Bajc, Vida. 2016. Tour. In: Jafar Jafari and Honggen Xiao (Eds.) Encyclopedia of Tourism

Bajc, Vida. 2016. “Tour.” In: Jafar Jafari and Honggen Xiao (Eds.) Encyclopedia of Tourism. Springer.

Tour

A tour is a form of mobilities which comes to exist for the specific purpose of a trip by an individual or a group, is dissolved after its completion, and unlikely to reassemble in the same configuration (Bajc 2007). It is also a transitory form of social organization which allows multiple people, who may not necessarily know each other, to travel as a group to one or more destinations, move from site to site, and return to the point of origin after the trip (Bajc 2006). At the heart of a tour is purposeful movement in space through time which has a potential to generate meaningful experiences. Tours vary widely in terms of their composition, purpose, duration, cultural specificities, and mode of mobility (Adler 1989).

As a collective movement, a tour has a number of interesting characteristics. Participants tend to develop a sense of a group. Without such internal cohesion, tensions can arise, potentially leading to dissolution or dispersion before the tour is completed. Groups tend to assume some kind of a leadership initiative. The leadership can emerge spontaneously during the trip, be agreed upon prior to the journey, or be predetermined through an officially designated tour guide. The group moves in and through social spaces of others. This is contingent upon the ability of the tour to maintain some level of spatial, social, or symbolic separation from the routines of the daily life surrounding the group. The structure of its movement tends to be formulated by an itinerary. This is a compilation of specific sites based on narratives associated with them. Itineraries may be negotiated throughout the journey, informally decided prior to the trip, or officially pre-formulated by a service provider. Such structuring of a tour has a potential to optimize experiences in the allocated time. Without such organization, a tour could turn into a disorienting, stressful, and confusing accumulation of experiences in disparate places.

The outcome of a tour is a compilation of experiences, embodied through performative practices shaped by group dynamics as well as its environment. How interrelations among these dynamics can shape tour configurations and tourist experiences remains largely unexplored. As more attention is being paid to various forms of tourism mobilities (Hannam, Butler and Paris 2014) and ways in which these are configured and experienced in relation to security and surveillance (Bajc 2013), the tour offers itself as a useful research problem through which such dynamics could be given theoretical insight and empirical depth.

See also: Experience, guided tour, performance, package tourism, security meta-framing.

References

Adler, J.

1989 Travel as Performed Art. American Journal of Sociology 94:1366-1391.

Bajc, V.

2006 Christian Pilgrimage Groups in Jerusalem: Framing the Experience through Linear Meta-narrative. Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing 7(2):101-128.

2007 Creating Ritual through Narrative, Place, and Performance in Evangelical Protestant Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Mobilities 2:395-412.

2013 Sociological Reflections on Security through Surveillance. Sociological Forum 28:615-623.

Hannam, K., G. Butler, and C. Paris

2014 Developments and Key Issues in Tourism Mobilities. Annals of Tourism Research 44:171-185.

Vida Bajc

Methodist University, USA