Backpackers: The next generation? - Scholarly Commons Home

Backpackers: The next generation?
focus of research from theoretical to practical research applications: reviews of
the social and economic impacts and interests of a now-acknowledged market
segment.
Cohen would not have been surprised. “The Vermassung of drifting and its
gradual penetration by economic interests could not but change the original
non-routinized character of the drifting” (1973, p. 95). Westerhausen and
Macbeth (2003, p. 72) note that the “existence of flourishing backpacker centres
frequently invites a “hostile takeover” of local tourism structures by outside
operators and competing tourism sectors. The exponential growth of the
backpacking industry, particularly impacted by larger-scale accommodations,
has created mass infrastructure that is difficult to escape (Garnham, 1993;
Slaughter, 2004; Speed & Harrison, 2004). The larger, “full service” facilities even
encourage “eating, drinking and socialising amongst these backpacker groups
[to] occur on site at the hostel and little or no contact with the local environment
is experienced” (Doorne, 1993, p. 534). As detailed by Moran (2000) and Vance
(2004), private transportation networks linking well-developed backpacker
destinations contribute to fomenting this self-contained travellers’ bubble. Far
from being independent travellers on open-ended trips, many backpackers
indeed do travel within separate but parallel itineraries to other organised mass
tourists.
The current research emphasises a very different, much smaller-scale,
accommodation, yet the research participants had been exposed to other
backpackers’ facilities and related infrastructure, particularly the transportation
systems. What were their perceptions and preferences of different sized
facilities, and why?
Commodification of risk
Even risk and adventure have been commodified by mainstream backpacker
travel providers. Cohen’s (1973) drifter and Vogt’s (1976, p. 27) wanderer seek
“novelty, spontaneity, risk, independence, and a multitude of options”.
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