Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
It would be a huge undertaking to try to fill the apparent gaps in our
knowledge on family tourism. This topic, though, is a irst coming together
of different perspectives and disciplines to provide better understand-
ings of what holidays for families entail. It provides a broad ideological
context, societal trends and historical background as well as discussions
and empirical findings on a variety of topics concerning family tourism
behaviours; the future implications are also considered. In this way, experts
in the incongruent field of family tourism are brought together for the first
time to disseminate to a wider audience their knowledge of aspects such as:
social and demographic trends; historical developments; fathers, children
and family groups; gay and lesbian families; VFR travel; social tourism;
stress on holiday; consumer kids; and the life cycle models. Much of this
breaks new ground and addresses some of the gaps in the research literature
highlighted above. It also emphasises that more research is needed to keep
pace with the increasingly changing and diversifying tourism market that
is made up of families in all their shapes and forms. The concluding chapter
suggests research topics in order to capture the fluid and dynamic nature of
modern families. Families make up a substantial and robust market segment
for the tourism industry, generating about 30% of tourism receipts (Mintel,
2004) and warrant much more attention in research than they are currently
awarded. What is needed is a better conceptualisation of the family in
tourism that takes account of its unique social qualities, multiple dimen-
sions and idiosyncrasies.
Conceptualisation of Families in Tourism
The fragmented and limited research on family tourism might explain why
there is no conceptual framework for it in the literature. Instead, most
studies that deal with tourism experiences discuss representations of the self
(tourist) and the other (host), usually in an international (exotic) holiday
environment (e.g. Wearing & Wearing, 2006), or external factors such as the
weather (e.g. Pritchard & Havitz, 2006). Yet the host-guest structure that
is applied to international tourism is not well suited to family group travel
because it neglects issues of group dynamics and sociality with 'significant
others' (i.e. within the family group) (Larsen
et al
., 2007), and simply
grafting theories about individual tourist behaviour onto group contexts
may not work (Yarnal & Kerstetter, 2005). This has led to a de-socialisation
of tourism subjects, which makes such research approaches unsuitable for
families (Obrador, 2012). One way to 'de-exoticise' and 're-socialise' tourism
theory is by placing family and friendship relations at the centre of tourism
research through the social turn (Larsen, 2008). What is needed, then, is
a familial perspective (Smith & Hughes, 1999) which puts the social into
travel and is inclusive of the views of all family members.
