Slow travel: issues for tourism and climate change

Abstract

This paper analyses the eclectic evolution of slow travel, examines key features and interpretations, and develops a slow travel framework as an alternative way of conceptualising holidays in the future. The paper focuses on slow travel's potential to respond to the challenges of climatic change: travel currently accounts for 50–97.5% of the overall emissions impact of most tourism trips. In-depth interviews with self-identified slow travellers illustrate and underpin the concept and note that slow travellers form a continuum from “soft” to “hard” slow travellers. The paper explores time as a social institution, timeless time and fragmented time, travel as an integral part of the tourist experience, and the links between tourism and the travellers’ self-identity and lifestyles. Special attention is given to people and place engagement, to behavioural choice and decision-making psychology, and to the role and growth of web communities. Slow travel is shown to require both holiday type/style choices and travel mode choices. Walking, cycling, travel using bus, coach and train all facilitate slow travel, while air and car travel do not. Slow travel prompts a reassessment of how tourism interfaces with transport.