Sebastian Filep

Moving Beyond Subjective Well-Being: A Tourism Critique

Tourism research on topics such as happiness, quality of life of tour-ists, and tourist well-being has flourished in recent years. This literature clarifies the subjective value of tourist experiences, provides new direc-tions for tourism branding and promotion, and opens doors to fresh re-search on the potential benefits of tourist experiences to mental health. Subjective well-being theory has been typically used by tourism re-searchers to help conceptualize and measure tourist happiness. In lay terms, this theory suggests that happiness is life satisfaction and pleas-ure; the theory is popular and useful but cannot explain tourist happi-ness. To craft a more complete picture of tourist happiness, a deeper qualitative appreciation of meaningful tourist experiences and special and engaging tourist moments is required. This brief critique highlights the problems of conceptualizing tourist happiness and suggests an al-ternative approach to the subjective well-being theory.

Positive Psychology and Tourism

Positive psychology is a growing, global research field of psychology that has flourished in the last decade, but its tourism applications are underexplored. Researchers in positive psychology investigate topics such as well-being, happiness, optimism, humour, positive emotions, character strengths and similar topics that broadly relate to quality-of-life research. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a detailed introduction of positive psychology to the tourism reader, to identify and analyse specific research linkages and present key challenges for the future development of positive psychology and tourism research. Three linkages are highlighted: (1) positive psychology research on happiness and its use in conceptualising and measuring fulfilling, happy tourist experiences; (2) positive psychology character strengths and their potential to embellish global tourism education values and (3) positive psychology research on humour and its value in promoting a productive tourism workplace. The incipient linkages therefore relate to a variety of tourism contexts – tourists and their experiences, tourism workers and managers and tourism students and educators. Two key challenges for future development of tourism and positive psychology research are presented: (1) challenges of overcoming insularity (the need to reach out and learn from other fields and disciplines, to further embrace non-Western perspectives and adopt a greater array of research methods) and (2) challenges of connecting with health (the need to integrate subjective benefits of tourism and positive psychology with physical health indicators to better explain optimal human functioning). The chapter ends with a brief synthesis and a call for future research.

Dive tourism in Luganville, Vanuatu: shocks, stressors and vulnerability to climate change

Luganville is a developing dive tourism destination region (DTDR) in Vanuatu, which relies on tourism. This article reports on the shocks and stressors faced by Luganville’s dive tourism sector and climate change’s exacerbation of these. The study’s methodology was based on rapid rural appraisal and case study principles, involving methods of semistructured interviews, group discussions, and personal observations. Data were analyzed using a thematic analysis approach. Key shocks identified include cyclones, earthquakes, effect on demand due to media footage, and changes to international flights. Main stressors were starfish outbreaks and environmental degradation. Unlike the indigenous communities, expatriates show little concern for the potential impact of climate change, presenting response challenges that must incorporate different perspectives to develop effective adaptation options. Special Issue : scuba diving tourism

Eudaimonic tourist experiences: the case of flamenco

Abstract In recent years, participation in flamenco, as a cultural art form, has gained momentum within Spain and internationally. Engagement in flamenco music and dance workshops in Spain has also become an increasingly significant tourism activity. Despite this trend, little research has looked into the nature of leisure experiences of flamenco. This paper seeks to address this knowledge gap by exploring how tourists experience flamenco music and dance courses in the city of Seville. Through a grounded theory research strategy in which in-depth interviews were conducted with 20 participants, the study reveals that four key themes characterise tourists’ experiences of flamenco. These are: the social and physical environment, which refers to physical flamenco spaces in Seville and tourists’ interactions with instructors and peers; secondly, the experience of challenge, characterised by hardship and sacrifice in the pursuit of flamenco; thirdly, activation of the sensual body or a sense of arousal; and lastly, an intrinsic and deep desire for self-discovery. The study demonstrates that the flamenco tourist experience strongly contributes to self-realisation and fulfilment of those who engage in it, or in other words, that the flamenco tourist experience is eudaimonic in character. The interview findings were linked to literature on self-realisation, self-fulfilment, true self, stress-related growth and related eudaimonic themes. Eudaimonia, or a sense of personal expressiveness and self-realisation, has not been previously established in this context. Therefore, the research findings provide a theoretical understanding of what a eudaimonic tourist experience of dance and music may look like.

Generation Tourism: towards a common identity

The purpose of this article is to highlight the implications of the indiscipline of tourism academia for a new generation of tourism academics. Generation Tourism is characterised by scholars with a multi-disciplinary education associated with a broad field of study and commonly considered to lack the advantages of a discipline-focused education with its strong theoretical and methodological foundations. The problem this article addresses relates to how new generations of scholars and their views on knowledge creation achieve ascendancy in ways that move on from existing paradigms and earlier cohorts of scholars. Our main argument is that Generation Tourism scholars would benefit from a more clearly developed and common academic identity. To begin the critical conversation around the identity of Generation Tourism we outline five possible points of departure. These points are: (1) learning from historical developments in parent disciplines; (2) spearheading inter-disciplinary scholarship; (3) working towards theoretical developments; (4) embracing mediating methodologies and (5) forming tourism nodes and networks. Recognising these as starting points rather than final statements, we hope that the conversation about Generation Tourism identity will continue in other forums.

Savouring tourist experiences after a holiday

Currently, there are no major models of savouring in leisure and tourism studies. This paper reports on an exploratory study that investigated how tourists reminisce about, or retrospectively savour, their holiday experiences. We aimed to identify which positive emotions are experienced by tourists when they reminisce about past holiday events and what types of tourist experiences are associated with their positive emotions. Using thematic content analysis, we examined 181 written travel blogs of a group of Chinese independent tourists following their trip to Australia. The emotion of joy was the most savoured emotion, followed by interest, contentment and love. Joy, interest and contentment were most commonly linked to experiences that involved observations of natural scenery, while love was the emotion that was linked to acts of kindness with the locals. The study reported in the paper supports existing knowledge on the relationship between experiencing positive emotions and being in nature.

Consider Prescribing Tourism

Estimates tell us that there are more than 1 billion tourists currently roaming around the planet.1 By the year 2050, one in two people on the planet is expected to be a tourist.2 Millions of travel movements every day affect millions of individuals, numerous societies, and environments in multiple ways. In the popular media and within the broader academic community, tourism is often, and arguably unjustly, marginalized and regarded as frivolous leisure, or simply, a big business.3 Yet, tourism could be seen equally as a human activity focused on the pursuit of greater well‐being away from usual domiciles.4 Until recently, potential health and well‐being benefits of leisure tourism have not received sustained, cross‐disciplinary empirical attention.5,6 I am approaching this editorial as a social scientist specializing in well‐being and tourism research. The purpose here is to put forward a case to the medical community that it is time to more seriously consider the role of diverse tourism activities in enhancing human health and well‐being. I will not be discussing health complications related to travel experiences, as they have been well documented in this journal;7 instead I will try to outline some potential benefits of vacations. While each vacation does not always work out as planned, on average, vacation experiences have positive effects on human well‐being.8,9,10 There is increasingly a pool of empirical evidence that vacation activities of well‐defined cohorts of tourists traveling in particular ways to … Corresponding Author: Sebastian Filep, PhD, Department of Tourism, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand. E‐mail: sebastian.filep{at}otago.ac.nz

On positive psychology of events.

Although contributions from the disciplines of sociology and anthropology have shaped the foundations of event studies as an academic field of inquiry, contributions from the discipline of psychology have played a minor role in the development of events scholarship. There is an opportunity for a further development of psychology of events as part of the discipline-based discourse in the event studies field. In this conceptual article, an overview of positive psychology, a study of what makes life worth living, is first presented and the field is critically evaluated. A research agenda, based on positive psychology theories and approaches, is then presented to the events reader. It is argued that the theories and approaches from this field could enhance understandings of how people anticipate events, enjoy events, and how they acquire psychological rewards and benefits from event experiences. New directions for research about visitor motivations, humor, and cocreation of events as well as visitor well-being are proposed in the article. The role and the value of appreciative inquiry, a strength-based methodological approach, to inform future event planning and design is also discussed. It is argued that the contributions from positive psychology could help develop psychology of events scholarship in a meaningful and theoretically informed manner.

Holidays against depression? An Ethiopian Australian initiative.

Tourism is an engine of economic growth, but its capacity to contribute to good health is only starting to be documented. This paper describes a forthcoming research project with the Ethiopian immigrant community in the Australian state of Victoria. The project aims to discover if writing about positive holiday experiences that involve visits to friends and relatives improves the communitys mental health – alleviates depression levels and increases levels of happiness. The role of holidays in improving mental health is of increasing interest to the tourism industry. This research note highlights the importance of understanding the benefits of holidays for individual well-being; this paper outlines a methodological approach for investigating these benefits.

Philip L. Pearce: foundation professor of tourism

We are honoured to be invited to write a portrait of Foundation Professor Philip L. Pearce, the first Professor of Tourism in Australia, a founding member of the prestigious International Academy for the Study of Tourism, and one of the leading early international scholars in the tourism field. Pearce is known to many in tourism academia for his foundational work on tourist behaviour, especially tourist motivation and more broadly, for his contributions to the development of the psychology of tourism. He is also widely acknowledged as the father of tourism research and education in Australia. We are privileged yet mildly troubled by the task of developing this portrait. First, we recognize that, as Pearce’s former doctoral students, we may not be able to adequately capture all of his academic development phases and career successes nor give a flawless overview of his personal life. Secondly, our position as two white, male academics based in Australia and New Zealand arguably introduces a degree of cultural and gender bias to this paper. Established international colleagues from other parts of the world who know Pearce very well and who continue to contribute to tourism scholarship in positive and diverse ways with him might pick out gaps in this paper. Third, we sense that despite the large body of work produced by Pearce over the last 40 years, he is by no means at the end of his career. In fact, he continues to teach, research, and supervise students and shows no signs of slowing down. Yet, despite these misgivings, we bring with us knowledge we have gained about Professor Pearce through up to 20 years of working with him, first as his former PhD students and then as his academic colleagues. During our PhD years, we had an opportunity to get to know Pearce by teaching tourism courses with him, serving as research assistants on key research projects, and, of course, through our academic discussions at numerous doctoral meetings. We found these experiences of learning rewarding and stimulating for our own personal and academic development as tourism scholars and educators. To this day, we see Pearce as an important academic mentor and research collaborator. We also know him informally, outside of his normal work environment. We have particularly fond memories of celebrating numerous events at his home. Today, we continue as Pearce’s regular academic companions at international tourism conferences and research events, enjoying a good laugh, mischievous ribbings, informal chats, and get-togethers. Recent formal research collaborations included two joint book projects with Sebastian Filep on the topic of tourism and positive psychology (Filep & Pearce, 2013; Pearce, Filep, & Ross, 2011). In the case of Pierre Benckendorff, work collaborations have included various joint publications, but particularly his work with Pearce on tourist attractions (Benckendorff & Pearce, 2003; Benckendorff & Pearce, 2011; Pearce, Benckendorff, & Johnstone, 2001). Our approach to the development of this portrait is one of portraying Pearce as both an excellent scholar and a good human being. When Pearce served as an editor of The Study of Tourism: Foundations