?Travelling workers? and ?working tourists?: variations across the interaction between work and tourism

Abstract

Tourism and work are usually perceived as two contradicting fields of human activity. Nevertheless, the study of tourism contains a few references to situations in which work-related and tourist-oriented activities are combined. A review of this narrow and sporadic literature suggests that the interaction between work and tourism, although mentioned in various contexts, has been hardly discussed as a distinct phenomenon. This paper aims to provide a coherent descriptive basis to further the study of this phenomenon by setting up a typology of travellers who combine work-related with tourist-oriented pursuits. Based on their work-related and tourist-oriented motivations, four types of such travellers are depicted: ‘travelling professional workers’; ‘migrant tourism workers’; ‘non-institutionalised working tourists’; and ‘working-holiday tourists’. Whereas members of the two former types of travellers are referred to as ‘travelling workers’, members of the two latter types of travellers were defined as ‘working tourists’. In addition, the typology points to the differences between these types of travellers in terms of their work characteristics and their demographic profile. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.