Missing the Boat? A Playfully Serious Look at a Group Cruise Tour Experience

Abstract

This manuscript fuses play, repeat behavior, and cruise tourism. First, I used a play lens to focus on an overlooked segment of the travel industry—mass cruise tourism. Second, I shifted the conceptual emphasis from the individual tourist to an exploration of why many members of a group cruise tour keep repeating the same experience. Third, in addressing the criticisms that most conceptualizations of tourism gloss over much of what is really going on for most people during the tourism process and empirical data on play are limited, I undertook a participant observation study of an annual group cruise tour. I used a dialectical approach to capture the complexities of cruise tourism behavior.