Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
with other benefits to be gained by staying at home. Earlier in this chapter,
staycation was discussed. This is a contemporary term used to describe the
substitution of a holiday for a stay at home or near to home and emerged as
a positive discourse during the global recession. The benefits of a holiday can
be substituted. By staying at home people save money and can engage with
leisure in the locality. While there may not be the 'pull' factors that draw peo-
ple to tourism destinations, the 'push' factors of tourism (see, for example,
Crompton, 1979; Dann, 1977; Pizam, Neumann and Reichel, 1979), such as
flexibility, freedom, independence, away from constraints of daily life, relax-
ation and engagement with people and place, can all be found through
holidaying at home. In addition, travel is avoided, with all its financial and
personal costs. Travel is not easy. There is much media reporting of delays at
airports and congestion on roads. Travel is not always pleasant. Indeed, it is
hard to imagine something less desired than being crammed into a confined
space of an aircraft, unable to leave for several hours, yet this is how many
holidays begin and end. However, tourism is so ingrained in the western psy-
che that the desire to travel is rarely questioned.
Slow travel does, of course, involve travel and there is no doubt that there
are equally likely to be hardships through slow travel just as for air and car
travel. However, with slow travel the journey is not just a necessary evil.
Travel is part of the experience. To briefly recap, slow travel refers to:
• the whole holiday experience with travel as an integral element
• low-carbon tourism as an outcome
• the use of foot, cycle, train, coach and bus travel, but not air and car travel
• the importance of the locality travelled through and as a destination
• the importance of the experience of travel both to and around the desti-
nation
• the importance of taking time
• an expression of environmental concern
• longer stays
• less distance.
At present, slow travel is a niche activity; however, there is much scope for it
to develop, and the theory of diffusion of innovation could well be applied in
this context at both a market and institutional level (Rogers, 1995). As the
imperative of climate change impacts on societies, and the contribution of
tourism to the problem becomes more widely recognized, it is likely that more
consumers will seek to change their ways. This demand will require modified
sectoral structures to pave the way for a new tourism, based on a low-carbon
future. The first step will be for upstream behavioural change in the institu-
tions that are currently powerful. Slow travel is likely to emerge as a
consequence of changed supply chains and changing consumer patterns of
behaviour. These dimensions are explored in Chapter 10.
