Sorrow, Security and Stress: The Flipside of the 3 'S's of Tourist Experiences

Abstract

Tourists' subjective negotiation of meanings and their active construction of the experience are being increasingly acknowledged in the tourism literature (Edensor, 2000; McIntosh and Prentice, 1999; Richards and Wilson, 2005; Selby, 2004). This paper focuses on subjective experiences in tourism, aiming to proffer a more holistic perspective to the popularised framing and classification of tourist experiences that often fail to capture the qualitative and personal nature of travel. Here we seek to challenge the conventional three 'S's: the sun, sea and sand model (Aguilo et al., 2005) of mass tourism, by offering the three alternative 'S's of sorrow, security and stress to showcase the personal subtleties of tourist's experiences. Three scenarios are offered to provide simple illustrations of the experiences of actual tourists and hosts during times of critical personal life events. Our key argument is that by taking a holistic and qualitative perspective of tourist's experiences, we will move beyond narrow and limiting frameworks, developing and building theory to gain a more realistic and inductive understanding of people's experiences in the context of tourism.