Abstract
The article examines notions of family holidays in the marketing of family adventure travel, a small but growing segment of the alternative tourism sector in Sweden. In family adventure travel, the family vacation is oriented toward exotic destinations in the Global South. The analysis is conducted through a multimodal discourse analysis of web-based marketing material from seven Swedish travel agencies. It shows that the travel style of family adventure travel is constructed through a novel discourse, filled with overlapping meanings of family life, authenticity, and adventure. The article offers a unique approach to family tourism research by theorizing family adventure travel from a post-colonial perspective. It demonstrates how family adventure travel entails a colonial continuity, where notions of exploring and discovering the world become reproduced and re-negotiated in the context of family tourism. In the marketing of family adventure travel, the family vacation is reimagined as a journey of discovery.
Highlights
This article explores notions of family holidays in the marketing of family adventure travel, a tourist niche that is previously unresearched in family tourism research
The family-oriented journeys are offered as pre-arranged group tours by small-scale, personalized travel companies, and meet the demands of middle-class travel-enthusiasts (Harrison, 2003). They are explicitly marketed in terms of authenticity and adventure, with marketing materials that call on families to embark on an adventure together: “Let yourselves explore and discover the world together!” Like other travel arrangements in this segment of the Swedish travel industry, the journeys are oriented toward exotic destinations outside the Western cultural sphere and are marketed with a focus on cultural differences, exoticism, and the uniqueness of place (Grinell, 2004; Mattsson, 2016a)
The article demonstrates how family adventure travel is marketed through a new discourse of family tourism, which renegotiates the concept of family vacation through narratives of adventures and notions of authentic travel experiences
Summary
This article explores notions of family holidays in the marketing of family adventure travel, a tourist niche that is previously unresearched in family tourism research. The family-oriented journeys are offered as pre-arranged group tours by small-scale, personalized travel companies, and meet the demands of middle-class travel-enthusiasts (Harrison, 2003). They are explicitly marketed in terms of authenticity and adventure, with marketing materials that call on families to embark on an adventure together: “Let yourselves explore and discover the world together!” Like other travel arrangements in this segment of the Swedish travel industry, the journeys are oriented toward exotic destinations outside the Western cultural sphere and are marketed with a focus on cultural differences, exoticism, and the uniqueness of place (Grinell, 2004; Mattsson, 2016a). The concept of “colonial continuity” (Hebron, 2007) is proposed to be a fruitful concept for a detailed analysis of how the marketing of family adventure travel reproduce and renegotiate colonial forms of exploring and discovering the world
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