Tourist encounters with a “GoPro”: three layers of hike&fly paragliding travels

Abstract

Hike&fly is a recent development in adventure tourism combining cross-country paragliding flights with hiking in remote destinations and is currently under-researched as a relatively new tourism phenomenon. As it highly intersects with media technologies such as the GoPro, the paper explores how this media technology can introduce new ways of studying mobile tourist practices from a more-than-representational perspective. By drawing on work in mobility and media studies, the paper argues that the GoPro does not simply record the subjective viewpoints of the users and their environment but also modifies how users encounter and make sense of destinations. Through challenging the former notion, the paper makes two contributions to tourism geographies: First, the paper provides background – based on preliminary fieldwork – on the recent development of hike&fly paragliding travels and the role of GoPro in the context of adventure tourism. Secondly, it contributes a methodological framework for further studies on tourist encounters with a “GoPro” by proposing a three-layered approach that considers the GoPro’s ability to augment the human body, record a video trace, and generate somatic images.