Abstract
This article focuses on neglected social hospitality dimensions of food and accommodation on family holidays. Holidays signify concentrated periods of family time not only allowing for more shared food experiences but also necessitating more confined living spaces compared to home. A whole-family methodology was used as a critical and holistic approach to understand the holiday experiences of 10 families. Positive and negative memories of hospitality encounters for different family members are illustrated through the emotive concepts of commensality and spatiality highlighting their embodied, visible and interactive aspects. Family meals take on symbolic and publicly celebrated characteristics, whereas shared accommodation space is privately contested. The theoretical implications of the antithetical nature of family hospitality dimensions are further discussed and the family tourism research agenda is further developed.
Highlights
Holidays involve leisure travel away from home for more than one day taken within the context of a family group (Schänzel et al, 2012)
The study has located perceptions and the importance of social hospitality within the totality of the family holiday experience and has found hospitality experiences to be highly significant in relation to major themes of sociality, the sociability of family meals and social tensions arising around personal space
The concept of commensality emphasises the social, emotional and celebratory importance placed on family meals on holiday while the concept of spatiality highlights the contested need for privacy on holiday
Summary
Holidays involve leisure travel away from home for more than one day taken within the context of a family group (at least one child and one adult) (Schänzel et al, 2012). On family holidays, shared meals as commensality experiences can assume highly symbolic celebratory characteristics whereas accommodation spatiality can be contested and impact negatively on experiences and memories. Holidays typically necessitate living in much smaller and more restricted accommodation spaces than at home (Lehto et al, 2012) as well as signifying condensed periods of time with family permitting more frequent and potentially time-rich shared food experiences.
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