Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
highlights the importance of visiting friends and relatives (VFR), which is a
growing trend (National Statistics, 2005; World Tourism Organization, 2008)
of what is increasingly viewed as necessary travel, compared to the view of
leisure travel as non-essential. In this sense, tourist travel is less 'an escape
from home but also a
search
for home(s)' (Larsen et al, 2006, p44) due to the
scattering of family and friends. Tourism is also an important contextual set-
ting for social research. As Franklin and Crang (2001, p12) suggest:
The excitement of mobilities in these highly mobile times, struc-
tured as they are by the language and practice of tourism, is that
they generate new social relations, new ways of living, new ties
to space, new places, new forms of consumption and leisure and
new aesthetic sensibilities.
However, in reality there are sections of western societies that have not
embraced mobilities, and equally in developing countries mobilities are not as
pervasive as discussed in the growing literature on the subject. It is by no
means a ubiquitous phenomenon.
Tourism is also an inherently social experience, as it usually involves
travel with friends or relatives (Arnould and Price, 1993), and social relations
shape consumer experience (Carù and Cova, 2003). Indeed, slow travel pro-
vides extended journey times providing opportunities to socialize and bond
with family or friends. In the 'search for the authenticity of, and between,
themselves … families are most at home when away from home. Tourists con-
sume places and thereby perform a special kind of togetherness' (Larsen et al,
2006, p45). In this way 'tourism seems to be increasingly about co-present
meetings and less about just travelling to see the exotic' (Larsen et al, 2006,
p46). Slow travel is part of this re-envisioning of tourism which is more socia-
ble, less exotic and enables engagement with place and with people. Slow
travellers seek interactions with friends and relatives and with people encoun-
tered en-route (Dickinson et al, 2010b).
Larsen et al (2006) analysed the role played by different modes of trans-
port in people's mobility. The car can become part of people's network capital,
'the capacity to engender and sustain social relations with those people who
are not necessarily proximate' (Urry, 2007, p197), as it gives spatial and time
flexibility and affords new leisure opportunities and forms of social life (Urry,
2005). As a part of network capital, the freedom to travel has become a much
coveted value:
… the freedom to move, perpetually a scarce and unequally dis-
tributed commodity, fast becoming the main stratifying factor of
our late-modern or post modern time. (Bauman, 1998; cited by
Letherby and Reynolds, 2009, p205)
As such, policies to reduce travel will not be viewed positively due to the impli-
cations for people's social life, social networks and social capital:
