Why people conduct different sharing about their travel is unclear. Understudied areas include the roles of tourism activity type, tourist well-being, and social context. Under the framework of construal level theory, three studies which combined secondary data and experiments revealed that: 1) challenging (relaxing) tourism activities lead to more desirability (feasibility) sharing; 2) eudaimonia (hedonia) occupy the dominant position and mediate the relationship between challenging (relaxing) tourism activity and desirability (feasibility) sharing; and 3) social context induces the transformation of the relationship between eudaimonia and hedonia, and has a significant moderating impact on the mechanism of travel experience sharing type. Theoretical and managerial implications of travel experience sharing type and mutual transformation between eudaimonia and hedonia are discussed.
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Until the recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the growth of tourism had confronted many destinations with policy decisions that had impacted regional ecosystems and the quality of life of their resident population. To counter the threats driven by dominant tourism growth models, a number of tourism scholars have called for revisiting the philosophical foundation upon which tourism activities are developed. Informed by debates in philosophy and the wider social sciences, including tourism scholarship, this conceptual paper, therefore, suggests an alternative governance paradigm for tourism destinations, which is articulated in four propositions that reflect a new materialist perspective. These propositions are a monist post-anthropocentric ontology, a participatory epistemology, resilient forms of tourism and participation as methodologies, and social eudaimonia as societal value. The core argument presented in this paper is that the Anthropocene requires tourism destinations to espouse alternative governance approaches drawing from ideas emerging from new materialist scholarship.
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This study, through the concept of biophilia, examines how we can restore a ‘love of life’ in a world often characterised by rationalisation, destruction and alienation from self and nature. Specifically, we observe how outdoor adventures during travels might contribute to the development of biophilic feelings. To this end, we employed a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to analyse the narratives from nine participants in the UK, Germany and Serbia. The findings suggest that adventure activities in the outdoors foster the development of meaningful relationships with the self, other humans and non-human nature, all contributing to the enhancement of eudaimonic wellbeing. The study adds to the tourism literature by arguing that more biophilic and ecological approaches, hitherto underutilised in studying the benefits of tourism from a positive psychology perspective, might serve as a lens through which to explore meaningful social transformation in times of polycrises.
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