Understanding tourists’ perceptions of distance: a key to reducing the environmental impacts of tourism mobility

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand how tourists might reduce their travel distances by better understanding their perception and "performance" of distances to destinations. Travel accounts for 75% of tourism's GHG emissions, the majority from flying. Tourist travel distances are growing rapidly, as are emissions, with little evidence of the reductions required to comply with emission reduction targets. This research used discourse analysis of in-depth interviews with Danish tourists to explore how they understand distance. Respondents rarely referred to physical distance (e.g. kilometres), but instead to scales including cost, time and cultural difference to express relative distances. Some distances were seen as "zonal", (e.g. "away from home" or "sun and sea" or winter sports destinations), others "ordinal", having degrees of difference, time or costs to cross. The desire for distance also resulted from links tourists make between physical distance and reaching cultural dissimilarity. Sometimes travel itself was integral with the holiday experience. While cost and time savings were important, the total holiday price was more important than the journey price. Measures are suggested for reducing the distances travelled and changing the modes used, and so reducing environmental impacts, including changing leave allowances, better marketing of nearby destinations with cultural differences, and promoting slow travel.

A darker side of hypermobility

“…Specifically, it has been argued that contemporary societies assign high social value to the consumption of distance, to 'being mobile' (Riber Larsen and Guiver, 2013;Urry, 2007;. Where mobility patterns turn into an object of admiration, they become a signifier of social status and thus a social necessity, shaping what might be termed 'liquid identities', which after Bauman (2007), are defined as social identities increasingly modelled and built on mobilities (Gössling and Stavrinidi, 2015).…”

The challenge of proximity: the (un)attractiveness of near-home tourism destinations

“…Third, ordinal interpretations are discerned (e.g. a place being perceived as 'near' or 'far') (Larsen & Guiver, 2013). These are often relative too, for example, with one destination perceived as 'farther away' than another.…”

“…Importantly, the way these contextualizations are represented in people's experiences can take different, interrelated forms (Larsen & Guiver, 2013). First, distance is a resource and interpreted in terms of the time and financial cost of traversing physical divides.…”

“…It seems unlikely, though, that people will refrain from travel for environmental reasons, as that contradicts the hedonic value of touristic behavior. Moreover, Larsen and Guiver (2013) found that people develop a need for distance, in which travel is functional, as the journey itself becomes important in order to experience difference and 'get away from it all. ' Conversely, and despite (or thanks to) few places remaining unaffected by the powerful effects of commodification (Cole, 2007), a broader social counter-dynamic may emerge characterized by revived attractiveness and importance of local production and consumption (e.g.…”

Construction of Optimal Management Strategies on Energy Saving and Carbon Reduction for Kaohsiung International Airport

“…The relevant factors of management strategy of ES & CR related to the sustainable development have been gathered from the literature in the past five years [5,11,[14][15][16]. Then, the key factors of management strategy of ES & CR were acquiring from expert interviews.…”