Travelling with Family and Friends
Travelling with Family and Friends
Travelling with Family and Friends
Regrettably much of the foundation work on tourist behaviour has unwittingly adopted a very individualistic orientation. This direction is undoubtedly linked to and driven by the dominance of questionnairebased methodologies to explore visitor behaviour; questionnaires and surveys are typically given to and filled in by individuals and the processing of the data aggregates individual responses. Nevertheless many researchers and students of tourist behaviour in naturalistic settings will quickly recognise that many travel parties are composed not of individuals but of couples, friends, and complex family groupings. As a brief illustration of this social dimension of tourism some diverse examples can be cited. Long distance car touring in Australia is dominated by senior couples (Pearce, 1999), young budget travellers are often in small shifting friendship groups (Buchanan and Rossetto, 1997), visitors to zoos and attractions are dominated by family groups (Turley, 2001), and gay male couples comprise more than half of the U.K. gay market holidaying at home and abroad (Clift, Callister, and Luongo, 2002). In this interconnected and social view of travel behaviours three emphases can be identified. First, the decision making about where to go on holidays is undoubtedly a complex amalgam of the motivations of and restrictions on the entire party (see Um and Crompton, 1990). Thus Moscardo and Pearce (1999) report that one cluster of visitors to a major Aboriginal cultural park in Northern Australia was not very interested in the attraction and cited their main reason for being present as ‘accompanying others.’ It can be suggested that this kind of tourist motivation may account for some of the moderate satisfaction scores obtained in tourist settings. The interest in this topic of ‘accompanying others’ and the challenge for tourism managers is to find ways to engage the interest of the whole travel party.
Travel parties and their composition also influence what people do in the site. Ryan (1992) reports that children are often the most willing participants in activities at heritage sites. Such participation may galvanise parental and adult interest and result in an extended time of visiting with some commercial implications in terms of food and souvenir purchases. In a more restrictive sense, travelling with senior members of a family or friendship group may limit participation in physically demanding activities, such as when visitors to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef do not participate in snorkelling because they choose to ‘stay dry’ and accompany their older relatives in glass bottom boat inspections of the coral (Moscardo, 1996). The presence of familiar faces in the form of family and friends may also exert a powerful influence on the development of the other relationships discussed in this chapter. Couples, family groups, and friendship parties are often self-sufficient in their social needs. Such self-sufficiency will limit the extent to which they fraternise with fellow travellers or seek out members of the local community for conversation and stimulation. The third consideration pertaining to travelling with others is shared satisfaction with the experience. Unlike individual travellers, those journeying around the world or across their own region with others have a commonality of experience which they can reflect on, retell, and reinterpret as a part of their social and shared experiences. Thornton, Shaw, and Williams (1997) argue that children in particular are discerning customers and because many parents consider the satisfaction of their children to be important in the leisure context, the adult satisfaction may be influenced by the reactions of their offspring. This argument could also be extended, even though the empirical work is lacking, to other satisfaction ratings; one could anticipate that close friends should at least be somewhat influenced by the satisfaction of their travelling companions in forming their own attitudes, whereas long-term partners should demonstrate even more awareness and mutual influence in satisfaction scores. At this point, however, these links remain research propositions rather than established findings
