drifter tourist meaning

Cohen’s tourist typology- The 4 major types of tourists

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Cohen’s tourist typology was one of the first major typologies developed in the travel and tourism space. If you are studying travel and tourism, you will probably be introduced to Cohen’s tourist typology at some point (and that’s probably why you are here now!). If you are wondering what this tourist typology is all about and how Cohen categorised his four major types of tourists, then you have come to the right place… read on….

Who is Erik Cohen?

What is cohen’s tourist typology, cohen’s types of tourists, institutionalised tourists, noninstitutionalised tourists, cohen’s tourist typology- 4 types of tourists, the drifter, the explorer, the individual mass tourist, the organised mass tourist, why is cohen’s tourist typology beneficial, types of tourists- further reading.

Erik Cohen is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Erik focuses his research in Social Anthropology, Sociological Theory and Tourism Studies. Erik is most well known for his work on tourist typologies published in the 1970s.

Cohen’s tourist typology is a model that aims to categorise tourists into different types. Cohen’s theory is well known as being the first to attempt to categorise types of tourists. Cohen derived this theory on the types of tourists based on his knowledge of sociology and anthropology and applied it to the context of tourism, he is not necessary a tourism specialist. Cohen’s theory was first published in 1972 in his article entitles ‘Towards a Sociology of International Tourism .

Whilst a lot has clearly changed in the tourism industry since the 1970, Cohen’s tourist typology has continued to be used as a guide for understanding the different types of tourists throughout the years by academics and tourism industry professionals.

The types of tourists identified by Cohen in his typology are based on a continuum- a spectrum that allows tourists to be placed at some point between the familiar and the novel. Essentially, Cohen teaches us that there are many different types of tourists, some who seek familiar experiences (such as familiar food chains, branded accommodation options that they know or languages that they can speak), others who seek entirely new experiences (new cultures, new locations, new languages etc) and those who fall somewhere in between.

In Cohen’s tourist typology there are two groups of tourists- the institutionalised tourists and the noninstitutionalised tourists. Lets take a look at what these are-

Cohen describes institutionalised tourism as the organised mass tourism . This is the tourism industry that is designed to make the tourist experience as smooth and as organised as possible. There are a number of tourism agents involved with institutionalised tourism, such as travel agents , tour operators and tourism resorts. Institutionalised tourists experience novelty with the comforts of the familiar.

Cohen’s noninstitutionalised tourists are the opposite of institutionalised tourists. These types of tourists do not seek the commodified products and services that the mass tourism industry provides, instead, the institutionalised tourist seek deep immersive and experiential travel experiences that cannot be obtained through institutionalised tourism. These types of tourists travel independently and are often in search of adventure, the new and the unfamiliar and authenticity .

Cohen breaks down his tourist typology further, suggesting that there are four main types of tourists:

The first two types of tourists (the Drifter and the Explorer) are deemed noninstitutionalised tourists and the latter two (The Individual Mass Tourist and the Organised Mass Tourist) are examples of institutionalised tourists. Now, lets take a deeper a deeper look at what each of these four types of tourists are…

The Drifter is the type of tourist that is least connected with the mass tourism industry. Drifters typically have an authentic and deep immersive experience, opting for staying with members of the local community rather than in hotels and spending their time in the local community. They seek adventure and plan their own itineraries. This type of tourist always opts for novelty over familiarity- you won’t see a Drifter eating in McDonalds or shopping in Zara!

This type of tourist is similar to a Drifter in that they seek novelty over the familiar, however Explorers do often have a little more interaction with the commodities associated with the tourism industry. For example, an Explorer may travel independently and enjoy an immersive cultural experience, but they may rest their head on a hotel pillow at the end of the day. This type of tourist will generally eat and shop local, but don’t be surprised if they enjoy a Big Mac from time to time too.

In Cohen’s tourist typology the Individual Mass Tourist seeks the familiar. This type of tourist wants familiar food, they want to be able to communicate in a familiar language and they want to stay in types of accommodation that they are familiar with. However, the Individual Mass Tourist is not constrained by the likes of group tours and activities- yes, they may book their holiday through a travel or use a local tour guide, but they will typically opt for solo travel over group tours.

The last of the types of tourists outlined in Cohen’s tourist typology is the Organised Mass Tourist. The Organised Mass Tourist seeks the familiar in the same way that the The Individual Mass Tourist does, however, they tend to do this as part of an organised group. This type of tourist seeks the familiar over novelty every time and they are often found with tour guides and undertaking group tours. The Organised Mass Tourist will generally have an itinerary or a plan and they will stick to it.

Whilst we can easily criticise this theory for being too generalised and for accounting for the specific and the individual, there is no questioning that it does have real-world value. By better understanding the different types of tourists tourism businesses and tourism industry stakeholders can better provide for the tourists- they can tailor their products and services better, they can understand the tourist demands and desires and they can help to improve the overall quality of the tourism provision that is offered to particular tourists.

There are many academic studies which utilise Cohen’s tourist typology as a means to understanding particular issues within the tourism industry, you can see one example here .

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

What makes tourist experiences interesting.

• 1 Department of Psychosocial Science, Faculty of Psychology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
• 2 Norwegian School of Hotel Management, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway

Traditional tourist role theory implies that tourists are either novelty seekers or familiarity seekers, while the interaction-hypothesis-of-inherent-interest predicts that interestingness is maximal when novel and familiar elements simultaneously are present in the experience. This paper tests these conflicting theoretical perspectives in three large surveys. In Study 1 ( N = 1,029), both novelty and familiarity seeking tourists were asked about how interesting it would be for them to meet tourists from their home country (familiar) or from a foreign country (unfamiliar), either at home (familiar) or abroad (unfamiliar). Study 2 ( N = 760) asked tourists to indicate the interestingness of well-known (familiar) and unknown (unfamiliar) sights at home (familiar) and abroad (unfamiliar) in familiarity seekers and novelty seekers alike. Study 3 ( N = 1,526) was a field experiment were tourists rated interestingness of familiar and unfamiliar attractions in familiar and unfamiliar surroundings for either themselves or for other tourists. Results show that perceived interestingness of tourist experiences depends on a combination of familiarity and novelty, for both familiarity seekers and novelty seekers. These results therefore are supportive of the interaction-hypothesis-of-inherent-interest; seemingly cognitive factors are better predictors of interestingness of tourist experiences than personality is.

Introduction

Understanding the tourist experience has been a major scholarly task for as long as tourism research has existed. Various social sciences, such as, for example, sociology (e.g., Cohen, 1972 , 1979 ; Crompton, 1979 ; MacCannell, 1999 ; Uriely, 2005 ), social anthropology and ethnology (e.g., Graburn, 1983 ; Yiannakis and Gibson, 1992 ; MacCannell, 1999 ; O’Dell, 2007 ; Selstad, 2007 ), marketing and economics, (e.g., Andersson, 2007 ; Mossberg, 2007 ), and psychology (e.g., Mannell and Iso-Ahola, 1987 ; Pearce and Stringer, 1991 ; Vittersø et al., 2000 , 2001 ; Larsen, 2007 ) have approached the tourist experience under a plethora of headlines, based on different types of data (or, sometimes with no systematic data), with a number of aims and contents, and with rampant methodological flexibility.

But it is still safe to say that tourist experiences are under researched ( Yiannakis and Gibson, 1992 ; Larsen et al., 2007 , 2017 ; Pearce and Packer, 2012 ) and only rudimentarily understood. This may partly be because tourism studies are inherently multi-disciplinary. It may well be that the disciplines do not always understand each other ( Pearce and Packer, 2012 ). Also, disciplines focus on different aspects of “experiences,” levels of analysis differ, methodologies differ, technical terms differ and may imply different meanings, and the social sciences vary concerning what kind of data and research designs are acceptable ( Larsen et al., 2017 ). The way toward a unified theory of tourist experiences seems to be hampered with ontological as well as epistemological problems, both between and within disciplines.

The present paper therefore sets out to test two opposing perspectives on the tourist experience derived from sociology ( Cohen, 1972 ) and cognitive psychology ( Teigen, 1985a , b , c , 1987 ), with the aim of comparing these perspectives in terms of their predictions. On the one hand, the sociological model ( Cohen, 1972 ) predicts that tourists are different from each other in terms of their tourist roles; some tourists are novelty seekers and some are familiarity seekers. On the other hand, the cognitive psychological model ( Teigen, 1985a , b , c , 1987 ) predicts that people, no matter their tourist role orientation, are inherently similar in terms of what constitutes an “interesting tourist experience.” This cognitive model challenges the dichotomy of novelty and familiarity in claiming that general psychological processes underlie the experience of interestingness, not individual differences in tourist role orientations or in tourists’ preferences. Knowledge about which perspective makes the best predictions is inherently important for theory-development within psychology. In addition, if the tourist industry has sound knowledge of what the generic aspects of interestingness are, then customization of tourist products and services may be improved ( Larsen, 2007 ).

Literature Review

Traditional tourist role theory (e.g., Cohen, 1972 , 1979 ; Snepenger, 1987 ; Yiannakis and Gibson, 1992 ; Mo et al., 1993 ) maintains that familiarity and novelty are opposites on a preference continuum. According to this model, tourists are either predominantly novelty seekers or predominantly familiarity seekers. Cohen (1972) emphasizes that tourists can be classified according to their degree of institutionalization. The “drifter,” who is characterized by his/her experimental mode of traveling which highlights his/her seek for novelty in relative strange environments, is the most independent of all the tourists in Cohen’s taxonomy, while the least novelty seeking tourist in this scheme is the “institutionalized mass tourist.”

In another seminal paper, Cohen (1979) once more proposes a descriptive scheme where five types of tourist groups are suggested. Such groups represent a number of modes of experiences which allocate individuals in segments of tourists varying from those who are mere recreation seeking to those who search for an existential meaning based on a hypothesized “center” which in one way or another resides in peoples’ minds. Snepenger (1987) and Mo et al. (1993) found some support for Cohen’s (1972) model, while Yiannakis and Gibson (1992) also found empirical evidence for the four roles of the Cohen (1972) scheme, in addition to several other tourist roles. Lepp and Gibson (2003) stated that tourists can be classified according to the degree of novelty and familiarity sought, thus highlighting that novelty seeking constitutes a motive in itself. In this line of thinking, the motive of novelty seeking represents the opposite of the familiarity seeking motive. Similar perspectives can be found in many publications within the literature on tourist roles and tourist motivation (e.g., Crompton, 1979 ; Gilbert, 1991 ; Yiannakis and Gibson, 1992 ; Elsrud, 2001 ; Lepp and Gibson, 2003 ).

A more recent study Hwang and Hyun (2016) found that luxury cruise passengers’ perception of cruise lines’ innovativeness (which can be seen as a proxy for novelty) is an important factor influencing various aspects of cruise travelers’ experience in the luxury market. Li et al. (2015) found that sensation seeking was a personality characteristic impacting tourist roles in as much as they asserted that sensation seekers would be more inclined to become independent tourists. These results imply that from the tourist role perspective, people are inherently different from each other in systematic ways that allows for the segmentation of customers according to a psychographic scheme ( Snepenger, 1987 ). The tourist role perspective therefore predicts that tourists are either inclined to be novelty (sensation) seekers or familiarity seekers ( Mo et al., 1993 ).

The interaction-hypothesis-of-interest however states that inherent interestingness of a given situation will be maximal for everyone when novel and familiar elements are present at the same time ( Teigen, 1987 ). In other words, this theory predicts that no matter the personality of the tourist, interestingness is a function of interpretations of the stimulus situation, in our case the tourist destination, the tourist attraction or more generally the tourists’ on-line experience. In a series of experiments, Teigen addressed informativeness of verbal information ( Teigen, 1985a ), preferences for news as a function of familiarity ( Teigen, 1985b ), sources of interest in verbal information ( Teigen, 1985c ), and the interaction of novelty and familiarity for intrinsic interest ( Teigen, 1987 ). These experimental studies jointly demonstrated that inherent interest is a function of the interplay of novelty and familiarity. For example, subjects expressed more interest for news about familiar themes than unfamiliar themes, and they preferred to learn news about familiar countries more than about unfamiliar countries. In addition, in the third experiment reported by Teigen (1987) , the focus was on a social encounter; that is, meeting a (familiar/non-familiar) tourist on a destination, which varied on the familiarity/non-familiarity dimension. Results indicated that the less familiar the imagined destination was, the stronger the subjects preferred meeting familiar others. In a similar vein of thinking, Yiannakis and Gibson (1992) hinted that “the location of a particular tourist role… indicates the optimal balance of stimulation-tranquillity, familiarity-strangeness and structure-independence” (p. 299), but their data were used to locate individuals to various tourist roles in a multidimensional space. It was in other words the tourists who were allocated to various roles, not the generic aspects of the experience that was studied.

Surprisingly, Teigen’s (1985a , b , c , 1987) studies have not had much impact on the academic tourism literature (with the exception of Noone et al., 2009 ). This may partly be due to the fact that Teigen’s work was published in generic psychology journals. Such journals are seemingly not often consulted by tourism scholars, maybe because these journals are considered to be too technical, too limited in scope, too often based on experimental data (which some tourism scholars even judge to be of little value), and too generic and thus of limited relevance for the interdisciplinary studies of tourism and tourists. But, as Pearce and Packer (2012) underline “…the breadth and intense scrutiny of human behaviour and experience undertaken within psychology” (p. 386) represents a vast resource and a challenge for tourism scholars, a standpoint which is in line with the assumptions underlying the current study.

Research Aims

The present research represents an attempt at testing the predictions of tourist role theory against the predictions of the interaction hypothesis of inherent interestingness. While tourist role theory predicts that people are inherently different from each other in what makes experiences interesting for them, the interaction hypothesis predicts that interestingness is a function of aspects of the experience, no matter who the individual is. Figure 1 shows the predictions made by these two theoretical perspectives.

Figure 1 . Predictions of interestingness by tourist role theory and interaction hypotheses.

As can be seen from Figure 1 , predictions are opposite in these two perspectives. Tourist role theory predicts that situations containing a combination of high and low familiarity will be least interesting for both familiarity and novelty seekers, while the interaction perspective predicts that it is exactly these two conditions that will be the most interesting for all tourists. Consequently, it seems reasonable to put these two perspectives to the test: which makes the best predictions?

Three studies were undertaken. The studies were designed so that tourist role theory and inherent interest hypothesis would predict differential outcomes. Study 1 tested whether novelty seekers prefer to meet foreigners abroad (maximum novelty) while familiarity seekers prefer to meet compatriots at home (maximum familiarity), or whether all tourists prefer to meet compatriots abroad and foreigners at home (combination of novel and familiar stimuli). Study 2 validated the concept of interestingness. In addition, Study 2 planned to replicate the finding in Study 1 concerning preferences of tourists with various tourist role orientations. In Study 3, an attempt was made at removing tourists’ self-perception as being less institutionalized and more novelty seeking than other tourists ( Prebensen et al., 2003 ; Doran et al., 2018 ) from the responses. Therefore it was hypothesized that when judging what is interesting for other tourists, tourists would judge a combination of novelty and familiarity of the experience to be most interesting and attractive.

Study 1: Interestingness of Social Interaction

In accordance with the predictions of the interaction hypothesis of inherent interest, in Study 1, it was hypothesized that tourists would find it more interesting to meet a compatriot in an unknown place than in their home country. It was also expected that meeting a foreign tourist would be more interesting in a more familiar setting. We also tested whether tourists high on the novelty seeking motive differed from those low in this motive in terms of what they judged interesting in social encounters, which is the prediction of tourist role theory.

Materials and Methods

Following the procedures indicated by Larsen et al. (2011) , tourists were approached in “low threshold” places; that is, spaces that many tourists would “want to visit… and that none would be excluded for resource reasons, e.g., disabilities, high prices etc.” (p. 695), such as, for example, Mount Fløyen, the Tourist Information Office and the Fish Market in Bergen. Potential respondents were asked if they were on vacation, and if so, if they would be willing to fill in a questionnaire concerning “various aspects of being a tourist.” The questionnaire was two pages long, and it took some 5 min to fill it in. Standard background questions, such as age, gender, and nationality, were asked, in addition to focus questions where novelty and familiarity were manipulated (high and low familiarity of place and of social interaction). No monetary or other compensation was given for participation.

Questionnaire

Inherent interest was measured by asking participants how interesting it would be for them to meet a tourist from Norway in “your home country,” Norway, Spain, Australia, and China, all measured on 7-point scales anchored by “Not interesting” (1) and “Very interesting” (7). To distinguish between familiarity and novelty seekers , three items addressing preference for “unorganized” and “organized” trips were used in accordance with the assumptions of Cohen’s tourist role scheme ( Cohen, 1972 , 1979 ). The items had the following form; “When I travel to…” (1) “…an exotic destination for the first time I prefer,” (2) “…to an exotic destination I have visited before I prefer,” and (3) “…to a destination I know well from before I prefer.” The preferences were indicated on 7-point scales anchored by “Unorganized individual trips” (1) and “Organized group trips” (7). The three items were treated as a scale ( α = 0.78), and the quartile of the respondents scoring lowest on the scale were categorized as novelty seekers ( n = 289), while the respondents with scores on the upper quartile ( n = 271) were grouped as familiarity seekers. The remaining respondents ( n = 469) scored in the mid-category (neither novelty nor familiarity seekers) and were thus excluded from the analyses concerning differences between novelty and familiarity seekers.

Participants

Of some 1,200 approached tourists, 1,029 agreed to fill in the questionnaire. The respondents represented 52 nations, 49.1% were female and 49.1% male (1.8% did not answer the gender item). In addition to participants from countries investigated by questionnaire items concerning the target issues, respondents from countries with more than 40 respondents (i.e., USA, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands) were also included in the data analysis.

Table 1 shows how interesting tourists from Scandinavia (i.e., Norway, Sweden, and Denmark), Spain, Australia, China, USA, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands would find it to meet tourists from their home country in their home country, in Norway, in Spain, in Australia, and in China. As can be seen from Table 1 , tourists tend to judge meeting compatriots more interesting the further away (culturally and geographically) they are from their home country. Norwegian tourists, for example, judge meeting a Norwegian (high familiarity) to be significantly more interesting in China or Australia (high novelty) than in Norway (high familiarity) and Spain (moderate familiarity). Australian respondents indicate that it would be more interesting to meet Australians (high familiarity) abroad (high novelty) than at home (high familiarity). Similarly, Chinese tourists find Chinese tourists (high familiarity) more interesting abroad (high novelty) than at home (high familiarity). And the same is generally true for all the groups; the least interesting place to meet a compatriot is at home, the most interesting place to meet a person from ones’ home country is in a remote place, no matter what the home country of the individual tourist may be. This finding is stable over all nationalities and indicates that for tourists, familiarity of the place does not work well with familiarity of the social interaction, and vice versa, that high novelty of the place does not work well in harmony with high novelty of the social encounter.

Table 1 . Interestingness a of meeting a tourist from one’s home country in various countries [scale: 1 (not interesting) – 7 (very interesting), mean scores, ±SD].

Table 2 shows that when the question was framed as meeting a Chinese tourist in various destinations (Norway, Spain, Australia, and China), the pattern is exactly opposite for all groups of respondents. Norwegians tend to judge meeting Chinese (low familiarity) in Norway (high familiarity) the most interesting. The same pattern emerges in the tourists from all other countries as well; Chinese tourists (high novelty) are thought of as being most interesting to meet in the tourists’ own home countries (high familiarity), but less interesting in China. In other words, the more remote the place in terms of distance or culture, the more interesting it will be to meet someone “more familiar,” and the more familiar the place is in terms of culture and distance, the less interesting it will be to meet familiar other tourists. Tourists in general it seems, prefer to meet compatriots and not local people when they travel to foreign countries that are new to them.

Table 2 . Interestingness a of meeting a tourist from China in various countries [scale: 1 (not interesting) – 7 (very interesting), mean scores, ±SD].

The second issue, whether familiarity seekers and novelty seekers differ from each other in terms of their preference for novelty and familiarity of social encounters was examined by using the top and bottom quartiles in the distribution of the scale measuring preferences for novelty and familiarity.

Figure 2 exhibits an extrapolation of some of the very complex data concerning the mixture of familiarity and novelty of social encounters (Chinese and Norwegian respondents are for logical reasons removed from Figure 2 ). As can be seen, there are no differences in the preference structure concerning social encounters – both familiarity seekers and novelty seekers find it significantly more interesting to meet Norwegians (unfamiliar) at home (in a familiar place) than in Norway (unfamiliar place). At the same time, familiarity seekers and novelty seekers both find it more interesting to meet compatriots (familiar) in Norway (unfamiliar) than at home (familiar). The same holds true for meeting Chinese tourists; both familiarity seekers and novelty seekers judge meeting Chinese (unfamiliar) at home (familiar) more interesting than meeting Chinese (unfamiliar) in China (unfamiliar). It seems like all tourists, those who classify themselves as novelty seekers and those who are inclined to perceive themselves as familiarity seekers alike show the same structure of preferences for social encounters in familiar and unfamiliar settings.

Figure 2 . Interestingness of social encounters with locals and compatriots in novelty and familiarity seeking tourists [scale 1 (low interestingness) – 7 (high interestingness)].

Results from Study 1 give support to the interaction hypothesis of inherent interestingness for social encounters during tourist trips. Tourists seemingly prefer to meet compatriots abroad and foreigners at home. This appears to be true for both familiarity seekers and novelty seekers alike and for tourists from all countries. Since it was somewhat surprising that familiarity seekers and novelty seekers showed the same preference structure, Study 2 focused on whether novelty seekers and familiarity seekers demonstrate similar preference structures in other types of tourist experiences than social encounters. This issue is consequently addressed below.

Study 2: Interestingness of Attractions in Familiarity and Novelty Seekers

Study 2 follows up the intriguing finding that novelty seekers and familiarity seekers report the same structure concerning interestingness reported in Study 1. Three measures of interestingness were used; “willingness to pay,” “attractiveness,” and “interestingness” with reference to four different conditions in a within subjects design; (1) unknown sights in a known place (home), (2) known sights in a known place (home), (3) unknown sights in a unknown place (away from home), and (4) known sights in an unknown place (away from home). Interestingness should correlate moderately highly with tourists’ willingness to pay for the experience and with their judgment of the attractions’ attractiveness. Based on the results from Study 1, it was hypothesized that tourists will judge the interestingness of tourist attractions to be the highest for known, i.e., familiar attractions in unknown destinations and for less known attractions in known settings, and lowest for known attractions in known destinations and unfamiliar attractions in unfamiliar places. Based on the results from Study 1, it was further expected that familiarity seekers and novelty seekers would demonstrate the same preference structures.

Potential respondents were approached in “low threshold” places and asked if they were on vacation. If the potential participant answered this question in the affirmative, they were asked if they would be willing to fill in a questionnaire concerning various “aspects of being a tourist.”

The questionnaire was four pages long, and it took some 10 min to fill it in. Standard background questions, such as age, gender, and nationality, were asked. Tourist role orientation was measured using the 16-item version ( Jiang et al., 2000 ) of the International Tourist Role Scale (ITR; Mo et al., 1993 ), a scale developed in order to empirically asses Cohen’s (1972) tourist role typology. In the present context, only the subscale measuring preference for familiarity when choosing a travel destination was used. Four scenarios describing novel and familiar aspects of places and sights were constructed. Respondents indicated interestingness (attractiveness/willingness to pay) for each of the scenarios (“hidden treasures in your hometown,” “famous landmarks in your hometown,” “hidden treasures in a town you visit for the first time,” and “famous landmarks in a town you visit for the first time”). All items were on 7-point scales anchored by “Not interesting” (or “attractive”/“no willingness to pay”) and “Very interesting” (“attractive”/“willing to pay”). No monetary or other compensations were given for participation.

Of some 820 approached tourists, 762 agreed to fill in the questionnaire. The respondents represented 57 nations, 52.8% were female and 47.1% male (1 person did not answer the gender item). Mean age was 41 years (SD = 17.3).

Interestingness correlated highly with both attractiveness and willingness to pay ( r ranges between 0.59 and 0.82) in all the four scenarios. Thus, it was decided that interestingness could be operationalized as a scale consisting of the three items measuring interestingness, attractiveness, and willingness to pay. This scale yielded Chronbach’s α for Scenario 1 (familiar place novel sight) = 0.86, Chronbach’s α for Scenario 2 (familiar place/familiar sight) = 0.87, Chronbach’s α for Scenario 3 (novel place/novel sight) = 0.90, and Chronbach’s α for Scenario 4 (novel place/familiar sight) = 0.91. This allows for construction of four interestingness scores with reference to the four scenarios.

In line with predictions from the interaction hypothesis, results indicated that tourists, when thinking about their hometown, in general report that they would find it more interesting to see unfamiliar (novel) sights than familiar sights (home: mean (familiar/familiar) = 3.11, mean (novel/familiar) = 3.38, t = 6.78, p < 0.001). At the same time, and contrary to the predictions of the interaction hypothesis of inherent interest, tourists reported that in unfamiliar (novel) places, they would find unfamiliar sights more interesting than well-known attractions in these places (away from home: mean (novel/novel) = 4.85, mean (familiar/novel) = 3.75, t = 3.17, p < 0.005). This structure of responses fits with the predictions made in traditional tourist role theory for novelty seekers , but not for familiarity seekers.

Therefore, the second question in Study 2 was whether familiarity seekers and novelty seekers differ from each other in terms of what they judge to be interesting. Figure 3 shows that familiarity seekers and novelty seekers exhibit practically the same preference structure concerning the combination of novelty and familiarity. A one-way ANOVA, using novelty/familiarity seeking (the 25% of the respondents scoring the highest and the lowest on novelty seeking) as a grouping variable showed that familiarity seekers had significantly higher preference for familiar sights in familiar settings (home), but no other differences between the groups were observed concerning degree of interest in any of the scenarios. Home/familiar : mean (familiarity seekers) = 3.36, mean (novelty seekers) = 2.85, F (1,325) = 6.26, p < 0.05; home/novel : mean (familiarity seekers) = 3.36, mean (novelty seekers) = 3.30, F (1,324) = 0.11, p = 0.74; away from home/familiar : mean (familiarity seekers) = 4.86, mean (novelty seekers) = 4.62, F (1,325) = 1.78, p = 0.18; away from home/novel : mean (familiarity seekers) = 4.81, mean (novelty seekers) = 4.81, F (1,325) = 0.001, p = 0.98. In other words, novelty seekers and familiarity seekers express the same degree of interest for the various combinations of novelty and familiarity of sights in unfamiliar settings, but familiarity seekers have a higher preference for familiar sights in familiar places.

Figure 3 . Novelty seekers and familiarity seekers preferences for combinations of novelty and familiarity [scale 1 (low interestingness) – 7 (high interestingness)].

The first results from Study 2 are ambiguous in as much as respondents judge unfamiliar sights most interesting in both familiar and unfamiliar settings. Seemingly, people think of themselves that they to a large extent are novelty seekers, and that what attracts their interest is novelty more than familiarity. One reason for this may be that what attracts ones attention in familiar situations may be if there is something new in that situation, and that people, when they travel, tend to note what is different (novel) in the situation and not what is known. For example, if one is a first time visitor to a country and eats a salad (a well-known activity for most people), the ingredients or the toppings may be different from what one knows from home, and therefore people may notice this difference, not the fact that salad-eating is a well-known activity. This may lead people to conclude that they are attracted to, indeed find the novel taste the most interesting, which in turn may result in distorted self-perceptions of oneself as a person who not only likes, but is attracted to novelty (c.f., Teigen, 1987 ).

This interpretation is supported by the second finding in Study 2, which reveals that familiarity seekers and novelty seekers demonstrate similar preference structures concerning what constitutes an “interesting experience” – a result replicating the results in Study 1. Actually, this result indicates that tourists think about themselves that they are highly interested in novelty, not in familiarity. This represents a major methodological problem; how can the illusion that people apparently have of being predominantly interested in highly novel (exotic) sights and places be removed from the measuring of interestingness? Study 3 represents an attempt to extract this self-perception from peoples’ responses.

Study 3: Interestingness for Typical Tourists

The results of Study 2 inspired a follow up study with the aim of focusing on what tourists think other tourists judge to be interesting. The study was a between subjects field experiment were tourists were randomized into either answering with reference to themselves as tourists or with reference to what they thought other tourists would find interesting. This was done for two reasons; first, it aimed at avoiding the confounding self-perception of being a person who is not a typical tourist ( Prebensen et al., 2003 ; Doran et al., 2015 , 2018 ), or indeed a better than average person ( Alicke and Govorun, 2005 ; Brown, 2012 ). Second, the aim was to study and compare how the “self as tourist”-image and the perception of other tourists concerning our relevant parameters differed. It was expected that tourists would think that other tourists are more inclined to prefer familiar sights in novel settings than themselves. At the same time, it was expected that tourists would think of themselves as being significantly more interested in novel sights and experiences in unfamiliar settings than they would judge other tourists to be.

Potential respondents were approached in “low threshold” places and asked if they were on vacation. If this initial question was answered in the affirmative, the tourists were asked if they would be willing to fill in a questionnaire concerning various “aspects of being a tourist.”

The questionnaires were four pages long, and took some 10 min to fill in. Trained research assistants distributed the questionnaires. Standard background questions, such as age, gender, and nationality, were asked, in addition to several items concerning various aspects of being a tourist. Respondents were randomized into four groups answering four versions of the questionnaire. The randomization procedure was that the questionnaires were distributed in a prefixed order securing that every participant had an equal probability of receiving any version of the questionnaire. Version 1 asked about the attractiveness of known and unknown sights in Norway and in the respondents home country; Version 2 asked about the attractiveness of named familiar (Edvard Grieg’s house) and unfamiliar (Amalie Skram’s house) sights in Bergen and (unnamed) familiar and unfamiliar sights in the respondents’ home town. In Version 3, respondents were asked to rate the interestingness of familiar and unfamiliar sights in Norway or in the respondents’ home country, and in Version 4, respondents were asked to rate the interestingness of named familiar and unfamiliar sights in Bergen and unnamed familiar and unfamiliar sights in their home town. Ratings were done on a 7-point scale anchored by “Not at all attractive” (or “Not at all interesting”) and “Very attractive” (or “Very interesting”).

About half of the respondents ( n = 747) were asked to rate themselves as tourists with reference to novelty and familiarity of landmarks and sights. The first item was meant to tap interestingness of familiar sights and had this wording: “As a tourist, I visit famous landmarks instead of exploring unknown sights.” The second item aimed at extracting interestingness of unfamiliar (novel) sights and had the following wording: “As a tourist I visit unknown sights instead of exploring famous landmarks.” The remaining half ( n = 751) of the respondents answered the same questions with reference to “typical first time tourists.” The wording in this version was “Tourists typically visit famous landmarks…” and “Tourists typically visit unknown sights…” Both groups indicated their response on a 7-point scale anchored by “Don’t agree at all” (1) and “Strongly agree” (7).

Of some 1,650 approached tourists, 1,516 agreed to fill in the questionnaire. The respondents represented 43 nations, 51.6% were female and 48.4% male. Mean age was 47.7 years (SD = 17.91).

Figure 4 shows that respondents, when asked what they think typical first time visitors to their home country and home town find attractive or interesting, it is the country’s or home town’s most well-known attractions that are judged to be both attractive and interesting to a significantly higher degree than less well-known sights and attractions. Tourists seem to think that “typical first time tourists” visiting their own home towns and home countries are indeed interested in the familiar and famous and not in the less famous and novel sights.

Figure 4 . Attributed attractiveness and interestingness for novel and familiar attractions in home country and home town [scale 1 (low attractiveness) – 7 (high attractiveness)].

When asked about tourists to Norway and Bergen, respectively, the same pattern appears as is evident from Figure 6 . Tourists think that other “typical first time tourists” to Norway and Bergen are mostly attracted to well-known (familiar) sights and less to unknown (novel) sights. Similarly, the respondents stipulate that typical first time visitors find famous landmarks and sights more interesting both in Bergen and in Norway.

It is probably noteworthy from Figures 4 , 5 that “home town” (and “Bergen”) both seem to be less attractive and interesting than “home country” and “Norway” alike.

Figure 5 . Attributed attractiveness and interestingness for novel and familiar attractions in Norway and Bergen [scale 1 (low attractiveness) – 7 (high attractiveness)].

As can be seen from Figure 6 , respondents think that “tourists” find familiar landmarks significantly more interesting than novel (unfamiliar) attractions (mean tourists (familiar landmarks) = 5.70, mean tourists (novel attractions) = 2.96, t = 35.02, p < 0.001). Also, as is evident from Figure 6 , tourists report that they are themselves more interested in familiar than novel aspects of experiences (mean self (novel attractions) = 3.82, mean self (familiar attractions) = 4.21, t = 4.51, p < 0.001).

Figure 6 . Interestingness of novel and familiar sights and attraction for “tourists” and for “me as a tourist” [scale 1 (low interestingness) – 7 (high interestingness)].

None the less, calculating the discrepancy score between expressed interestingness of familiarity and expressed interestingness of novelty yields an estimate of netto interestingness of novelty. Comparing the means of these discrepancy scores show that respondents to a significantly higher degree estimate that tourists are interested in familiarity than in novelty as compared to themselves in their roles as tourists (mean tourists (net interestingness of familiarity tourists) = 2.74, mean self (net interestingness familiarity) = 0.39, F = 403.08 (1,472) , p < 0.001). This reflects that tourists think of themselves that they find novelty significantly more interesting while visiting places for the first time than what they judge other tourists to find. Respondents think that “typical first time tourists” find familiar sights to be significantly more interesting and novel sights to be significantly less interesting. One tends to think that tourists (not me) on their first time visit find it most interesting to look up well-known (familiar) sights, while the most uninteresting for such tourists are novel sights.

Results in Study 3 show that people think that typical first time visitors to unknown places will find well-known attractions to be most interesting and attractive. In addition, results indicate that people, when they are tourists, think that they are distinctly different from “typical first time visitors” in what they judge to be interesting. People think of other tourists that they look for well-known sights and hallmarks in new places, thus combining familiarity (well-known) and novelty (unknown) in construing the interestingness of a tourist experience. At the same time, people seem to think about themselves that they are significantly more balanced in what they would find interesting and attractive, and significantly less inclined “just to go for the tourist attractions.” This bears a resemblance to earlier findings indicating that people do not see themselves as “typical tourists” ( Prebensen et al., 2003 ; Larsen and Brun, 2011 ; Doran and Larsen, 2014 ; Doran et al., 2015 , 2018 ). Based on these results, one could actually suggest that this tendency is generic and applies over a range of tourist related behaviors, emotions, and cognitions. But most of all, results from Study 3 indicate that tourists think that other tourists look for familiarity while they think of themselves that they prefer an optimal blend of novelty and familiarity in their quest for interesting experiences.

General Discussion and Conclusions

Study 1 revealed that tourists in general prefer to meet compatriots and not local people when they travel to countries that are unknown to them. At the same time, people prefer to meet un familiar people in more well-known settings. This was found to be true for novelty seekers and familiarity seekers alike. Study 2 revealed that tourists tend to think of themselves that they are novelty seekers and that they think of themselves that they prefer more exotic over less exotic experiences. Just like in Study 1, results from Study 2 indicated that the preference structures were similar in novelty seekers and in familiarity seekers alike. Results from Study 3 demonstrate that tourists think of other tourists that they are mostly interested in familiar sights in novel situations. Results from Study 3 also indicate that tourists think that other tourists are much more familiarity seeking than they are themselves in novel places.

The starting point of the present study was to test the predictions of traditional tourist role theory and those of the interaction hypothesis of inherent interest, as shown in Figure 1 . It is evident from the results that the interaction hypothesis gets substantially more support than the tourist role perspective in the current material. This result is fascinating, since the cognitive model is virtually non-existent in the tourism literature, and at the same time, the tourist role orientation perspective has been highly influential in that same literature. This leads to a few thought-provoking preliminary conclusions that can be drawn on the basis of the joint findings of the three studies reported in the present paper.

The first conclusion is that the well-known platitude from general psychology, that people do not know what causes them to feel, think, and behave ( Flanagan, 1991 ) seems to hold true also within the realm of inherent interest of tourist experiences. Seemingly, people think of themselves as not being familiarity seekers; they rather tend to think that they are novelty seekers. But, the results in the present series of studies also indicate that inherent interest in various situations seems to be a function of both familiarity and novelty just as predicted from the interaction hypothesis and documented in several earlier experiments from the psychology laboratory ( Teigen, 1985a , b , c , 1987 ). One explanation why people think they are mostly interested in novelty may be that people overlook familiar aspects in situations containing something novel. This, in turn, may lead to screwed perceptions of oneself as a novelty seeker. In addition, this self-construal may lead to distorted memory processes; one will tend to remember the novel and not the mundane aspects of tourist experiences. It is well-known form the memory literature that for autobiographical memories, stimuli containing emotional arousal, i.e., novel stimuli ( Talarico et al., 2004 ; Gilboa et al., 2018 ) are those that will be remembered most vividly. This implies that people do not know what makes things interesting for them and they do not know why particular experiences are more attractive than other experiences. Thinking that novel experiences are the most interesting ones may just be a memory distortion.

Another preliminary conclusion also emerging from the data is that although most tourists seem to think about themselves that they are novelty seekers, most people still prefer an optimal balance of novelty and familiarity in their tourist experiences. Actually, no differences were found between self-proclaimed novelty seekers and self-proclaimed familiarity seekers in terms of their preference structures: novelty seekers and familiarity seekers demonstrated parallel preference structures. This may imply that segmentation of people based on self-proclaimed preferences of novelty and familiarity may be futile. But even more importantly, these findings might also imply that classical tourist role theory is less feasible than thought by many tourism researchers. It is of course true that people travel for many reasons, but the idea that people travel to explore novel situations, unknown cultures, and unknown people do not seem to be completely true. Au contraire, based on the results from the present study, novelty seeking cannot be judged to be an exclusive and true motive for traveling neither for novelty seekers nor for familiarity seekers.

The third conclusion that may be drawn from the present study is that people, when traveling as tourists, tend not to think that they are like “other tourists.” This, of course is well-known from the literatures of both psychology and tourism research. Psychologists have, for example, amply documented the so-called “optimistic bias” ( Weinstein, 1989 ) and the “better than average effect” ( Alicke and Govorun, 2005 ; Brown, 2012 ) over a large range of domains, such as, for example, smoking ( Arnett, 2000 ) and other health risks ( Weinstein, 1987 ). It seems that people tend to think that they are unique in the sense that they are less likely to suffer negative outcomes and more likely to experience positive future outcomes, and that they fall prey to thinking that they perform better or have better abilities than average persons. Along similar ways of reasoning, Prebensen et al. (2003) reported that 89.5% of their sample of German tourists to Norway reported that they were not “typical German tourists”, while Larsen and Brun (2011) observed that tourists judged other tourists to be more at risk than themselves. Similarly, Doran et al. (2015) found that tourists asserted that they were not similar to other tourists in terms of their motivations, and Larsen et al. (2007) found that people tend to judge home country to be safer that abroad no matter what home country people come from. One possible interpretation of these findings is that people seem to find an optimal distance between their own self-perception and what they think other tourists represent in terms of many aspects of the tourist experience. It may well be that the search for familiarity is a sign of “typicality” in touristic terms, but it may equally well be that many, if not all tourists fall prey to the cognitive distortion of not being a typical novelty seeker. Seemingly, the pervasiveness of preference for familiarity in novel situations and novelty in familiar situations is a common characteristic of many, if not all tourists.

In sum, the present series of studies give stronger support for the cognitive interaction hypothesis of inherent interestingness then for the predictions of classical tourist role theory. The findings are in line with Teigen’s (1987) results. While Teigen based his conclusions on findings from laboratory settings among university students, the present studies were done in real life settings among tourists, which is a major advantage in terms of ecological validity. While findings from the psychology laboratory are of the greatest importance for the advancement of psychological science, such findings are always strengthened by corroborating findings from “real world” settings, such as in the present study. Those “institutionalized” and “noninstitutionalized” tourists do not differ in their preference structure for novelty and familiarity is compelling. Although “drifters” and “explorers” feel that they are distinctively different from other tourists in terms of novelty seeking, they are probably more similar to other tourists than they are aware of. Almost everyone tends to perceive themselves as different from the “mainstream tourist,” the “other tourists,” the “typical tourist” (c.f., Larsen et al., 2011 ) which in a sense makes them, or all of us, more typical than we think.

It should also be underlined that the results reported in the present study are not meant to give a complete and final solution to the question of what constitutes interesting tourist experiences. As Teigen (1987) highlighted, many psychological factors may play a role in peoples’ quests for such attractive experiences, such as, for example, emotional appeal, associative appeal, and personal appeal. Other sources of interestingness may be associated with feelings of well-being and peoples’ experiences of mastery. In addition, tourists’ worries and risk judgments may play a role. It must also be mentioned that it is not certain that this optimal blend of novelty and familiarity holds true for all classes of experiential domains; it may be that, for example, food and drink experiences and other experiences containing the possibility for disgust may turn out to be different. In addition, peoples’ expectancies to particular tourist places and events may also influence real life experience as exemplified in the well-known Jerusalem syndrome and in the less well-known Paris-syndrome ( Flinn, 1962 ). However, it is our contention that only future research will contribute to dissolving the various highly interesting general psychological issues enclosed within the agenda of the study of “interestingness of tourist experiences.” Based on the findings reported in the present study, however, it is evident that the simplistic model which places people in categories based on their self-reported preferences for novelty and familiarity is not sufficient for enhancing the advancement of knowledge of the psychology of the tourist experience.

Data Availability

Raw data supporting the conclusions of this manuscript will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation, to any qualified researcher.

Ethics Statement

The data collection in the three studies in the present paper complied with the general guidelines for research ethics by the Norwegian National Committees for Research Ethics in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (NESH). Formal approval by an ethics committee was not required as per applicable institutional guidelines and regulations. Informed consent was implied by responding to the questionnaire in all three studies.

Author Contributions

All authors contributed to the conception and design of the study. Data collection was carried out by student research assistants. SL and KW contributed to the statistical analysis, and SL wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors contributed to manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted version.

Data collection was funded by the Department of Psychosocial Science (Småforsk).

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

Some preliminary data (from Study 1) were presented at the CAUTHE, Southern Cross University (AU), February 2–5, 2015.

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Keywords: interesting tourist experience, novelty, familiarity, tourist roles, interaction hypothesis of interest

Citation: Larsen S, Wolff K, Doran R and Øgaard T (2019) What Makes Tourist Experiences Interesting. Front. Psychol . 10:1603. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01603

Received: 10 May 2019; Accepted: 25 June 2019; Published: 07 August 2019.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2019 Larsen, Wolff, Doran and Øgaard. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Svein Larsen, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Drifter, tourist

2014, Encyclopaedia of Tourism, 2nd Edition

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Backpacking’s future and its drifter past

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ISSN : 2055-5911

Article publication date: 8 October 2018

Issue publication date: 21 November 2018

The purpose of this paper is to deconstruct the backpacker label by reconstructing it using the historical antecedent of drifting. Following the deconstruction of backpacking’s near past, the author build a clearer conceptual foundation for backpacking’s future.

Design/methodology/approach

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• Scenario planning
• Backpackers
• Backpacking
• Tourism futures
• Tourism history

O’ Regan, M. (2018), "Backpacking’s future and its drifter past", Journal of Tourism Futures , Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 193-204. https://doi.org/10.1108/JTF-04-2018-0019

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2018, Michael O’ Regan

Published in Journal of Tourism Futures . Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

1. Introduction

Backpacking as an “alternative” form/type of tourism generates a distinct way of “being-in-the-world” as individuals characterised by extensive spatial mobility and time and space flexibility travel for up to one year or more on routes that span the globe ( Berdychevsky et al. , 2013 ). There has been a rapid increase in their visibility as a distinct form of tourism. From books to movies, the media is now flush with “backpacking” related images, films, fiction, oral histories, documentaries, reality television shows and soap operas ( O’Regan, 2016 ). However, as a label or category, “backpacker” and “backpacking” can generate a surprising amount of debate. From the scholars who contest the conflicting claims to its origin ( Loker-Murphy and Pearce, 1995 ), the entrepreneurs who seek to extend it as a label ( Bell, 2008 ), to the backpackers who wish to distance themselves from it ( O’Regan, 2016 ); there is little agreement as to the nature of backpacking homogeneity or heterogeneity, its past or its future. This paper argues that backpacker research in the social sciences has stalled as form-related attributes have become fixed defining criteria for manipulative hypotheses stated in advance in propositional form and subjected to flawed empirical tests.

The purpose of this paper is to deconstruct the backpacker label through a past-to-future scenario planning perspective. This approach includes exploring current “backpacker” research through a critical lens, deconstructing backpacking’s “drifter past”, and rebuilding a new conceptual foundation for the future. As thinking about future scenarios requires an accurate appreciation of history in order to understand the future ( Yeoman, 2008 ), this paper explores drifting, which has symbolic, cultural, structural and historic continuity with backpacking, and is seen as the most direct precursor of backpacking ( Hannam and Diekmann, 2010 ; Sørensen, 2003 ).

2. Backpacker research: disparities and incongruities

There is some contestation as to where the backpacker label originated ( Slaughter, 2004 ). While first noted at an academic conference by Pearce (1990) , it was already a internal-external dialectic of identification ( Jenkins, 1996 ) in the early 1980s, with Smith (1992) noting its use by Boracayans in the Philippines in 1985. Whatever its origins, the external identification of “backpacker” became an internal identification used by those who shared an identity based on their form of travel as well as a marketing concept used by business. After Pearce (1990) utilised a quiz/questionnaire inserted in the free Aussie Backpacker magazine during 1989 (596 questionnaires), he found backpackers to be predominantly young, on an extended holiday, with a preference for budget accommodation. He found they had a flexible and informal travel itinerary and placed an emphasis on meeting people and participating in a range of activities. Loker-Murphy and Pearce (1995) built on this, by administering a questionnaire and drawing on data from the annual visitor survey conducted at Australia’s major international airports. They extracted data from those aged between 15 and 29 years of age, with holiday as main purpose of trip, a duration of stay of four weeks or more to confirm the 1990 criteria. The findings met the demand by authorities and businesses in Australia for an internationally accepted, comprehensive definition ( Wallace, 1991 ). Subsequent research based on the criteria produced by Loker-Murphy and Pearce (1995) and others confirmed backpackers extended travel, a tendency towards low spending and interaction with other travellers ( Hecht and Martin, 2006 ; Murphy, 2001 ; Riley, 1988 ).

Whilst other labels have been applied to these travellers included “youth travelers” ( Adler, 1985 ), “free independent travellers” ( Clarke, 2004 ), “long-term budget travelers” ( Riley, 1988 ), “non-institutionalised tourists” ( Uriely et al. , 2002 ), “non-tourists” ( Tucker, 2003 ), “budget tourist/economy tourists” ( Elsrud, 2001 ) and “anti-tourists” ( Maoz, 2007 ), the “backpacker” label has become dominant ( Elsrud, 2001 ; Hampton, 1998 ; Pearce, 1990 ; Scheyvens, 2002 ; Smith, 1992 ; Uriely et al. , 2002 ). This has made the category legible for researchers, its use instrumental in researching the demographic and social background of backpackers. They were cast as a distinct “category” of tourism that is seen as categorically different from mass tourism or “institutionalized” tourism flows ( Sørensen, 2003 ). Backpackers continue to attract attention in sociological, anthropological and psychological research, based on the priori-assumption that not researching difference is “dangerous”, “since it will surely result in at least some of these visitors being dissatisfied or not particularly well catered for” ( Loker-Murphy, 1997 , p. 25). While a shift from unifying depictions of the backpacker as a general type “toward an approach that stresses its diverse and plural characteristics” ( Uriely, 2005 , p. 205) is welcome, research have primarily utilized the criteria developed by Pearce (1990) to analyse backpacker homogeneity/heterogeneity in terms of nationality, motivation and gender ( Hampton, 1998 ; Elsrud, 2001 ; Maoz, 2007 ; Murphy, 2001 ; Noy, 2004 ).

Codification of criteria is used to know the “proper” location, ages and characteristics of backpackers and “proper” backpacker practices. Utilising form related criteria, such as age, luggage type, accommodation usage, etc., backpackers are placed in a controlled context so as to observe, measure and quantify them. For example, researchers now indicate the minimum length of travel time backpackers must be “on the road for”, with researchers often drawing samples from those staying in hostels ( Hecht and Martin, 2006 ; Hughes et al. , 2009 ; Pearce and Foster, 2007 ; Thyne et al. , 2004 ). Larsen et al. (2011) used a hostel stay as a criterion to identify backpackers as other researchers identify a backpacker as spending at least one night in a hostel or backpacker accommodation. Other studies link their research to usage of particular internet groups and sites online ( Luo et al. , 2015 ; Paris, 2012 ) and even their use of a backpack ( Chen et al. , 2014 ; Pearce and Foster, 2007 ). Research risks missing the evolving nature of backpacking as researchers search for niches, taxonomies, segments or typologies.

Codification of criteria does have benefits. Backpacker research originates across different disciplines such as medicine, management and business studies, economics and sociology. The global scale of backpacking research demands exchange of knowledge between geographically dispersed researchers. Codification allowed the backpacker phenomenon and the backpacker label to become a worldwide term of description and made it possible to talk of a developing transnational socio-spatial sub-lifestyle. However, codification has also produced contradictory classifications, typologies, clusters, taxonomies and segments as deviations from criteria are not unusual. There has been a recent trend to focus on deviations from the “standardized” backpacker characteristics, with researchers finding cohorts of “humanistic backpackers” ( Uriely et al. , 2002 ), “holiday hippies” ( Westerhausen, 2002 ), “conformist backpackers” ( Hottola, 2008 ), “flashpackers” ( Paris, 2012 ), the “Backpacker Plus” ( Cochrane, 2005 ), “backpacker tourists” ( Bell, 2005 ), “youth train backpackers” ( Bae and Chick, 2016 ) and “study backpackers” ( Jarvis and Peel, 2005 ). Those revealed as deviating from these criteria are exposed either as a new type of backpacker with specific type-related attributes or deviants/non backpackers like “begpackers” ( Saidi, 2018 ), whom Cohen (1972, 1973) should have approved!

Backpacking research has been largely disconnected from its near past as backpacking is perceived to have become institutionalized and retrenched through a combination of touristic, educational and economic discourses ( Cohen, 2003 ). The backpacker label has become so unrooted that it has become redundant for increasing numbers of researchers who label all “budget travellers” ( Larsen et al. , 2011 ) as backpackers, “gap year” travellers as backpackers ( O’Reilly, 2006 ), “youth students” ( Richards, 2015 ) as backpackers and those on working visas as backpackers ( Allon, 2004 ). There has also been a trend in applying macro-level concepts and trends to backpackers such as sustainability, service quality, authenticity and loyalty ( Brochado et al. , 2015 ; Iaquinto, 2015 ). Finally, as backpacking has progressively widened its sociocultural base by drawing adherents from Asia, Africa and South America, researchers have disregarded the particular historical backgrounds in which drifting and backpacking emerged in the west, and have applied western concepts of backpacking to other nationalities such as Chinese backpackers ( Chen et al. , 2014 ).

Pearce (1990) , however, had recognised that the emergence of backpacking was partially because of the “marginal” behaviour of the “hippie/drifter” type during the 1960s and 1970s, with Eric Cohen’s (1972, 1973) conceptualization of “drifters” the conceptual basis for early backpacker research. Cohen (2004 , p. 44) himself noted that “If the model for the drifter was the tramp, the drifter is the model for the backpacker”. However, many scholars argue that backpacker identifies are too far (re)constructed by the (social) media and the tourism industry to be linked with drifting ( Molz and Paris, 2015 ). They argue that any unconventional elements have stripped away, with resold backpacking as a touristic pursuit. The shift from the “drifter” to the “backpacker” label has come to be seen as a disjuncture ( Elsrud, 2001 ; Sørensen, 2003 ), creating a break with backpackers past and future. This paper applies scenario planning to reconceptualise backpacking’s past, so as to reconceptualise backpacking to account for backpacking today and in the future.

3. Methodology

The disparities, incongruities and deviations in backpacker research demand a retrospective look at backpacking’s near past. Scenario planning has been used by businesses, academics and government agencies for strategic futures planning since the 1950s ( Bradfield et al. , 2005 ). Given the subjective, personalised and heuristic nature of scenario planning, it is thought to leave “many academics uncomfortable” ( Schoemaker, 2004 ). This discomfort may deter academics from subjecting a topic to scholarly scrutiny. However, scenario planning can be useful to academics, since the process may act as a cognitive aid to overcome limitations and framing biases ( Page et al. , 2010 ; Yeoman, 2008 ). It may lead academics to update their judgment, and induce changes in their thinking. More than simply predicting future backpacking scenarios, the paper challenges current assumptions about backpacking and casts a critical eye on backpacker research.

4. The drifters

[…] make it wholly on his own, living with the people and often taking odd-jobs to keep himself going. He tries to live the way the people he visits live […] The drifter has no fixed itinerary timetable and no well-defined goals of travel. He is almost wholly immersed in his host culture.

The drifter was described as the complete opposite of the mass tourist ( Cohen, 1972 ). The drifter is “individualistic”, “disdainful of ideologies”, “un-patriotic”, “hedonistic” and “anarchistic” ( Cohen, 1973 ) and shunned “any kind of connection with the tourist establishment, and considers the ordinary tourist experience phony” ( Cohen, 1972 , p.168). Cohen acknowledges the drifter as a “child of affluence, who reacts against it. He is young, often a student or a graduate, who has not yet started to work” ( Cohen, 1972 , p. 175) and “usually settles down to an orderly middle-class career” ( Cohen, 1972 , p. 176). Cohen’s (1973 ) idealised drifter has no fixed itinerary or timetable and no well-defined goals of travel and seeks “to see the world as it really is” (p. 95) through “begging, scavenging and ‘sharing’ food and lodgings with friends and acquaintances” ( Cohen, 1973 , p. 95). He notes how their involvement in the host community sets them apart with time spent in one place an important determinant of social involvement.

Cohen’s (1973) paper also described the emergence of what he describes as a subculture of drifters who travelled and congregated in “drifter communities”. He argues that these drifter tourists were a different kind of social category. They were not as ideological, but individualistic, and as drifter itineraries formed, “fixed travelling patterns, established routines and a system of tourist facilities and services catering specifically to the youthful mass-tourist” ( Cohen, 1973 , p. 95) came into existence. Drifting became encumbered by all the “paraphernalia of mass tourism” ( Cohen, 1973 , p. 95) against which his idealised drifters rebelled. These drifter tourists were not as motivated to seek to mix with host populations, customs and landscape. While the idealised drifter did not die, Cohen recast the category into a typology based on work by Keniston’s (1968) about countercultural drug users, and work by the sociologist Yablonsky (1968) . Cohen utilised the dimensions of involvement and time to create a four-fold typology of drifters. His “Adventurers” corresponded to the idealised drifter as they were, outward oriented and full time. The inward oriented “Itinerant Hippie”, drifted aimlessly from one “hippie” community to another in search for drug culture and was oblivious to the native environment. The part time outward oriented “mass-drifter” was linked to college youth, with limited time and stuck to the “drifter-tourist establishment” ( Cohen, 1973 , p. 98). He argued they were “almost the complete opposite of its original prototype” ( Cohen, 1973 , p. 103). Finally, the part time, inward oriented “Fellow Traveller” merely associated with the “hippies”. Cohen (1979) later provided a typology of modes of tourist experiences by situating drifting within what he called the experimental mode. He suggested those who travelled on his mode were pre-disposed to try out alternative ways of life as part of a quest for meaning. By 1982, Cohen argued that only a few fulltime drifters remained, and in a 2003 paper, he noted few backpackers had the competence, resourcefulness, endurance, fortitude, or ability to replicate his idealised drifter. Rather than the drifter tourist, he argues it was the “original; idealised drifter” which was the “ideal” ( Cohen, 2003 ) to which backpackers are attracted, but cannot succeed. He argues backpacking has been stripped of its countercultural leanings, and comparable to conventional mass tourism.

5. A retrospective analysis of drifters

A retrospective analysis identifies issues with the concept of the idealised drifter. While Cohen (1973 ) noted he conceived of the drifter in 1968, it was not until the early 1970’s that he became interested in the phenomena of unconventional travellers. An anthropologist by training, his interest in tourism was marginal, and the intrusion of these travellers into his anthropological studies antagonised him ( Cohen, 2007 ). The label drifter had been around for some time, with the novel Drifters by James A. Michener (1971) , e.g., following six young characters from diverse backgrounds as they travelled together through parts of Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Mozambique. Cohen’s (2003, 2007) conceptualisation of the “drifter” was influenced by one personal encounter in 1969 whilst carrying out anthropological fieldwork on poverty in Ayacucho, in the central Andes of Peru and linked this encounter to an anthropological study of Arab boys and tourists girl in Acre, Israel in 1966 ( Cohen, 1971 ). However, Cohen’s work lacked fieldwork, given he did not perceive himself as a tourism researcher ( Cohen, 2007 ). There are contradiction is his work, as he describes the emergence of the drifter tourist as both sudden and gradual ( Cohen, 1973 ). While he notes drifter tourists follow into areas which “individual drifters already started to penetrate in the earlier period” ( Cohen, 1973 , p. 92), it is difficult to establish timelines and whether drifters and drifter tourists interacted. This may be because Cohen never travelled with drifters, did fieldwork, or immerse himself in drifting. Given the lack of literature to substantiate the drifter conceptualization, his work obscures whether the idealised drifter existed or how drifter tourism emerged. Without forming a complete picture of drifting ensures our understanding of the emergence of backpacking remains fuzzy. There is little evidence for his idealised drifters, although there is evidence of new forms of travel in that period ( Alderson, 1971 ). There is little evidence to suggest links between drifters and drifter tourists. This paper, therefore, re-align’s backpacking to drifter tourism and the counterculture from which they emerged, rather than Cohen’s idealised drifter. Cohen (1972, 1973) did link the drifter tourist to the counterculture, and mentioned links to the drug culture, the Vietnam War, economic affluence and broader alienative forces. He described the “loosening of ties and obligations, the abandonment of accepted standards and conventional ways of life, the voluntary abnegation of the comforts of modern technological society, and the search for sensual and emotional experiences […] [that motivates them] to travel and live among different and more ‘primitive’ surroundings” ( Cohen, 1973 , p. 93).

Drifting emerged out of a disjuncture and a period of societal flux we call the counterculture.

There is considerable debate as to when the counterculture began as a cultural construct with most commentators placing it between 1960 and 1970. Marwick (1999) places it between 1958 and 1974. Roszak (1969) places the “1960s” within a broader setting that stretches from 1942 with the Beats, who sought mobility and experiences to escape from the predictability of suburban life. Emerging out of the “hipsters” who formed around black jazz and swing performers, a Bohemian counterculture began to evolve around North Beach in San Francisco in the early 1950s. As rental prices rose in the late 1950s and early 1960s, remnants moved to Haight-Ashbury, a neighbourhood in San Francisco near Golden Gate Park. This new “scene” ( Irwin, 1977 ) attracted the white, middle class and the college educated, who were reacting to a loss of an overriding societal purpose. Fuelled by increased leisure time, societal affluence and the rapid postwar participation in the university system, these now relabelled “Hippies” sought escape – both literally and metaphorically ( Miles, 2008 ). Previous temporal rhythms governing study, graduation and employment were shattering, suspended and replaced by a developing “socio-political-cultural concept” ( Stephens, 1998 ) known as the counterculture. It was a “literal” escape from the consumerist suburban lifestyle, while metaphorically it was an escape from America ( Miles, 2008 ). The district, which had an estimated 800 hippies in residence in 1965, had 15,000 by 1966 and 100,000 by the summer of 1967 ( Falk and Falk, 2005 ). By the mid-1960s, the countercultural imagination was driven by the idea of “flowering” cities and creating alternative structures and enclaves where networked individuals and groups of similarly thinking people could coalesce. By the end of the 1960s, the “intense, spontaneous internationalism” ( Neville, 1970 , p. 14) saw enclaves across America and Europe develop ( Lewis, 1972 ; Mills, 1973 ; Neville, 1970 ).

[…] proclaim a new heaven and a new earth so vast, so marvelous that the inordinate claims of technical expertise must of necessity withdraw in the presence of such splendor to a subordinate and marginal status in the lives of men. To create and broadcast such a consciousness of life entails nothing less than the willingness to open ourselves to the visionary imagination on its own demanding terms.

Cohen over emphasised alienation as the main motivating factor for drifter tourists, and under emphasised the importance of self-reliance, personal development and self-expression to individuals of the time. Detachment from the social structure was meant to be a graceful, temporary, selective and active attempt to create/find social structures that could carry and sustain their shared understandings and individual visions. Cohen under emphasised the counterculture outside the United in the UK, France and Australia, and the role of niche and mass media (like the music and style press). The media along with commercial interests from record companies to transport companies ( Mills, 1973 ) drew in India, Nepal, Morocco, etc., into the countercultural orbit ( Roszak, 1969 ). These countries symbolized freedom and independence ( Cavallo, 2001 ) and escape from restrictions, laws and obligations and the beginning of “something wilder and weirder on out on the road” ( Wolfe, 1968 , p. 103). A new constructed (countercultural) imaginative map of the world gave “prominence to countries perceived to be spiritual and marginalized” ( Stephens, 1998 , p. 52); with “new possibilities derived from drugs, sexual freedom and a vague spirituality”.

These drifter tourists were not as homogeneous as Cohen suggests, with the retrospective review indicating it would be more accurate to suggest that the drifter tourists were made up of various non-conformists, antiwar militants, counter-culturists, radicals, heads, “wanderers” ( Vogt, 1976 ), “travelers” ( Teas, 1974 ), dropouts, freaks, hippies and beatniks who had tapped into a countercultural mobility fantasy and a shared imaginary ( Tomory, 1996 ). Adler (1989) notes how a single code need not be fully shared by those whose efforts yield a recognisable style of performance. Cohen over emphasises the role of idealised drifter, as it was the drifter tourist ideas and infrastructure (bars, restaurants, hotels, shops, sites) which were projected onto maps, novels, movies, images and guidebooks, and became embedded in western social imaginaries, which people would aspire to. Cohen also failed to describe why drifting reproduced itself, why it declined or explain why drifters rejoined the system (social structure) ( Turner, 2006 ). Deflation in the late 1970s, a resurgence of neo-conservatism in many western countries, cold war conflicts, military dictatorships and proxy “hot” zones in many regions, combined to make the drift less popular. In addition, countries who had once welcomed the drifters now labelled their mobility “criminal”, “deviant” or “alternative”, with a number of countries refusing them entry visas and deporting them. This was further exasperated by the decline in value of western currencies and severe recession and stagflation between 1973 and 1983. However, there is no evidence to suggest drifting died ( Hail, 1979 ) and backpacking did not simply appear in 1990 when introduced to an academic audience.

The death of the drifter label was linked to a tourism industry happy to de-link a new wave of travellers in the 1990s with anarchistic drifting, with some researchers loath to connect the reemergence of budget travel to “drifting” given the perceived end of the countercultural era ( Cohen, 1982 ; Smith, 1992 ) and “hippie travellers” ( Riley, 1988 , p. 316). However, this type/form of travel had now been embedded in western social imaginaries as an organised field, with its building blocks, key story lines, narratives, cultural representations, affinities, performative conventions, understandings, regularities, ethos and practices in the public domain. This world retained its fluid and irregular shape and retained the core principles of its drifter tourist predecessors, by way of schemas of interpretation rather than explicit ideologies. Reignited desires in the late 1980s meant this world could again emerge, primarily in Australia, Thailand and the Philippines ( Cohen, 1982 ; Riley, 1988 ; Smith, 1992 ).

Just as the drifting was enabled by low unemployment between 1946 and 1973, the mid-1980s saw the global economy improve once more. Combined with the fall of communism and the cold war; a period of affluence swept the western world. The countercultural imagination, from the beatniks to drifters and backpackers, has long been associated with “mobility fantasies”, and drew dispersed individuals with different backgrounds and expectations that saw movement as a vehicle to explore new subjective experiences. Lonely Planet publications, always on the brink of bankruptcy found financial stability again as their guidebook sales took off in the 1980s ( Wheeler and Wheeler, 2007 ).

Despite technology taking over, guidebooks were not evidence of backpacking, but the necessity of proximity and face-to-face contact. It indicates that “[u]topian desire doesn’t go away […]. in fact never really went away” ( McKay, 1996 , p. 6). It offered individuals an opportunity to travel as a form of “escape” ( Pearce, 1990 ), with Cohen noting the drifter tourist “often goes abroad in order to get away from his homeland” ( Cohen, 1973 , p. 93). Iso-Ahola (1982) argues that people escape from such things as the dullness, stresses and monotony of everyday life, jobs, career decisions and/or relationship responsibilities ( Riley, 1988 ) and are motivated by ideals of freedom, independence and adventure ( Cohen, 2003 ).

6. Future of backpacking

People continue to be caught at the intersections of social pressures, education, career and family such as breaks between school and university, deaths in the family, divorces, marriage break-ups, career breaks/changes, workplace arrangements, retirement, health scares, redundancy, sabbaticals or post-military service. People will seek to escape oppressive, patriarchal and heteronormative structures, and “get distance” from former lives and identities (student, son, employee, husband, wife). Like the drifter tourists, some are transformed, self-induced mobility becoming a “substantial content of the reflexively organised trajectory of the self” ( Giddens, 1991 , p. 85), while others may merely buy into a temporary commodification of difference and otherness that is neither permanent nor long lasting. Many lack the time and inability to withdraw from economic necessity, or lack unrestrained freedom of travel, because of passport and visa restrictions imposed upon them. While some backpackers separate comfortably from the social structure, others are forced from it. Backpacking remains characterised by “audience-segregation” ( Goffman, 1961) , so that family, friends and employers do not figure, at least physically, during travel. Drifters and backpackers were never the free-floating individuals idealised by Cohen, with all those who travel tied into a network of regulations, conditions, provisos and obligations, tied up “with caring, guilt, responsibility and negotiation” ( Larsen et al. , 2006 , p. 261).

This paper finds that backpacking’s future can be found in its drifter past, but not the one idealised by Cohen or in codified criteria. Drifter tourism is backpackers past, but also its future as the countercultural imagination and the motivation to escape continues to drive contemporary backpacking. As individuals act on the basis of a shared imaginary that is culturally shared and socially transmitted, by those who purposefully enter this world, backpacking will continue. It is they who will inevitably modify and change backpacking over time as people, structure and contexts change. This is despite a market and managerial focus driven by lifestyle entrepreneurs, governments, consultants and academics that flatten backpacking’s meaning and depth, strip it of its original countercultural symbols, and rewrite it within educational and touristic discourses. While it makes backpacking legible in a modern society, which is a prerequisite for governance and governance systems, it also seeks to blunt any meaning beyond that of mainstream disposable play ( Cohen, 2018 ). While Cohen failed to address how interaction amongst drifters who shared the same cultural representation continually reproduced drifter tourism, backpacking’s encounters of conflict and collaboration between inexperienced and experienced (recognised by those who enter backpacking as competent, credible and relevant) backpackers continually reproduce, rejuvenate and even transform backpacking through new myths, gossip, stories, routes and understandings. It is a formation that must continually shapeshift and transform to avoid co-option.

As long as backpackers are codified as objects of knowledge and separated from their near past, a business and managerial focus will dominate research. It is the failure of the scholastic imagination to adapt to a world on the move. Research needs to explore new overlapping imaginaries such as ecovillages, intentional communities, new age travellers ( Kuhling, 2007 ), the Rainbow Family ( González and Dans, 2018 ), Woofing ( Ince, 2016 ), nomad houses, transformational festivals ( St John, 2001 ; Saldanha, 2002 ), hospitality exchange ( Ince and Bryant, 2018 ) and hitchhiking, but also mechanisms of exclusion and inequalities of mobility for different groups (females, disabled, LGBT, locals, older travellers) within these worlds. There is little understanding of backpackers beyond the western context and how other backpackers learn and interact. The future of backpacking is assured until those active in backpacking’s past, present and future share a new imaginary that transitions towards new ways of escape. Some who engage in the above practices argue that climate change, pollution, the birth of artificial intelligence will possibly lead to societal upheaval and instability ( Mannermaa, 1991 ) and a new social imaginary that is transnational in nature. The Rainbow Family prophecy, e.g., tells of a new tribe of “Rainbow Warriors”, with values of wisdom, unity, harmony and love emerging after a revolutionary transition caused by environmental destruction ( Niman, 1997 ).

7. Conclusion

The paper traces the development from “drifters” to backpackers, by reconnecting them retrospectively. This paper finds that backpackers inhabit a world endowed with history, desires, representations, understandings and intentions from its near past, to create a distinct type and form of tourism, with a memory of its own that has been represented, transmitted and recycled for nearly 60 years. Using scenario planning, this paper found an inherent power in the countercultural imagination, with continues to shape backpacking today, and also its future.

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About the author.

Michael O’ Regan, PhD, worked alongside the National Tourism Development Authority of Ireland before joining Gulliver, and later, Wicklow County Tourism. He has a PhD from the School of Sport and Service Management at the University of Brighton, UK (2010). His research interests are slow, alternative, historic, future and cultural mobilities.

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Types of tourist

This is a fascinating list of our various categories of tourists; you may be one of them, or shockingly several of them. Let's see where you land!.

The Drifter

Drifters are the kind of travelers who are least involved with the mass tourism industry. They typically have an authentic and deeply immersive travel experience, choosing to stay with locals rather than in hotels and spending their time in the local community.

The Explorer

However, these types of tourists do frequently contact a little more with the products connected to the tourism sector. Explorers also prefer novelty to the familiar. For instance, an Explorer might travel alone and take in a rich cultural experience, yet they might end the day by sleeping on a hotel cushion. This kind of traveler prefers to dine and buy locally, but don't be surprised if they occasionally enjoy a KFC.

The Individual Mass Tourist

These kinds of travelers want familiar foods, the ability to converse in a familiar tongue, and accommodations that are comfortable for them. Although they may organize their vacation through a travel agent or hire a local tour guide, the Individual Mass Tourist is not restricted by the likes of group tours and activities and will often choose solo travel over group tours.

The Organised Mass Tourist

The organized mass tourist looks for the familiar while usually traveling in a planned group. These travelers frequently travel in groups and prefer the comfortable over the exotic. They prefer the familiar above novelty. The organized mass traveler usually has a schedule or plan in place and follows it.

Allocentric tourists

Psychocentric tourists

Allocentric tourists are the polar opposite of psychocentric tourists. Psychocentric visitors are most typically connected with well-developed or over-developed tourism destinations. Many individuals will have gone there before them, so it has been tried and tested. These travelers are at ease knowing that their vacation destination will give them with the comforts and familiarities that they have come to expect.

Mid-Centric tourists

Mid-centric visitors are somewhere in the middle; they enjoy some adventure as well as some of their home comforts. Perhaps they book their vacation through dynamic packaging yet spend the most of their time in their vacation resort. Or perhaps they book a pre-arranged package but then opt to escape the crowds and explore the surrounding area.

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Definition of drifter

Examples of drifter in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'drifter.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

1897, in the meaning defined above

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Definition of drifter noun from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

• A 36-year-old drifter from Cincinnati was charged with the murder.
• As a young man he had been a romantic and a drifter.
• I spent my time in the company of drifters and losers.
• Several hundred drifters spend the night in the park.

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• Heather J. Gibson 3  

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There is general consensus that a tourist refers to a person who travels outside of their home community. However, this movement is where agreement tends to end. Discussions continue about how far the individual has to travel in order to be considered a tourist. Distances from 50 to 100 miles one way are commonly used to designate a tourist, although in some renowned destinations, such as the state of Florida in the United States , traveling across a county line either for business or pleasure or staying in rented accommodations for less than six months designates a tourist.

Early definitions

The Florida designation raises two other contentious issues related to the tourist definition debate, one is length of stay and the other is purpose of the trip. An overnight stay or 24 h away from home has been commonly used to distinguish a tourist from a day tripper or excursionist. Indeed, one of the first definitions of an international tourist used a 24 h stay in another country as one of the...

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Cohen, E. 1972 Toward a Sociology of International Tourism. Social Research 39:164-182.

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Cohen, E. 1974 Who is a Tourist? A Conceptual Clarification. Sociological Review 22:527-553.

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IUOTO 1963 The United Nations’ Conference on International Travel and Tourism. Geneva: International Union of Official Travel Organizations.

Pearce, P. 1985 A Systematic Comparison of Travel-related Roles. Human Relations 38:1001-1011.

Plog, S. 1974 Why Destination Areas Rise and Fall in Popularity. The Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly 14:55-58.

Smith, V. 1977 Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Yiannakis, A., and H. Gibson 1992 Roles Tourists Play. Annals of Tourism Research 19:287-303.

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Department of Tourism, Recreation and Sport Management, University of Florida, 32611, Gainesville, USA

Heather J. Gibson

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Correspondence to Heather J. Gibson .

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Honggen Xiao

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Gibson, H.J. (2016). Tourist. In: Jafari, J., Xiao, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Tourism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01384-8_589

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Meaning of drifter in English

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drifter noun [C] ( PERSON )

• daily passenger
• day-tripper
• grief tourist
• super-commuter

drifter noun [C] ( BOAT )

• cabin cruiser
• dragon boat
• rubber dinghy

drifter noun [C] ( IN CRICKET )

• all-rounder
• asking rate
• strike rate
• A casual town, created by drifters, and void of settled purpose.  
• For she was a child still—only twenty, but she had been in the 'show business' since she was a motherless, fatherless little drifter of sixteen....  
• I'm a drifter, sort of.  
• I'm not just a lounger, a drifter.  
• What did she care about any of the people about them, aimless, pleasure-hunting drifters like themselves.  

drifter | American Dictionary

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