TRAVELLING 2.0 AND THE AGE OF MOBILITIES: MOVING OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
Russo, Antonio Paolo
Department of Geography – Research Group GRATET
UniversitatRovira i Virgili
C. Joanot Martorell 15,
43480 Vila-seca, ESPAÑA
T +34 977 395294; M
Quaglieri Domínguez, Alan
Department of Geography – Research Group GRATET
UniversitatRovira i Virgili
C. Joanot Martorell 15,
43480 Vila-seca, ESPAÑA
T +34 977 395294; M
Résumé
This paper opens up a field of research on new forms of hospitality and tourism products that are being enthusiastically taken up by a new generation of connected, expert travellers. We present these as fostering mobilities that challenge traditional conceptions of tourism interventions in place, focusing especially on home exchanges. The latter is a form of hospitality – or rather an altogether new philosophy of travel, situated at the crossroads of collaborative consumerism and alternative tourism – which could be nuanced as “tourism without development”, largely eschewing the agency of the industry, at least at the local level. Instead, it is realised within a community with shared cultural values and shaped by individual affordances.
For mobile societies, tourism is not anymore an exceptional intermission in ordinary work-related activities “at home”, as posited in traditional, “sedentarist” (Urry 2006) social sciences, but rather an essential component of professional and social routines. Travel that is normally associated to leisure time becomes then partially intermeshed with opportunities for personal and professional lives, leading to a blurred boundary between the leisurescapes and workscapes produced by visiting. Hence, for some visitors, an important element in the appeal of places is the opportunity to experience and feel a part of them. In this context, it is not surprising that the travelling habits of global mobile denizens require new forms of hospitality that have specific characteristics:
1.Facilitate homing in partly unfamiliar environments
2.Eschew the “fictional” landscapes of traditional (mass) tourism (where they can’t find the commodities and the meanings that a citizen needs in his/her quest for ambience of everyday life)
3.Are socially produced (easily accessible from everyday communication and professional platforms) and trustworthy (provided and/or evaluated by peers)
Consequently, there has been in recent years an outstanding progress in the provision and diversification of such services, which our paper documents. The rise of such concepts like house swapping and other social network-based activities is not only an interesting phenomena per se, challenging one of the pillars of the tourism industry business models; what is even more interesting from the point of view of destinations, it may be seen as following a spatial logic which is shaped by the communities engaging in it, not only consumers but also peer communitiesof producers of hospitality and related services that to a large degree share values, status and interests in travel.
Our study presents some empirical evidence on the home exchanging “marketplace”, which reveals peculiar patterns of mobility with respect to those ascribed to commercial tourism, both across types of places and countries, and at destination level. Quantitative data on type, location of properties on offer, past histories of successful swaps and offering parties’ characteristics have been collected through an online survey among more than 1,000 members of the major house swapping web site, homeexchange.com; a smaller numberof them have also completed an online questionnaire focusing on qualitative information such as search criteria, motivations, and perceptions in their house swapping activities.
It then discusses this evidence in the light of its conceptual standpoints and its potential implications for places in terms of the peculiar geographies which this model seems to engender. These insights specifically consider two case studies of urban tourism destinations, Paris and Barcelona, where the information from the above mentioned survey have been treated at the finer spatial detail of neighbourhoods. Finally, it presents some conclusions and open questions for further research on this topic.
Mots-clés: (5)
Tourism geography, mobilities, collaborative consumerism, place restructuring, tourism flows
RéférencesBibliographiques
Lynch, P., Germann Molz, J., McIntosh, A., Lugosi, P. and Lashley, C., 2011, « Theorizing hospitality », Hospitality & Society, 1 (1): 3–24.
Maitland, R., 2008, « Conviviality and everyday life: the appeal of new areas of London for visitors », International Journal of Tourism Research, 10(1): 15–25.
Russo, A.P. & Quaglieri Domínguez, A., 2012, From the Dual Tourist City to the Creative Melting Pot: the Liquid Geographies of Global Cultural Consumerism. In Smith, M., and G. Richards (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Cultural Tourism. London: Routledge, Ch. 40.