributing sections, each of which has its own elements. These sources of influence contribute different component parts at different times to achieve the full musical effect. In the tourists' experiential world the contributing components are the sensory inputs, the affective reactions, the cognitive abilities to react to and understand the setting, the actions undertaken and the relevant relationships which define the participants' world. The component parts of these elements are sometimes more powerful than others such as when smell rather than sight dominates a food experience. Nevertheless, the totality of the food experience will also include affective, behavioural, cognitive and relationship contributions. Behaviour and experience can be studied as they occur or more usually by later recall and analysis. In the following chapters, the way experiences are presented in tourists' stories and accounts will be stressed. This approach expands upon and provides an alternate and sometimes richer and more holistic pathway to review how tourists think about their encounters and settings than relying solely on attitudinal studies (Pearce, 2010). The component parts of experience are itemised in Figure 1.1. The sources of this way of thinking about experience are derived from the work of Ryan (1997), Ashcroft (2000), Schmitt (2003), Baerenholdt et al. (2004), Peters (2005), Pearce (2005) and some of the work of Cutler and Carmichael (2010).

Tourists: The Focus of Our Concern

One reasonably clear and initially satisfying approach to defining tourists, or at least international tourists, is to follow the criteria adopted by the United Nations World Tourism Organisation. This approach requires an individual to have crossed an international boundary for non-remuneration purposes and to have stayed for 24 hours but less than one year in that new setting. Certain exclusion principles add complexity to the definition (nomads, refugees and army personnel are not included as tourists nor are those who are involved in the diplomatic service, those who work across borders or those who are forced to resettle due to disaster or famine). The resulting statistics which are collected globally on the basis of this definition will tend to exaggerate the sheer numbers of tourists in countries which have many borders and through which many pass en route to other locations. Consequently tourists' lengths of stay and expenditure patterns become more compelling statistics when examining the scale of the tourist presence in any location (cf. Morrison, 2010).

Domestic tourists are somewhat harder to define. The approach appears to depend on the purpose of the tourism analyst. Ambiguities revolving around how far an individual has to travel, their trip purpose and their length of stay in the visited destination appear to be interpreted differently in diverse countries (cf. Masberg, 1998). The problem is simplified with an example. Are the father and the son travelling to another city 100 km away for the son to play junior sport domestic tourists? What if they stayed for the weekend? Does this make them more like tourists? And what if they were visiting a festival and not playing sport – would that also make them more 'tourist-like'? The questions raise more questions. Is there really something out there called a tourist – a species we will all recognise? The answer takes us into the territory of the nature of what is real (ontology) and how do we know and study what is real (epistemology) and beyond that to the paradigms of research which might usefully be employed to study the intricacies of tourists' experiences (cf. Tribe, 2009: 6). These are all concepts which must be considered further in the forthcoming phases of this chapter.

These difficulties have led one group of tourism researchers, and particularly those with a background in sociology or geography, to adopt what has been termed the new mobilities paradigm (Hall, 2005; Urry, 2000). At core this approach emphasises the commonalities amongst many travel behaviours and sees positive synergy, for example, in researching everyday commuting, weekend leisure travel and domestic tourism. It is congruent with the mobilities paradigm that residents sometimes report feeling like a tourist in less familiar or intensely structured recreational settings in their own home towns. These local experiential realizations are additional considerations which will be considered at times as we review tourist behaviour.

More will be made of the use of the term paradigm later in this chapter, but the value of grouping diverse travel categories together remains uncertain. Aramberri (2010) for example suggests that it is difficult to see that the mobilities approach adds any value. It is perhaps an example of what has been rather inelegantly labelled the difference between 'lumpers' and 'splitters' (Gold, 2002). The terms were initially used to describe differences in the approach to taxonomic work in classifying species but have become more widely used to describe approaches to identifying similarities or differences amongst terms within other disciplines. The mobilities paradigm like other lumping approaches consistently tries to create coherent patterns from much diversity while splitters, by way of contrast, emphasise differences and prefer to emphasise context and complexity.

For the purposes of this volume, a constructivist approach to defining domestic tourists will be pursued. In this linguistic and ontological sense, we create tourists with our definitions rather than set out to describe a fixed entity. In particular it can be argued that we impose our definitional boundaries on the behaviours of people who travel. In this way we can firstly identify prototypical tourists; those we see as sharing some but maybe not all of the behaviours necessary for a meaningful, socially useful category to exist. Pivotal considerations include being somewhere different, not being paid for the experience, seeking to fulfil a pattern of predominantly leisure-related motives and participating in the experience for shorter time periods. Next, there are also travellers whom we can describe as exhibiting several of the characteristics of our core domestic tourists. Here the travel to the different place may be shorter and the motives more a hybrid of work and leisure purposes. Finally there are some travellers who at times resemble the first group of tourists' motives, on-site activities and outcomes. In such instances, recurring and repetitive travel to a destination may differentiate the individuals from those who frequent a destination only occasionally (cf. Cohen, 1974).

This approach can be conceived as a set of onion rings or concentric circles with the innermost core comprised of sets of people exhibiting behaviours who most would label as typical of tourists whereas the outer rings describe activities and experiences less commonly seen as warranting the tourist label. In the more formal mathematical terms of fuzzy set theory, there are people with high degrees of core membership and others where the overlap with the core behaviours are tangential and fractional as befits the notion of graded membership of a group (cf. Smithson & Verkuilen, 2006; Zadeh, 1998).

Whether or not they acknowledge these conceptual roots, the definitional studies of tourists and tourists' roles which have been in the academic literature for some time implicitly depend on these themes of either variation from a central core or variations in the approach to lumping and splitting on select variables which produces alternate tourist forms (Cohen, 1974, 1979, 1984; Foo et al., 2004; Gibson & Yiannakis, 2002; Wickens, 2002; Yiannakis & Gibson, 1992). The fuzzy set theory approach, in particular, offers rich views of the contrasting meanings of group membership and has been adopted in some recent as well as some formative tourism research (Cohen, 1974; Pearce, 1982; Woodside & Ahn, 2008).

In brief, the resolution to our fundamental definitional dilemma about domestic tourists can be seen as simple, if somewhat trite. Within certain constraints imposed by a sense of linguistic consensus, domestic tourists are those we want them to be. Certainly for the pragmatic purposes of tourism industry bodies there appears to be a political agenda to include as many visitors to a region as possible. In this approach all who are in the core, as well as all who surround such a symbolic centre, are counted as domestic tourists. Counting more people as domestic tourists can form stronger arguments for funding and power. For the management of people at tourist sites, whether this be in developed or developing countries, domestic tourists can be all those who visit, irrespective of the length and duration of their travels (Ghimire, 2001). And in our academic analyses the ways in which we construct a view of domestic tourists again depends on the sense of purpose for the studies and our inclination to assign tourists to full or partial set membership or pursue a lumping or splitting approach.