Contemporary Tourist Experience

This significant and timely volume aims to provide a focused analysis into tourist experiences that reflect their ever-increasing diversity and complexity, and their significance and meaning to tourists themselves. Written by leading international scholars, it offers new insight into emergent behaviours, motivations and sought meanings on the part of tourists based on five contemporary themes determined by current research activity in tourism experience: conceptualization of tourist experience; dark tourism experiences; the relationship between motivation and the contemporary tourist experience; the manner in which tourist experience can be influenced and enhanced by place; and how managers and suppliers can make a significant contribution to the tourist experience.

Richard Sharpley is Professor of Tourism and Development at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK. Philip Stone is a former management consultant within the tourism and hospitality sector, and is presently employed as a Senior Lecturer with the University of Central Lancashire Preston, UK.

Introduction: Experiencing Tourism, Experiencing Happiness? Section 1: Conceptualising Tourism Experiences 1. Personal Experience Tourism: A Postmodern Understanding 2. The Habit of Tourism: Experiences and Their Ontological Meaning 3. Experiences of Valuistic Journeys: Motivation and Behaviour Section 2: Understanding Dark Tourism Experiences 4. Re-Conceptualizing Dark Tourism 5. Dark Tourism as 'Mortality Capital': The Case of Ground Zero and the Significant Other Dead 6. Towards an Understanding 'Genocide Tourism': An Analysis of Visitors' Accounts of Their Experience of Recent Genocide Sites Section 3: Motivation and the Contemporary Tourist Experience 7. Being Away or Being There? British Tourists' Motivations Holidaying in Alanya, Turkey 8. Identity in Tourist Motivation and the Dynamics of Meaning 9. Bitten by the Twilight saga: From Pop Culture Consumer to Pop Culture Tourist Section 4: Place and the Tourist Experience 10. Volunteer Tourists' Experiences and Sense of Place: New Orleans 11. Family Place Experience and the Making of Places in Holiday Home Destinations: A Danish Case Study 12. Museums as Playful Venues in the Leisure Society Section 5: Managing Tourist Experiences 13. 'We've seen it in the Movies, Let's See if it's True': Motivation, Authenticity and Displacement in the Film-Induced Tourism Experience 14. Tourism Harassment Experiences in Jamaica 15. A Critical Evaluation of the UK 'Grey' Market's Experience of the Overseas Package Holiday