Aim/Purpose: This paper aims to provide important learning insights for doctoral students, researchers and practitioners who wish to research on sensitive topics with research participants from a significantly different culture from their own. Background: Embarking on doctoral research in different cultural contexts presents challenges for doctoral students, especially when researching a sensitive topic. Methodology: This paper uses an autoethnography as its research methodology. Contribution: This paper extends the literature on doctoral researchers’ experiences of exploring the lived experiences of senior travellers who have faced major life events. Little of the previous literature on the experiences of PhD students has explored the experiences they had while researching on a sensitive topic in a different cultural context to their own. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper presents an autoethnography of my experiences. Findings: This paper presents some critical insights into undertaking research in another culture. Its findings are outlined under the following four themes: (a) Feeling vulnerable, (b) Building rapport, (c) Preparing for the unexpected, and (d) Exploring lived experiences. Recommendations for Practitioners: When conducting sensitive cross-cultural research, understanding researchers’ vulnerabilities, rapport-building and preparing for the unexpected are very important. The use of a visual element is beneficial for the participants in their idea generation process. Visual methods have the potential to capture the lived experiences of participants and enable them to reflect on those. Recommendation for Researchers: Doing cross-cultural sensitive doctoral research poses a number of methodological and practical challenges. It was very important to gain a wider cultural understanding of the country and its people in my cross-cultural doctoral research. To this end, this paper suggests that future doctoral researchers consider volunteering with the community as a way to gain understanding of the research context when preparing to undertake cross-cultural research. Impact on Society: The findings support the importance of cultural sensitivity when doing cross-cultural research. Future Research: Future research could be conducted in a different cultural setting to reveal whether the key themes identified here are universal.

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Within tourism studies, there has been a gap in attempting to understand chronic illness within the context of travel. Researchers examining affective tourism have noted that much of everyday life endeavours to create order through 'ontological security' for individuals. In creating this sense of order, positivity and emotional security are emphasised, while taboo issues such as death, pain and chronic illness are 'bracketed off'. Despite these attempts at bracketing, travel experiences can prompt individuals to reflect on their own mortality, existence and purpose, which in turn may reshape their travel experiences. For senior travellers, chronic illness may be part of their everyday reality, challenging the individual's sense of self, time and relationships with places, things and people. These topics can be challenging for data collection, because such experiences can be hidden, emotion-laden, difficult to articulate or difficult for others to observe.Researchers have noted the methodological challenges with the use of traditional data tools and have turned to creative visual methods to facilitate and gain deeper understandings of participants' experiences of chronic illnesses. We used one creative visual tool, the 'MeBox' method, to study the hidden aspects of chronic illness and to understand the embodied experience of chronic illness in the context of their travel. The 'MeBox' method was created to understand and communicate the participants' multifaceted experience of chronic illness. The 'MeBox' method contributes to tourism scholarship, particularly for sensitive topics, by facilitating the inclusion of participants' voices to capture their affective travel experiences. This method usefully represents the deeper emotionality of tourists' lived experience that may have otherwise remained invisible to others.

Multiple dimensions of our experiences such as visual, embodied and sensory experiences cannot always be easily expressed in words. Traditional qualitative methods may struggle to access these deep-rooted complex and emotional aspects. Tourism scholars have called for innovative methodologies to unravel layers of diverse meaning in phenomena. This article critically reflects on a visual tool called the ‘MeBox’. It was adopted in our study to explore senior travellers’ responses to loss following a major life event. The ‘MeBox’ method enabled participants to express embedded and tacit knowledge to reflect on their lived experiences. We critically review the ‘MeBox’ methodology, and provide practical learnings for scholars who may want to adopt this method as a means to understand lived experiences that are difficult to express in words.

Multiple dimensions of our experiences such as visual, embodied and sensory experiences cannot always be easily expressed in words. Traditional qualitative methods may struggle to access these deep-rooted complex and emotional aspects. Tourism scholars have called for innovative methodologies to unravel layers of diverse meaning in phenomena. This article critically reflects on a visual tool called the ‘MeBox’. It was adopted in our study to explore senior travellers’ responses to loss following a major life event. The ‘MeBox’ method enabled participants to express embedded and tacit knowledge to reflect on their lived experiences. We critically review the ‘MeBox’ methodology, and provide practical learnings for scholars who may want to adopt this method as a means to understand lived experiences that are difficult to express in words.