Backpacker Tourism

The search for new tourism experiences as well as changes in the tourism industry itself has led to new forms of individualised travel and consequentially new forms of backpacker tourism. This volume provides an up to date examination of the behaviour, attitudes and motivations of backpacker tourists as well as the growth of the infrastructure behind backpacker tourism phenomenon throughout the world. Drawing upon insights from geography, sociology, anthropology, management and marketing, Backpacker Tourism provides theoretically informed case studies of individual destinations of backpackers. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of backpacker tourism as well as those involved in the backpacker tourism industry itself.

Backpacker tourism has shifted from the margins of the travel industry into the mainstream. Backpacker Tourism: Concepts and profiles explores the current state of the international backpacker phenomenon, drawing together different disciplinary perspectives on its meaning, impact and significance. Links are drawn between conceptual issues and case studies, setting backpacking in its wider social, cultural and economic context.

Building on previous work on backpacking, this book takes the analysis of backpacker tourism further by engaging both with new theoretical debates into tourism experiences and mobilities as well as with new empirical phenomena such as the rise of the 'flashpacker' and alternative destinations.

There has been a phenomenal growth of backpacker tourism from the overland routes to India in the 1960s, to present-day backpacker tourism across the less developed world. As a result there has been significant economic development impacts of backpacker tourism upon local communities especially in areas with the largest concentrations of backpackers (South and South-East Asia particularly Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and India), as well as increasingly in Latin America. This volume provides a focused review of the economic development impacts of backpacker tourism in developing regions furthering knowledge on how backpacker tourism can play a crucial role in development strategies in these areas. First, it reviews the origins of the backpackers with a detailed examination of their "hippy" predecessors on the overland trail, before discussing the emergence of modern backpackers including social and cultural aspects, and how new technologies are changing their experience. It then analyses the powerful economic development impacts of backpackers on local host communities in cities and rural areas with a special focus on coastal destinations. Extensive case study material is used from backpacker destinations across Asia, Latin America and Africa. In doing so the book provides original insights into how backpacker tourism is highly significant for poverty alleviation and effective local development since it has strong linkages to the local economy, and less economic leakage than conventional tourism. Written by a leading academic in this area, this volume will be of interest to students of Tourism and Development Studies.

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: In the past two decades backpacker tourism has grown vastly throughout both developed and developing world. Particularly to south and Southeast Asian countries the phenomenon of backpacking is not new, so to India, where it dates back to the 60 s and 70 s hippy drifters, to which backpacking is often associated. It has been since the publication of the Lonely Planet s Yellow Bible ( Southeast Asia on a Shoestring ) in 1975 that backpacking has gradually emerged as a mass travel style. Today popular travel-yourself literature cover almost every corner of the globe, serving a steady demand for off the beaten path travel. Thereby to backpackers the developmental background of a destination plays a lesser role than to the mainstream tourist, who is demanding certain infrastructural arrangements. As a result backpackers are found in utmost remote and low developed locations that other tourists never reach. Thus backpacker enclaves have emerged in many places throughout the world, and not without effects on their hosting environments. While social impacts often carry negative connotations, hosting communities do usually appreciate backpackers for their economic contributions. Objectives and Scope of this paper: In recent years backpacker tourism has profoundly been studied in developed contexts, particularly Australia and New Zealand are to be seen the pioneering regions of independent travel research, having undertaken strenuous efforts to study the same within the past two decades. As a consequence both destinations have recognized the economic value of low budget travel to their countries and established backpacker tourism as high yielding segments within their national tourism markets. In both countries backpacking has since undergone shift from de-marketing to a marketing label. Though in recent years international research has made numerous successful attempts to study backpacker tourism in less developed contexts, many tourism officials in third world destinations as yet refuse to accept the economic reach coming along with low-budget travel. Instead a majority of administrative instances promote upscale- and regulated forms of tourism to be the way forward, neglecting any concerns with regard to necessary infrastructure or initial investments. Though only a fraction of developing nations do actively restrict independent travel to their territories (e.g. Maldives, Bhutan), a majority at best tacitly ignores the [...]

The Backpacker Tourist: A contemporary perspective explores the increasing number of people traveling around the world as backpackers and analyses the great diversification of this demographic and their varied experiences while traveling.

This book is an interdisciplinary collaboration between a literary critic and cultural historian, which examines and recovers a radical and still urgent challenge to the industrialisation of cultural tourism from the work of John Ruskin. Ruskin exerted a formative influence on the definition and development of cultural tourism which was probably as significant as that, for example, of his contemporary Thomas Cook. The book assesses Ruskin’s overall influence on the development of national and international tourism in the context of pre-existing expectations about tourism flows and cultural capital and alongside parallel and intersecting trends of the time; examines Ruskin’s contribution to the tourist agenda at all social levels; and discusses Ruskin’s significance for current debates in tourism studies, especially questions of the place of the ‘canon’ of traditional European cultural tourism in a post-modern tourist setting, and the various incarnations of ‘heritage tourism’.

Building on previous work on backpacking, this book takes the analysis of backpacker tourism further by engaging both with new theoretical debates into tourism experiences and mobilities as well as with new empirical phenomena such as the rise of the ‘flashpacker’ and alternative destinations. Chapters include material on flashpacking, the virtualization of backpacker culture, the re-conceptualisation of lifestyle travellers, backpackers as volunteer tourists, as well as backpackers' experiences of hostels, mobilities and their policy implications. It sets a new benchmark for the study of independent travel in the contemporary world.