Unravelling Travelling: Uncovering Tourist Emotions Through Autoethnography

The Tourist Experience is complex, intrinsically personal, and highly emotional. Consequently, it is not easy to understand what it is that drives us to continue to travel, and to return to places visited. It is important for all sides of the travel, tourism, and hospitality industries to understand what tourists are searching for as well as what they experience, with emotions playing a central role.

The research outlined in Unravelling Travelling: Uncovering Tourist Emotions through Autoethnography delves into the deep, personal, and very subjective emotions experienced while travelling to foreign places. Taking an autoethnographic approach, this evocative, reflexive, critical and analytical study uncovers a range of personal emotional drivers that resonate across disciplinary boundaries.

Examining the development of autoethnography in the social sciences, where the researchers often expose deeply personal experiences that cannot be directly interpreted from an outsider’s perspective, Unravelling Travelling offers an in-depth commentary on the role of autoethnography in the tourism field. This personal account from author Sue Beeton goes beyond simple memoir, exposing the practices of researcher, as well as the methodology employed. Personal travel narratives and poems not only uncover emotions that may not be evident through other research approaches, but also by being highly critical of her own work, Beeton argues the case for and against autoethnography itself.

Sue Beeton is a tourism researcher and Visiting Professor at Hokkaido University, and for over 25 years has conducted tourism-based research into community development and public land management, along with film-induced tourism and pop culture. In 2019 Prof. Beeton was awarded the TTRA Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to tourism research and scholarship.