Female Traveller Research Articles

Research and Design for Hotel Security Experience for Women Traveling Alone

Hotel security has been a main issue for tourism. It is urgent for solo female travelers since more than 50% of women worldwide had travelled alone, and Chinese women take account for 42% of the business travels. Focusing on this issue, the main goal of this study is to study individual female traveler’s experience in terms of sense of security when staying in hotels in China. The study consist of two parts. Firstly, preliminary interviews and questionnaires are used to explore solo female traveler’s perception on hotel security and potential factors influencing such perception. In-depth interviews were adopted to achieve better understanding on the factors. Secondly, future-oriented techniques are adopted to provide directions for design. Main factors and corresponding scenarios are gathered and illustrated using customer journey map. Mirroring approach is then used to flip the problematic customer journey into wishful one from which design opportunities could be extracted. Main outputs include a facial recognition system for elevator, statistical identification system for the number of people entering the room, rescue word alarm system and intelligent door defense system. Subsequent design outcome has won UXPA award, indicating certain utility and value for future development.

Demographic differences in the travel Behaviour: Case Study of regional route in Iraq

Objective: The aim of this work is to the relation between age, and gender and choosing a certain mode of transport to travel between two main Iraqi cites.Methods: a statistical method, T-test, is used to distinguish between these parameters.Data: Infield survey data was collected using questionnaire.Results: the results indicate that passengers are differentiated in terms of age, and gender. For instance1-As age of male traveler increased, participants were more likely to travel by train than other mode of transport.2-As age of female traveler increased, participants were more likely to travel by small vehicles than other mode of transport.

Travel-associated neurological disease terminated in a postmortem diagnosed atypical HSV-1 encephalitis after high-dose steroid therapy \u2013 a case report

BackgroundHuman encephalitis can originate from a variety of different aetiologies, of which infection is the most common one. The diagnostic work-up is specifically challenging in patients with travel history since a broader spectrum of unfamiliar additional infectious agents, e. g. tropical disease pathogens, needs to be considered. Here we present a case of encephalitis of unclear aetiology in a female traveller returning from Africa, who in addition developed an atypical herpes simplex virus (HSV) encephalitis in close temporal relation with high-dose steroid treatment.Case presentationA previously healthy 48-year-old female presented with confusion syndrome and impaired vigilance which had developed during a six-day trip to The Gambia. The condition rapidly worsened to a comatose state. Extensive search for infectious agents including a variety of tropical disease pathogens was unsuccessful. As encephalitic signs persisted despite of calculated antimicrobial and antiviral therapy, high-dose corticosteroids were applied intravenously based on the working diagnosis of an autoimmune encephalitis. The treatment did, however, not improve the patient’s condition. Four days later, bihemispheric signal amplification in the insular and frontobasal cortex was observed on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The intracranial pressure rapidly increased and could not be controlled by conservative treatment. The patient died due to tonsillar herniation 21 days after onset of symptoms. Histological examination of postmortem brain tissue demonstrated a generalized lymphocytic meningoencephalitis. Immunohistochemical reactions against HSV-1/2 indicated an atypical manifestation of herpesviral encephalitis in brain tissue. Moreover, HSV-1 DNA was detected by a next-generation sequencing (NGS) metagenomics approach. Retrospective analysis of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and serum samples revealed HSV-1 DNA only in specimens one day ante mortem.ConclusionsThis case shows that standard high-dose steroid therapy can contribute to or possibly even trigger fulminant cerebral HSV reactivation in a critically ill patient. Thus, even if extensive laboratory diagnostics including wide-ranging search for infectious pathogens has been performed before and remained without results, continuous re-evaluation of potential differential diagnoses especially regarding opportunistic infections or reactivation of latent infections is of utmost importance, particularly if new symptoms occur.

Discovering the Empire: Julija Pranaitytė’s Guidebook to Europe and Asia

The significance of Iš kelionės po Europą ir Aziją (1914), the guidebook by Julija Pranaitytė, a Lithuanian intellectual from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, depended not just on the fact that the author was the first Lithuanian female traveller to comprehensively document the experiences of a modern tourist in the early 20th century, but that the book itself was the first guidebook to the Russian Empire to be published in Lithuanian. The guidebook is an attempt by member of the intelligentsia with strong Catholic views to provide practical information about a modernizing and increasingly mobile world. Thus, the intended target of Pranaitytė book is twofold. Firstly, it is more mobile yet still poorly educated working-class reader who is being constantly warned about possible threads of being fooled or cheated. The reader could find advice in guidebook about things worth having while travelling, how to communicate, and what to expect. The guidebook also provides historical information about places visited, cultural insights, similarities and differences to Western society in such a way the book could be interesting and useful for middle-calls traveler as well. There is also a more general problem relating to the author’s approach to the guidebook: what representations of different cultures and nations did early 20th-century Lithuanians share, and what did these representations mean in the religious, imperial and international contexts of the time? As is often the case in travel literature, history is presented here selectively, taking into account the dominant cultural monologue. It has a clear purpose in Pranaitytė’s guidebook: to spread a vision of the moral and religious superiority of Western and Christian culture. However, having in mind that growing number of workers and middle class were engage in Lithuanian national movement at the beginning of 20th century, this prejudges becomes paradoxical because Empire’s religious and cultural values are shown as cultural foundation for discovering new parts of late Russian Empire.

Instagram As the “Identity Workshop” for Female Travelers

Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms used by societies, with one of the key groups being female travelers. Nowadays, Instagram does not only become a social space, but it is also a space of identity construction, or an “identity workshop”. Traveling is one activity which is often found on women’s Instagram accounts. It is an activity chosen by women to show their personal authority. The purpose of this paper is to understand how female travelers use Instagram as their “identity workshop”. This research analyzes the Instagram account of a female traveler, Claudia Kaunang’s (@claudiakaunang) by applying virtual ethnography methods. Alongside this, the research uses Angela McRobbies’s postfeminist theory which focuses on ‘empowerment’ and ‘choice’. The research findings confirm that a female traveler constructs herself to be what she wants through Instagram.

I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death, by Maggie O’Farrell

The Edinburgh Neurology Book Club had a unique opportunity to explore Maggie O’Farrell’s1 memoirs ‘I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death’ with the author present, which provided...

“Swimming among the Jellyfish”: travel guides, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Rügen

ABSTRACTIn the opening of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen (1904), the protagonist, Elizabeth, comes across Marianne North’s autobiography, Recollections of a Happy Life (1894) and her description of the bathing near Putbus, “a sandy cove where the water was always calm, and of how you floated about on its crystal surface, and beautiful jellyfish, stars of purest colours, floated with you”. This essay examines Arthur Schuster’s Fuhrer durch die Insel Rugen (1902) and Marianne North’s travel autobiography as background to Elizabeth’s Adventures in Rügen (1904) and how the Rügen novel began as a travel account before merging into fiction as the protagonist attempts and fails to write her own travel guide and, in opposition to social conventions for her gender and class, become a female solitary traveller.

La femme voyageuse dans les Héroïdes 10, 12 et 21: lectures intra-ovidiennes

In this paper, the discussion centres on the portrayal of the female traveller in Ovid’s Heroides 10, 12 and 21. Notwithstanding the predominance of travelling narratives in the collection, most letters tend to focus on the description of the heroes’ journeys as passively attested by the abandoned puellae, whereas the epistles of Ariadne, Medea and Cydippe explicitly address the issue of travelling as – also – a feminine activity. The examination of the travel motif will encourage us to review critically the wellestablished and quite restricted perception of women in Ovid’s Heroides as mere elegiac puellae in love. The paper will tackle the recontextualisation of the travel metaphor from the text of two exiled women to Cydippe’s final words – possibly written during Ovid’s relegatio –, to examine the poet’s plea for survival and commemoration.

Gender Role in Saudi Arabian Female High School English Textbooks Traveller 1 and Traveller 2

In an era of rapid and sustainable alterations, Saudi Arabia are now going through transformation in gender roles and opportunities. The current study aimed to investigate the gender roles in the two major English language textbooks widely used by Saudi female high school students, namely Traveller 1 and Traveller 2, which has been taught since 2013. To achieve the study goals, a mixed method was used; Content Analysis and a compiling quantitative data in which the corpus of the two English textbooks were analyzed and frequencies and percentages of gender appearances and activities were also calculated. The major findings of the study are 1) the textbooks contained some obvious gender bias and imbalance; 2) males were predominant whereas females were completely absent or marginalized; 3) females’ pictures and participations in dialogues were very limited; 4) dialogues were largely male-male predominant and were about various topics; 5) males signed to gender roles significantly higher and more aggressive; 6) in contrast, females had weaker roles and never shown as symbolic or even significant social figures.

Traveling as the “Art of Thinking” in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

This article examines Mary Wollstonecraft’s epistolary travelogue Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) in the context of conjectural history. By illustrating how she borrows the methodology of conjectural history to trace the improvement of manners in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, the article analyzes the utopia (or dys -topia) Wollstonecraft imagines based on the social progress she observes during her northern travels. It demonstrates that despite her initial faith in human industry and economic prosperity as the driving forces behind civ ilization, Wollstonecraft later expresses grave reservations about the “future improvement of the world” by drawing attention to the harmful effects that commerce can bring to societies. It suggests that such con cerns largely derive from her status as a female traveler who does not enjoy the privileges of the leisured male traveler and is therefore in a more favorable position to reflect on the conditions of the socially disen franchised such as women and the laboring poor. By exploring how Wollstonecraft’s unstable status leads her to critically examine stadial the ory and use various criteria in assessing a nation’s state of civilization, the article examines how she ultimately envisions the world as a “vast pris on” in her travel narrative, thereby anticipating the pessimistic turn in her political vision and later writings.

Sleep, energy disturbances and pre-competitive stress in female traveller athletes.

Background: Gymnasts of high performance level are submitted to a demanding competitive schedule, which can negatively affect their circadian rhythm, sleep, appetite and pre-competitive stress. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate sleep, body composition, pre-competitive stress and energy in elite female athletes just before a World Cup and potential sleep risks according to the travelled distance by athletes in order to compete.Methods: Sixty-seven rhythmic gymnasts of high performance level were evaluated in order to collect training and competition data, daytime sleepiness (DS) by the Epworth Sleepiness Scale, sleep quality (SQ) by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, precompetitive anxiety by the Sport Competition Anxiety Test-A and dietary intake prior to a World Cup.Results: Gymnasts suffering from severe DS had worse scores in the competition than those who reported normal DS (p=0.004). In addition, gymnasts with severe DS reported reduced SQ (p=0.014) and showed high levels of precompetitive stress (p<0.01). Gymnasts with reduced SQ demonstrated great DS (p=0.014) and high levels of precompetitive stress (p=0.010).Conclusions: Gymnasts demonstrated disordered sleep and precompetitive stress. Athletes who travelled long distances to compete presented high risk for short sleep duration, abnormal DS and reduced SQ.

The Presentation of Gender Identity on Female Travel Blogs

Blogs as a growing online platform came to be seen as a ‘newly ideal’ space for social interaction, identity construction and negotiation. Bloggers became a social actor who showcase and perform their roles and identities online. This paper would attempt to analyse the presentation of gender identities on travel blogs managed and written by female travellers. The research questions raised were “how online technology (travel blogs) become a space for women to perform gender identity online? In performing their identity, how these women may challenge the conception of male domination in “travel world” as presented through their narratives in a travel blog?” Adopting West and Zimmerman’s (1987) concept of doing gender, gender identities would be viewed as something individuals achieve or accomplish through ongoing social interactions (p. 129). The study found that travel blogs have become a space for female travellers to express and extend their identities online. Female identity presented in travel blogs substantially informs the traditionally exclusion of women in travel world. As has also been elaborated, travelling itself can be understood as a gendered phenomenon. Since traveling is gendered, perception of being on the road and the roles played by male and female traveller is different.

Cosmopolitanism, colonial shopping, and the servant problem: nurse Ida E. Cliffe’s travels in wartime India

ABSTRACTIda E. Cliffe was posted in India as a nurse during the First World War. In a travel memoir published sixty years later, she captures her extensive travels across wartime colonial India. Her travel diary combines two distinct positions – that of the woman-coloniser recording her travel in the colonies, and that of the nurse in a war-zone. It focuses on the British coloniser’s home-life in India, the picturesque landscape of the country, the cosmopolitanism of its people, and its recent history. This article explores the problematic nuances in Cliffe’s celebration of colonial cosmopolitanism, her shopping for colonial artefacts and her appreciation of the picturesque embedded within the subtext of pride in British imperialism. It demonstrates not only the complexities in the figure of the female imperial traveller, but also the heteroglossia in the genre of women’s travel writing.

Women solo travellers: motivations and experiences

Introduction: The concept of female solo traveler, despite recent, has become a relevant tourist segment. As tourists, these women are looking for journeys that bring more than a trip from one place to another. They choose to go alone in the pursuit of adventure, independence, feeling of personal fulfillment, individuality and escape. They do not travel alone because they have no choice or because they are loners. They are driven by specific and consciousness motivations.Objective: In this conceptual work, a set of solo travel motivations are categorize based on literature review, to identify why women, choose to travel alone. The focus of this article is to explore the relationship between these motivations with women solo travel experiences providing a conceptual model.Methods: An extensive literature review focusing on the concept of tourism motivations and experiences provide a framework that allows assesses the specific motivations that driven women into travel alone and the corresponding solo traveler experience dimensions. The multi-dimension scales considers eight motivations dimensions: (1) escape, (2) self-identity and development, (3) challenge, (4) connectedness with others, (5) learning, (6) adventure, (7) new life perspectives, and (8) autonomy; and five experience dimensions: (1) sense, (2) feel, (3) think, (4) act, and (5) relate based on Schmitt’ model tourism experience (Schmitt, 1999).Results: Despite an extensive literature review, there are few studies based on experiences and motivations of women solo travelers.Conclusions: Even if it is a market that has not been very explored and studied has gained numerous supporters around the world, translating into an expressive impact not only in sociological terms, but also in its tourist experience.

De la Bourgogne à la Syrie, et retour : Orientalisme et régionalisme dans l’œuvre d’Alice Poulleau

This article concentrates on the work of Alice Poulleau, a young female traveller from the beginning of 20th century who defended the freedom of peoples to self-determination and who developed a critical view of Western actions. The study, which focuses on the writer’s travel journal À Damas sous les bombes, her Eastern stories Sept histoires de Syrie and La Madone, as well as her Burgundy stories Pur jus : Faicts et dicts de biberons de Borgoingne, analyses the place of the traveller’s experience at the heart of her fiction and examines the tangible link between the writer’s place of origin (Burgundy) and the East of her travels.

Quasispecies composition and evolution of a typical Zika virus clinical isolate from Suriname

The arthropod-borne Zika virus (ZIKV) is currently causing a major international public health threat in the Americas. This study describes the isolation of ZIKV from the plasma of a 29-year-old female traveler that developed typical symptoms, like rash, fever and headache upon return from Suriname. The complete genome sequence including the 5′ and 3′ untranslated regions was determined and phylogenetic analysis showed the isolate clustering within the Asian lineage, close to other viruses that have recently been isolated in the Americas. In addition, the viral quasispecies composition was analyzed by single molecule real time sequencing, which suggested a mutation frequency of 1.4 × 10−4 for this ZIKV isolate. Continued passaging of the virus in cell culture led to the selection of variants with mutations in NS1 and the E protein. The latter might influence virus binding to cell surface heparan sulfate.

Isolation of Zika Virus Imported from Tonga into Australia.

Introduction: The globally emergent Zika virus (ZIKV) is a threat to Australia, given the number of imported cases from epidemic regions and the presence of competent mosquito vectors. We report the isolation of ZIKV from a female traveler who recently returned from Tonga to Brisbane, Queensland, Australia in 2016.Methods: A specific TaqMan real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction assay (RT-PCR) assay was used to detect ZIKV in serum and urine samples. Conventional cell culture techniques and suckling mice were employed in an attempt to isolate ZIKV from serum and urine.Results: A ZIKV isolate (TS17-2016) was recovered from the serum sample after one passage in suckling mouse brains and harvested 11 days post inoculation. Phylogenetic analysis of complete envelope (E) gene sequences demonstrated TS17-2016 shared 99.9% nucleotide identity with other contemporary sequences from Tonga 2016, Brazil 2015 and French Polynesia 2013 within the Asian lineage.Discussion: This is the first known report of successful isolation of ZIKV from a human clinical sample in Australia and the first from a traveler from Tonga. This study highlights the potential difficulties in isolating ZIKV from acute clinical samples using conventional cell culture techniques, particularly in non-endemic countries like Australia where access to samples of sufficient viral load is limited. The successful isolation of TS17-2016 will be essential for continued investigations of ZIKV transmission and pathogenicity and will enable the advancement of new preventative control measures extremely relevant to the Australian and Pacific region.

Travel medicine and mHealth technology: a study using smartphones to collect health data during travel.

mHealth methodology such as smartphone applications offers new opportunities to capture the full range of health risks during travel in real time. Our study aims to widen the scope of travel health research in tropical and subtropical destinations by using a smartphone application to collect detailed information on health behaviours, clinical symptoms, accidents and environmental factors during travel. We enrolled travel clinic clients in Zurich and Basel ≥18 years of age travelling to Thailand for <5 weeks. Sociodemographic, clinical and risk behaviour information was collected pre-travel. Participants were equipped with a smartphone and an application that (1) actively administers a daily self-report questionnaire on the health risks, behaviours and symptoms the traveller encountered, and (2) passively collects information on the traveller's location and environmental conditions by transformation of raw GPS data. A prospective cohort of 101 travellers planning travel to Thailand between January and June 2015 was recruited. Of the 101 enrolled travellers, 75 (74.3%) answered at least one questionnaire during travel, 10 (9.9%) had technical difficulties and 16 (15.8%) dropped out. Those who completed questionnaires were a median of 27.0years old (range 18-57). Travellers filled out a median of 12.0 questionnaires during their trip (range 1-30), corresponding to a median completion rate of 85.0% days of travel. The typical example of a healthy female traveller shows that many and diverse health issues arise during a trip that clusters on certain days. The rich data on behaviour and local environment may be used to explain the occurrence and clustering of health issues. Use of a smartphone app to collect health information is technically feasible and acceptable amongst a traveller population, minimizes recall bias and greatly increases the quality and quantity of data collected during travel. mHealth technology shows great potential for innovation in travel medicine.

Dengue virus infection in a French traveller to the hilly region of Nepal in 2015: a case report.

BackgroundDengue viral infections are known to pose a significant risk during travel to tropical regions, but it is surprising to find dengue transmission in the hilly region of Nepal, which is over 1800mtr above sea level.Case presentationA 43-year-old Caucasian female traveler from France presented with fever and abdominal pain following a diarrheal illness while visiting the central hilly region of Nepal. Over the course of 9 days, she developed fever, body aches, and joint pain, with hemorrhagic manifestation. She was hospitalized in India and treated with supportive care, with daily monitoring of her platelets. An assessment by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay showed that she was positive for dengue non-structural protein 1. Upon her return to France, dengue virus was confirmed by reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction.ConclusionThe district where this dengue case was reported is in the hilly region of Nepal, neighboring the capital city Kathmandu. To the best of our knowledge, there has previously been no dengue cases reported from the district. This study is important because it aims to establish a potential region of dengue virus circulation not only in the tropics, but also in the subtropics as well, which in Nepal may exceed elevations of 1800mtr. This recent case report has raised alarm among concerned health personnel, researchers, and organizations that this infectious disease is now on the way to becoming established in a temperate climate.

Footloose in Tasmania: Patsy Adam-Smith and middlebrow travel writing, 1950–1973

In her loose collection of travel stories, Footloose in Australia (1973), Patsy Adam-Smith writes that Tasmanians bear little relationship to Australians: “Their folk culture is different, their struggles have been different; their pace, outlook, and environment are so different that they are a separate people, as tough and tenacious as the ‘mainlanders' […] but different” (32). This essay examines Adam-Smith's Tasmanian travel stories, many of which were printed in the influential magazine Walkabout. It situates Adam-Smith's stories in relation to the field of middlebrow writing and its wide sphere of influence at the time of Walkabout’s run (1934–1974), drawing from her Walkabout articles, travel books and two volumes of autobiography. An examination of Adam-Smith's travel writing raises questions of gender and spatiality. While Adam-Smith boldly asserted her presence in marginalised space as a female traveller, her texts demonstrate the unstable discursive position occupied by women in mid-twentieth-century Australia. This essay considers how Adam-Smith's movement beyond the private (and feminised) space of the home reflects and challenges predominantly masculine performances of space.