Contemporary Tourist Experience Concepts and Consequences [Hardcover]

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

The book critically explores these experiences from multidisciplinary perspectives and includes case studies from wide range of geographical regions. By analyzing these contemporary tourist experiences, the book will provide further understanding of the consumption of tourism.

Introduction: Experiencing Tourism, Experiencing Happiness?  Section 1: Conceptualising Tourism Experiences  1. Personal Experience Tourism: A Postmodern Understanding  2. The Habit of Tourism: Experiences and Their Ontological Meaning  3. Experiences of Valuistic Journeys: Motivation and Behaviour  Section 2: Understanding Dark Tourism Experiences  4. Re-Conceptualizing Dark Tourism  5. Dark Tourism as Mortality Capital: The Case of Ground Zero and the Significant Other Dead  6. Towards an Understanding Genocide Tourism: An Analysis of Visitors' Accounts of Their Experience of Recent Genocide Sites  Section 3: Motivation and the Contemporary Tourist Experience  7. Being Away or Being TherlÓ'