Family Tourism

Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Heike A. Schänzel, Ian Yeoman, Elisa Backer, Heike A. Schänzel, Ian Yeoman, Elisa Backer

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781845413293
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Gastgewerbe, Reise- & Tourismusbranche

The family remains at the emotional heart of society, and makes up a significant proportion of the tourism market. However, the concept of family has changed over the decades and there are now different types of families that have their own unique attributes and needs. Families may have one parent or two, who may or may not be of different genders. This cutting-edge book constructs a multidisciplinary perspective on family tourism by discussing various types of families; how parents and children influence travel behaviours now and in the future and how family holidays may also be linked to stress. Family Tourism: Multidisciplinary Perspectives provides a compilation of issues from academic writers around the globe, to provide a range of perspectives linked by a common theme of family tourism with a futures perspective.

1 Introduction: Families in Tourism Research

Why Study Families in Tourism?

Families with dependent children account for just under half of the population and comprise 29% of all households in the UK (Beioley, 2004), which is comparable to other Western countries. In New Zealand, about 26% of the population are under 18 years old and most children are nurtured within the context of the family (Statistics New Zealand, 2006). Families with dependent children (who encompass adolescents as well as babies) thus represent a significant proportion of the population and an important current and future market for the tourism industry. For example, families generate about one in four of all holiday trips made in the UK (Mintel, 2004) and account for 30% of leisure travellers in the USA (Travelhorizons, 2009). Consequently, it is not surprising that the family holiday market has been identified as constituting a major portion of leisure travel around the world (Shaw et al., 2008). Peter Yesawich predicted that family travel (defined as that undertaken by adults, including grandparents, with children) will continue to grow at a faster rate than all other forms of leisure travel, partly because it represents a way to reunite the family and for family members to spend time with each other, away from the demands of work (Yesawich, 2007). Families seem to put a high priority on taking holidays. For many families in the UK an annual holiday is now seen as essential rather than a luxury (Beioley, 2004). The importance placed on the family market within the tourism industry is, however, not reflected in tourism research.

The American humourist Nathaniel Benchley (2001) stated that ‘there are two classes of travel – first class, and with children’, referring to the burdens associated with travelling with children. While research that addresses travel has focused on the ‘first class’ holiday, very little is known about holidays with children, which are deemed to be a more ‘mundane’ and trivial type of tourism (Bærenholdt et al., 2004). In tourism research, the family holiday has been awarded far less attention than it deserves for its overall market share and size. One area of family tourism in which the invisibility of the family is especially disconcerting is coastal mass tourism (Obrador, 2012); the invisibility results partly from the general vilification of mass tourism. Another area where family tourism has been ignored is domestic tourism, despite the predominance of families with children travelling within their own countries. In New Zealand, for example, domestic tourism has generally been the neglected cousin of international tourism (Pearce, 2001) because of the emphasis placed on export earnings. Both of these shortcomings can be linked back to the perception of ordinariness and the taken-for-granted nature of family travel. It is the purpose of this multidisciplinary book to expand in a comprehensive manner our understanding of families who travel with children. It results from the collaboration of international tourism experts and is the first book to disseminate original thinking and research on family tourism from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. The chapters in Part 1 of the book provide some context by looking at the social, demographic and historical trends affecting families and their holiday behaviour before Parts 2 and 3 respectively provide a comprehensive reflection on family holiday experiences now and into the future, from a range of perspectives. A more holistic, multidisciplinary, global and future-orientated approach is taken here to understand family tourism by acknowledging its underlying social dynamics, fluidity and multidimensionality. What emerges is that family tourism is far more complex and noteworthy than has been appreciated.

Definition of Families and Family Holidays

This is a pertinent time for a comprehensive consideration of families in tourism. The concept of the ‘family’ is itself in question. There is recognition of the plurality of family forms, to the effect that many would refer to families rather than to ‘the family’, in that different family members are likely to perceive the composition of their families in different ways (Dumon, 1997; Shaw, 1997). Nevertheless, despite the diversity of family forms, a common denominator is that ‘they all serve as person-supporting networks’ (Dumon, 1997: 181, original emphasis). Defining ‘family’ is not only a complex undertaking for researchers but also a problem that confronts society with new challenges. The concept of relationships and interaction between family members is essential to any notion of family and underlies most literature on family leisure and family tourism. Researching the family holiday must be considered within the context of changing family structures and values, and wider societal trends. In the UK, a family holiday is most commonly defined in the literature and policy as a recreational break of four or more nights away from home (Hazel, 2005). A more widely accepted definition of family holidays is that it involves leisure travel away from home for more than one day undertaken by a family group, itself defined as at least one child and one adult (Schänzel et al., 2005).The adult here can be a parent, legal guardian or caregiver (although in the present work the term ‘parent’ will be used throughout, for the sake of simplicity). These definitions are fairly narrow, in that they are based merely on length of stay and minimum size of the travelling group, and do not take into account the different experiences of children and parents.

Holidays are commonly defined around push motivations that are orientated either towards escape (Iso-Ahola, 1982) or towards a break from routine (Crompton, 1979) but this does not necessarily apply to family holidays. According to Shaw et al. (2008) parents with children differ from other tourists in their strong focus on social values, such as family togetherness, creating family memories and generativity. This indicates a purposive element to family holidaying that involves connections with, rather than escape from, social relations (Larsen et al., 2007). While parents seek togetherness on holiday they may also desire personal space, which can be a source of conflict and requires compromise. Gram (2005) identified an inherent dilemma in family holidays: because parents seek relaxation and children seek activities, the ideal of togetherness is hard to achieve. Gram’s study, however, was largely based on the parental perspective rather than being informed by the individual members of the family. According to Schänzel (2008), who included the voices of all family members, family holidays are primarily about doing activities that are different to normal routines and that involve spending time together ‘with’ the family (including extended family) rather than being an escape or break ‘from’ home routines. They serve a purpose of (re)connecting people, through tourism, and can be seen as a social practice that involves networking, family capital formation and social obligations. Because Schänzel included the voices of children it became evident that fun was an important factor, as evidenced by the comments of an eight-year-old boy: ‘It is not a holiday if it is not fun. If it is fun then it is a holiday’ (Schänzel, 2008). As a result, the following definition of ‘family holidays’, based on the experiences of all family members, was adopted for this book:

A purposive time spent together as a family group (which may include extended family) doing activities different from normal routines that are fun but that may involve compromise and conflict at times.

The Under-representation of Families in Tourism Research

Despite the economic significance of family tourism for the tourism industry, holidays with children have largely been marginalised in academic research (Schänzel et al., 2005). Most tourism research focuses on the individual and emphasises detachment, and so has effectively de-socialised tourist subjects, rendering such approaches unsuitable for research into families (Obrador, 2012). Research has also not kept pace with the change in family forms and structures. This has led to limited, fragmented and individualised research on family holiday experiences. Most family tourism research is market and consumer driven and focused on the themes of decision processes and roles (Lehto et al., 2009), and even here relatively few studies have included children (Blichfeldt et al., 2011; Nickerson & Jurowski, 2001). Some research has been carried out at family-centred tourist attractions (Hallman et al., 2007; Johns & Gyimothy, 2003) and there are historical accounts of family holidaying (Inglis, 2000; Rugh, 2008). A historical development of family tourism in the UK is given in Chapter 4. Specialised studies on the benefits of social tourism coming out of Europe (Hughes, 1991; McCabe et al., 2011; Minnaert et al., 2009) are increasingly identifying the link between tourism for disadvantaged families and increases in family social capital, as discussed in Chapter 7. Families also form an important part of travel for visiting friends and relatives (VFR), which is perpetually underestimated in tourism research (Backer, 2012) and is discussed in Chapter 6.

Also evident is a lack of research into the broader experiential dimensions of family holidays that takes into account the perspectives of all family members and the increasing diversity of family groups. There have been studies of family holiday experiences that are mainly informed by feminist perspectives and thus focused on mothers’ family holiday experiences (Deem, 1996; Small, 2005). There is little published on the holiday experience of fathers, apart from their joint parenting voice (Schänzel & Smith, 2011) and, again, few studies have investigated the family holiday experiences of children (Carr, 2006, 2011; Cullingford, 1995; Hilbrecht et al., 2008; Small, 2008). This is in contrast to a research tradition that is inclusive of children and fathers in related social sciences such as family studies and leisure studies (Daly, 1996b; Jeanes, 2010; Kay, 2009). This means that little is known about children as family tourists and how they can be better attended to. Children are the consumers of tomorrow and their influence on travel decisions and tourism experiences should not be underestimated. This is discussed with regard to marketing to young tourists in Chapter 10. Relatively little attention has been paid to the meaning of family holiday experiences to parents (Blichfeldt, 2006; Shaw et al., 2008). The dearth of research on the family group (Gram, 2005) and on family group dynamics on holiday (Schänzel, 2010) has resulted in a poor understanding of how group dynamics can inflame or heighten the individual holiday experience (Pritchard & Havitz, 2006). This is despite the fact that potentially different generational and gender needs and desires can lead to social tensions and conflicts on holiday, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 5.

As mentioned above, holidays with children are different from other holidays and can involve family group conflicts (Gram, 2005; Schänzel, 2010) and added stresses that require careful family organisation. There is scant literature on the work involved in and the difficulties with facilitating positive family experiences (Shaw, 2008). Even less is known about the stress factors in family holidays, despite the significant influence these can have on overall satisfaction with the holiday experience, as discussed in Chapter 8. Instead, the notion of families spending happy times together on holiday is a persistent marketing image that has long been part of the ‘mythology of tourism’ (Seaton & Tagg, 1995). The image of the happy family on holiday is also largely based on white, middle-class and nuclear families, and does not reflect the growing diversity of family forms. According to Carr (2011), it can be construed that the non-nuclear family is an unhappy family who cannot be together because it does not fit within conceptualisations of the tourism experience as a time of family togetherness. Yet this is clearly erroneous, as demonstrated by the discussion in Chapter 9 of the significant potential of tourism to strengthen and consolidate sexual identities and family relationships for gay and lesbian families. The increasing proportion of people who exist outside the traditional family life cycle in tourism (Bojanic, 1992; Lawson, 1991), such as families with different sexual orientations, is discussed in Chapter 11. It debates whether a model of set stages that people are expected to go through during their life needs updating to reflect societal changes.

Apart from the under-representation of families in tourism research there is also a disconnection between tourism studies and other social sciences concerned with families. This is despite the significant influence that society and dominant ideologies of parenting and childhood can exert on family holiday experiences. Much can be gained from the literature in sociology, family studies and leisure studies (Daly, 2004; Handel et al., 2007; Shaw, 2010) for the deeper understanding of trends and behaviours shaping family tourism experiences, as discussed in Chapter 2. The idealisation of family time in Western societies (Daly, 1996a) and changing gender roles (Harrington, 2006; Shaw, 2008) can then be traced from the home and leisure realms to the holiday realm. While tourism has some unique qualities that may not be found in everyday leisure activities or in the home, such as the ‘notion of departure’ from what is routine (Urry, 1990), this neglects the concept that family tourists’ behaviour is influenced by a combination of socio-cultural and personal values that are present in both t...