This article was downloaded by: [Dr Paulo Duarte] On: 12 November 2013, At: 14:59 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Journal of Heritage Tourism Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjht20
Tourist experience: contemporary perspectives Paulo Duarte
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University of Beira Interior , Portugal Published online: 02 Feb 2012.
To cite this article: Paulo Duarte (2012) Tourist experience: contemporary perspectives, Journal of Heritage Tourism, 7:2, 187-188, DOI: 10.1080/1743873X.2011.638459 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1743873X.2011.638459
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Journal of Heritage Tourism Vol. 7, No. 2, May 2012, 187 –188
BOOK REVIEW
Downloaded by [Dr Paulo Duarte] at 14:59 12 November 2013
Tourist experience: contemporary perspectives, edited by Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone, Abingdon, Routledge, 2011, xx + 304 pp., £95.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-0415572781 Tourism is all about experiences. Firstly, there is the emotion of having to decide where to go among the many destinations available. Secondly, there is the thrill of planning, buying and preparing for the trip. Thirdly, there is the sense of adventure, discovery and excitement involved in the ‘interaction with the sites, attractions, events, and people they encounter, and of the multitude of intrinsic and extrinsic factors that influence the nature and outcomes of those interactions’ (p. 2). Finally, there is the memory of the emotions felt during that particular tourism experience. The search for new adventures, experiences and emotions has driven tourists to search for unusual places and experiences, most of which were unthinkable as tourism destinations even just a few years ago. Focused on emergent motivations, behaviours and responses of tourists to new and different tourism experience offers, this book analytically explores the tourist experience in these unusual settings from a multidisciplinary perspective. It includes helpful and detailed examples from a wide range of countries and contexts. Based on a set of papers chosen to represent current research activity on tourist experiences, from both academic and practitioner-based contributors, the book offers new insights into the contemporary and emergent behaviours, motivations, attitudes and wants of tourists. It describes the tourism experiences associated with dark tourism experiences, experiencing poor places, sport tourism experiences, writing the tourist experience and methodological approaches to research on tourist experiences. By analysing these contemporary tourist experiences, the book strives to provide a better understanding of the consumption of tourism. Perhaps the least uncommon experience described in the book is that of sports tourism. Evidence of a relationship between sports and tourism has been increasing over recent decades. However, there is a lot more involved in the sports tourism experience than the sporting event itself. The experience surrounding the event and the experiences provided by the event site facilities can communicate with all of the tourist’s senses, meshing them together to provide a remarkable and unique experience, as illustrated by the examples of the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff and Twickenham Stadium in London. Another crucial aspect of the tourist experience is the ability to share them with others. Writing travel narratives and publishing photos are some of the ways the tourist has to disseminate their experiences and contribute to the social construction of the tourism reality. The Internet, Web 2.0 applications, mobile communication devices and, especially, social networks have played a key role in the expansion of consumer-generated media and the dissemination of tourism consumption experiences. This is comprehensively explained in Chapter 11 by Gretzel, Fesenmaier, Lee and Tussyadiah, whose chapter shows that consumer-generated content has the power to mediate the experience of a significant share of the total tourist market. ISSN 1743-873X print/ISSN 1747-6631 online http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1743873X.2011.638459 http://www.tandfonline.com
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Book review
Dark tourism and visiting poor places are less common attractions, yet the interest in and demand for these types of experiences is growing. The term ‘dark tourism’ was first introduced in the mid-1990s by Professors John Lennon and Malcolm Foley of Glasgow Caledonian University to describe the act of travelling to sites of death, disaster and the macabre. Since then, the subject has attracted a great deal of interest from the media and from academia. Travel to sites of events associated with death, pain or suffering is not a new phenomenon, but it is only recently that dark tourism, in its various forms, has become more widespread and popular. A particularly complex issue involves the search for the motivational drivers of dark tourists. The question of why people visit such dark sites is intriguing, and Section 1 of the book presents some emotive and controversial ideas related to this. Using case studies focusing on Cuba, Brazil, South Africa and India, the three chapters of Section 2 illustrate the backgrounds and experiences of people travelling to poor places and slum tourism. The studies included in this section present and characterise the slum tourism product and explore the motivations of the tourists to travel to these places, as well as the kind of images they retain from the experiences gained in those visits. Poverty is not exactly hard to find, so what could be the main reasons to travel to distant places to observe it? This is one of the several questions addressed by the contributors. Other questions include whether slum tourism is acceptable and what motivates tourist to engage in such experience. Could this type of tourism be just a form of voyeurism or is there something more? What kinds of experiences are the tourists looking for in such places? In summary, this is an interesting book that highlights some crucial aspects of contemporary tourist experiences based on the analysis of three main themes: dark tourism, visiting poor places and sports tourism. Overall, the book is well edited. The chapters provide a good contribution to the understanding of the reality and the challenges of trying to meet the ever-increasing diversity and complexity of tourist demand for new and exciting experiences. Additionally, the book offers an interesting final section with some insights into the methodological aspects in tourist experience research. Thus, in my opinion, the book can be useful to postgraduate students, teachers and scholars interested in the study of tourism consumption and the motivations underlying tourist behaviour. Paulo Duarte University of Beira Interior, Portugal Email:
[email protected] # 2012, Paulo Duarte
