Responsible tourists in the time of Covid-19?

Abstract

COVID-19 effectively stopped tourism mobilities for a time. Theoretically, this qualitative study draws on the notion of responsibility, as in responsibility to act and responsibility to Otherness. We explore how, during the pandemic, Norwegian tourists dealt with infection preventive measures, how they changed travel habits and how the pandemic transformed their thinking on tourism and climate change. The tourists were loyal citizens adhering to the authorities’ measures and refrained from international holidays, thereby taking responsibility for the governmentally enforced dugnad (collective efforts). This temporal change in travel habits, however, was not expected to become the new normal, as warmer, southern destinations were still desired. Culturally embedded neoliberal values of freedom of movement were, for most of these tourists, stronger than the threat of climate crisis. Fatalistically, we conclude that COVID-19 did not have the power to transform their mind-sets regarding responsible tourism futures and free them from neoliberal shackles.

Performativities, pandemic pressures and ‘patchwork’ tourism places: Editor-in-Chief notes

“…They built on Tourist Studies' existing efforts at understanding the viral pandemic and its aftermath and how tourism can proceed during or emerge after COVID-19 (see e.g. Duffy and Mair, 2021;Gibson, 2021;Heimtun and Viken, 2023;Ong et al, 2023). For instance, Duffy and Mair (2021) chart the course for festival research and identified how festivals will remain relevant in post-viral times and how their resilience is bound up with their everydayness and mundaneness.…”

“…For instance, Duffy and Mair (2021) chart the course for festival research and identified how festivals will remain relevant in post-viral times and how their resilience is bound up with their everydayness and mundaneness. Heimtun and Viken (2023) discuss the ways in which Norwegian tourists made sense of infection preventive measures and the ways in which they changed travel habits and whether, with the enforced non-travel during pandemic times, the pandemic transformed their thinking on tourism and climate change. They conclude pessimistically that the heightened awareness during their non-travel and travel pause in pandemic times is not sufficient to overcome the modern tourism consumptive system driven by neoliberal ideals of freedom of movements.…”

Editors-in-Chief Notes, June issue, 2023

“…The question of which values propel tourism and travel desires is also raised in the second article, “Responsible Tourism in the Time of COVID-19?” by Bente Heimtum and Arvid Viken (2023). They examine the issue of ethics and responsibility in their pandemic-situated field research with middle-aged and older domestic Norwegian tourists who are responsible citizens within a strong welfare state yet cannot foresee changing their travel habits post-pandemic, despite climate change awareness.…”

“…Griffiths (2015) argues, affect theory and method allowed him to feel and sense how the affective world of volunteer tourists in India “generates other ways of knowing outside of neoliberalized imaginaries of development” (p. 217). The sense of hope, or fatalism, in Heimtum and Viken’s article (2023) or pragmatics about tourism futures has also been taken up in articles on climate change and travel ethics. Hales and Caton (2017) query the reasons why hypermobile travelers continue to fly places when environmentalism is important to them.…”

“…Finally, the fourth article, written by one of us (Susan) and student research assistant Celeste Macevicius, (Frohlick and Macevicius, 2023: 151), shares several concerns with works in this and prior issues, namely to do with touristic desires for particular environments—desires that are rooted in elitism and wealth-oriented access to such environments regarded as “inclusive” or “just is.” While Norwegian middle-class middle-aged tourists sought places of safety and sanitation that complied with normalized national and international measures of public health (Heimtum and Viken, 2023) and American tourists in Lisbon sought the kinds of restaurants that oozed with naturalized “authentic” Portuguese culture (Carvalho et al 2023), the tourists we write about in our critical media analysis want incontrovertible silence in the nature and wellness tourism spaces they can afford to pay for. In “Listening Otherwise: From ‘Silent Tourism’ Soundscapes to Privileged Sonic Ways of Knowing” we try as privileged white settler tourists to engage with the taken-for-granted silences represented in western media in a relational approach to sound and sonic atmospheres rather than distance ourselves from them.…”