Settled Tourists: Second Homes as a Part of Tourist Life Stories

Abstract

In a society of mobile life-styles, tourism has been fundamentally connected to the idea of being on the move without any firm attachment to any one place. However, it seems that being a tourist may often involve seeking a close relationship with one specific place or region, and wanting to ''go steady'' with that place or region. Thus, visitors may over time transcend their typical positions and make a place or a region their regular haunt or even ''home''. The question posed in the paper is how do people become so attached to their tourist destinations that they eventually want to buy a second home or even move to such a location? The article also discusses the changes in second-home traditions from simple summer cottages to fully-equipped second homes and time-shares situated in regions with which the owners have no social connections, but which have beautiful landscapes and other amenity values. Based on life-story narratives of Finnish second-home owners, who mainly got their first contact with the region as tourists, the results show that tourist experiences can be cumulative in a person's life course and place attachment and the sense of home develop in the course of many visits to same place.

Second home mobility in Finland: Patterns, practices and relations of leisure oriented mobile lifestyle

“…As was discussed earlier, metropolitan dwellers are ready to travel longer trips to rural second homes. Furthermore, the urban dwellers increasingly purchase second and even third homes in the tourist resorts of Lapland (Tuulentie 2007). A quarter (24%) of all HbH Study respondents had access to two second homes and 5% even to three.…”

‘A solid partner in a fluid world’ and/or ‘line of flight’? Interpreting second homes in the era of mobilities

“…However, it is now imagined as distributed across space-time rather than essentially orientated towards and around a single point. Thus, home can embrace rather than negate mobility (Quinn 2004;Tuulentie 2007). It is a manifestation of how 'places are .…”

“…Metaphors of 'movement, mobility and contingent ordering' need to replace those of 'stasis, structure and social order' within a 'sociology beyond societies' (Urry 2000, 18; see also Miller 2008). A resultant 'new mobilities paradigm' Urry 2007) challenges first the predominant 'sedentarist' tradition within social science (Cresswell 2006) or 'the place-fixated paradigm of the modern age' (Rolshoven 2007, 21). This rests on the essentialist assumption that boundedness and authenticity-in-place are foundational to human life.…”

“…. the primary home of meaning' (Williams & Van Patten 2006, 38), people may be increasingly seeking out second homes to 'complete' their sense of both self and home (Tuulentie 2007). Thus, the second home forms a key node within the dynamic heterolocalist 'geographically extended network of social relations and .…”

Progress in Tourism Management: From the geography of tourism to geographies of tourism – A review

“…'Without such an approach… we are forever doomed to see tourism's effects only at the destination scale rather than as part of a broader understanding of mobility' (Hall 2008: 15). Indeed, Hall (Duval 2002(Duval , 2003, retirement migration Gustafson 2002), student migration (King and Ruiz-Gelices 2003), second homes (Müller 2002a(Müller , 2002b(Müller , 2002c(Müller , 2004(Müller , 2006Müller and Hall 2003;Hall and Müller 2004;McIntyre et al 2006;Visser 2006;Tuulentie 2007), and human mobility over the lifecourse (Hall 2005b;Frändberg 2006). In addition, the empirical research on mobility has been aided by developments in tracking technology and spatial information systems that can provide a powerful analysis of patterns of individual mobility (e.g.…”