Backpackers: The next generation? - Scholarly Commons Home

Backpackers: The next generation?
• What are their specific needs and preferences in backpacker
accommodations?
• What are their travel-related research and booking patterns?
And, subsequently,
• How is the industry responding to older travellers, vis à vis both facilities
and marketing?
Defining “travel roles” and “touristic experiences”
To situate the research, academic and industry definitions of tourists and the
ever-expanding combinations of travel styles and tourism products must first be
explored. As will be discussed, nomenclature itself often disrupts
communication both within and between academia and industry experts.
Academic definitions
Who is a tourist? Who is a backpacker? These two apparently simple questions
have been discussed and debated for years by academics. Cohen, stating in 1974
that definitions for tourism created by international travel statistic models were
too broad for sociological purposes, instead declared the “tourist” to be within
the genus proximus (wider category) of “traveller”. He stated that the tourist is “a
voluntary, temporary traveller, travelling in the expectation of pleasure from the
novelty and change experienced on a relatively long and non-recurrent
roundtrip” (Cohen, 2004c, p. 23). He sub-classified tourists into four travel roles:
organized mass tourists, individual mass tourists, explorers, and drifters, positioning
them along a continuum of risk aversion. Organized mass tourists travel in groups
on pre-planned and pre-purchased trips with little or no input to daily decisions.
Individual mass tourists pre-purchase elements of their trip (e.g., airfare,
accommodations) but have flexibility in daily itinerary choices and travel
without a group. An explorer tries to avoid the mass tourist routes but
“nevertheless looks for comfortable accommodations and reliable means of
transportation. … He tries to associate with the people he visits…but still does
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