impacts of backpacker tourism

Backpacking’s future and its drifter past

Journal of Tourism Futures

ISSN : 2055-5911

Article publication date: 8 October 2018

Issue publication date: 21 November 2018

The purpose of this paper is to deconstruct the backpacker label by reconstructing it using the historical antecedent of drifting. Following the deconstruction of backpacking’s near past, the author build a clearer conceptual foundation for backpacking’s future.

Design/methodology/approach

The study is framed by scenario planning, which demands a critical review of the backpacking and an appreciation of its history in order to understand its future.

Backpacking, ever evolving, remains difficult to articulate and challenges researchers to “keep up” with its complexity and heterogeneity. This paper argues that researchers must learn more about how backpacking “works” by opening a dialogue with its past, before engaging in further research. The paper finds that a poor conceptualisation of backpacking has led to a codification of backpacker criteria.

Practical implications

Backpacking remains a research topic which draws disparate researchers using criteria that produces disparate results and deviations. By understanding its past, researchers will be better placed to explore the emancipatory impulses that drive backpackers today and in the future.

Originality/value

This papers’ value lies in the retrospection process which explores backpacking’s near past so as to “make sense” of present research and present scenarios for it is the immediate future. The paper re-anchors backpacking by investigating the major historical, social and cultural events leading up to its emergence.

• Scenario planning
• Backpackers
• Backpacking
• Tourism futures
• Tourism history

O’ Regan, M. (2018), "Backpacking’s future and its drifter past", Journal of Tourism Futures , Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 193-204. https://doi.org/10.1108/JTF-04-2018-0019

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2018, Michael O’ Regan

Published in Journal of Tourism Futures . Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

1. Introduction

Backpacking as an “alternative” form/type of tourism generates a distinct way of “being-in-the-world” as individuals characterised by extensive spatial mobility and time and space flexibility travel for up to one year or more on routes that span the globe ( Berdychevsky et al. , 2013 ). There has been a rapid increase in their visibility as a distinct form of tourism. From books to movies, the media is now flush with “backpacking” related images, films, fiction, oral histories, documentaries, reality television shows and soap operas ( O’Regan, 2016 ). However, as a label or category, “backpacker” and “backpacking” can generate a surprising amount of debate. From the scholars who contest the conflicting claims to its origin ( Loker-Murphy and Pearce, 1995 ), the entrepreneurs who seek to extend it as a label ( Bell, 2008 ), to the backpackers who wish to distance themselves from it ( O’Regan, 2016 ); there is little agreement as to the nature of backpacking homogeneity or heterogeneity, its past or its future. This paper argues that backpacker research in the social sciences has stalled as form-related attributes have become fixed defining criteria for manipulative hypotheses stated in advance in propositional form and subjected to flawed empirical tests.

The purpose of this paper is to deconstruct the backpacker label through a past-to-future scenario planning perspective. This approach includes exploring current “backpacker” research through a critical lens, deconstructing backpacking’s “drifter past”, and rebuilding a new conceptual foundation for the future. As thinking about future scenarios requires an accurate appreciation of history in order to understand the future ( Yeoman, 2008 ), this paper explores drifting, which has symbolic, cultural, structural and historic continuity with backpacking, and is seen as the most direct precursor of backpacking ( Hannam and Diekmann, 2010 ; Sørensen, 2003 ).

2. Backpacker research: disparities and incongruities

There is some contestation as to where the backpacker label originated ( Slaughter, 2004 ). While first noted at an academic conference by Pearce (1990) , it was already a internal-external dialectic of identification ( Jenkins, 1996 ) in the early 1980s, with Smith (1992) noting its use by Boracayans in the Philippines in 1985. Whatever its origins, the external identification of “backpacker” became an internal identification used by those who shared an identity based on their form of travel as well as a marketing concept used by business. After Pearce (1990) utilised a quiz/questionnaire inserted in the free Aussie Backpacker magazine during 1989 (596 questionnaires), he found backpackers to be predominantly young, on an extended holiday, with a preference for budget accommodation. He found they had a flexible and informal travel itinerary and placed an emphasis on meeting people and participating in a range of activities. Loker-Murphy and Pearce (1995) built on this, by administering a questionnaire and drawing on data from the annual visitor survey conducted at Australia’s major international airports. They extracted data from those aged between 15 and 29 years of age, with holiday as main purpose of trip, a duration of stay of four weeks or more to confirm the 1990 criteria. The findings met the demand by authorities and businesses in Australia for an internationally accepted, comprehensive definition ( Wallace, 1991 ). Subsequent research based on the criteria produced by Loker-Murphy and Pearce (1995) and others confirmed backpackers extended travel, a tendency towards low spending and interaction with other travellers ( Hecht and Martin, 2006 ; Murphy, 2001 ; Riley, 1988 ).

Whilst other labels have been applied to these travellers included “youth travelers” ( Adler, 1985 ), “free independent travellers” ( Clarke, 2004 ), “long-term budget travelers” ( Riley, 1988 ), “non-institutionalised tourists” ( Uriely et al. , 2002 ), “non-tourists” ( Tucker, 2003 ), “budget tourist/economy tourists” ( Elsrud, 2001 ) and “anti-tourists” ( Maoz, 2007 ), the “backpacker” label has become dominant ( Elsrud, 2001 ; Hampton, 1998 ; Pearce, 1990 ; Scheyvens, 2002 ; Smith, 1992 ; Uriely et al. , 2002 ). This has made the category legible for researchers, its use instrumental in researching the demographic and social background of backpackers. They were cast as a distinct “category” of tourism that is seen as categorically different from mass tourism or “institutionalized” tourism flows ( Sørensen, 2003 ). Backpackers continue to attract attention in sociological, anthropological and psychological research, based on the priori-assumption that not researching difference is “dangerous”, “since it will surely result in at least some of these visitors being dissatisfied or not particularly well catered for” ( Loker-Murphy, 1997 , p. 25). While a shift from unifying depictions of the backpacker as a general type “toward an approach that stresses its diverse and plural characteristics” ( Uriely, 2005 , p. 205) is welcome, research have primarily utilized the criteria developed by Pearce (1990) to analyse backpacker homogeneity/heterogeneity in terms of nationality, motivation and gender ( Hampton, 1998 ; Elsrud, 2001 ; Maoz, 2007 ; Murphy, 2001 ; Noy, 2004 ).

Codification of criteria is used to know the “proper” location, ages and characteristics of backpackers and “proper” backpacker practices. Utilising form related criteria, such as age, luggage type, accommodation usage, etc., backpackers are placed in a controlled context so as to observe, measure and quantify them. For example, researchers now indicate the minimum length of travel time backpackers must be “on the road for”, with researchers often drawing samples from those staying in hostels ( Hecht and Martin, 2006 ; Hughes et al. , 2009 ; Pearce and Foster, 2007 ; Thyne et al. , 2004 ). Larsen et al. (2011) used a hostel stay as a criterion to identify backpackers as other researchers identify a backpacker as spending at least one night in a hostel or backpacker accommodation. Other studies link their research to usage of particular internet groups and sites online ( Luo et al. , 2015 ; Paris, 2012 ) and even their use of a backpack ( Chen et al. , 2014 ; Pearce and Foster, 2007 ). Research risks missing the evolving nature of backpacking as researchers search for niches, taxonomies, segments or typologies.

Codification of criteria does have benefits. Backpacker research originates across different disciplines such as medicine, management and business studies, economics and sociology. The global scale of backpacking research demands exchange of knowledge between geographically dispersed researchers. Codification allowed the backpacker phenomenon and the backpacker label to become a worldwide term of description and made it possible to talk of a developing transnational socio-spatial sub-lifestyle. However, codification has also produced contradictory classifications, typologies, clusters, taxonomies and segments as deviations from criteria are not unusual. There has been a recent trend to focus on deviations from the “standardized” backpacker characteristics, with researchers finding cohorts of “humanistic backpackers” ( Uriely et al. , 2002 ), “holiday hippies” ( Westerhausen, 2002 ), “conformist backpackers” ( Hottola, 2008 ), “flashpackers” ( Paris, 2012 ), the “Backpacker Plus” ( Cochrane, 2005 ), “backpacker tourists” ( Bell, 2005 ), “youth train backpackers” ( Bae and Chick, 2016 ) and “study backpackers” ( Jarvis and Peel, 2005 ). Those revealed as deviating from these criteria are exposed either as a new type of backpacker with specific type-related attributes or deviants/non backpackers like “begpackers” ( Saidi, 2018 ), whom Cohen (1972, 1973) should have approved!

Backpacking research has been largely disconnected from its near past as backpacking is perceived to have become institutionalized and retrenched through a combination of touristic, educational and economic discourses ( Cohen, 2003 ). The backpacker label has become so unrooted that it has become redundant for increasing numbers of researchers who label all “budget travellers” ( Larsen et al. , 2011 ) as backpackers, “gap year” travellers as backpackers ( O’Reilly, 2006 ), “youth students” ( Richards, 2015 ) as backpackers and those on working visas as backpackers ( Allon, 2004 ). There has also been a trend in applying macro-level concepts and trends to backpackers such as sustainability, service quality, authenticity and loyalty ( Brochado et al. , 2015 ; Iaquinto, 2015 ). Finally, as backpacking has progressively widened its sociocultural base by drawing adherents from Asia, Africa and South America, researchers have disregarded the particular historical backgrounds in which drifting and backpacking emerged in the west, and have applied western concepts of backpacking to other nationalities such as Chinese backpackers ( Chen et al. , 2014 ).

Pearce (1990) , however, had recognised that the emergence of backpacking was partially because of the “marginal” behaviour of the “hippie/drifter” type during the 1960s and 1970s, with Eric Cohen’s (1972, 1973) conceptualization of “drifters” the conceptual basis for early backpacker research. Cohen (2004 , p. 44) himself noted that “If the model for the drifter was the tramp, the drifter is the model for the backpacker”. However, many scholars argue that backpacker identifies are too far (re)constructed by the (social) media and the tourism industry to be linked with drifting ( Molz and Paris, 2015 ). They argue that any unconventional elements have stripped away, with resold backpacking as a touristic pursuit. The shift from the “drifter” to the “backpacker” label has come to be seen as a disjuncture ( Elsrud, 2001 ; Sørensen, 2003 ), creating a break with backpackers past and future. This paper applies scenario planning to reconceptualise backpacking’s past, so as to reconceptualise backpacking to account for backpacking today and in the future.

3. Methodology

The disparities, incongruities and deviations in backpacker research demand a retrospective look at backpacking’s near past. Scenario planning has been used by businesses, academics and government agencies for strategic futures planning since the 1950s ( Bradfield et al. , 2005 ). Given the subjective, personalised and heuristic nature of scenario planning, it is thought to leave “many academics uncomfortable” ( Schoemaker, 2004 ). This discomfort may deter academics from subjecting a topic to scholarly scrutiny. However, scenario planning can be useful to academics, since the process may act as a cognitive aid to overcome limitations and framing biases ( Page et al. , 2010 ; Yeoman, 2008 ). It may lead academics to update their judgment, and induce changes in their thinking. More than simply predicting future backpacking scenarios, the paper challenges current assumptions about backpacking and casts a critical eye on backpacker research.

4. The drifters

[…] make it wholly on his own, living with the people and often taking odd-jobs to keep himself going. He tries to live the way the people he visits live […] The drifter has no fixed itinerary timetable and no well-defined goals of travel. He is almost wholly immersed in his host culture.

The drifter was described as the complete opposite of the mass tourist ( Cohen, 1972 ). The drifter is “individualistic”, “disdainful of ideologies”, “un-patriotic”, “hedonistic” and “anarchistic” ( Cohen, 1973 ) and shunned “any kind of connection with the tourist establishment, and considers the ordinary tourist experience phony” ( Cohen, 1972 , p.168). Cohen acknowledges the drifter as a “child of affluence, who reacts against it. He is young, often a student or a graduate, who has not yet started to work” ( Cohen, 1972 , p. 175) and “usually settles down to an orderly middle-class career” ( Cohen, 1972 , p. 176). Cohen’s (1973 ) idealised drifter has no fixed itinerary or timetable and no well-defined goals of travel and seeks “to see the world as it really is” (p. 95) through “begging, scavenging and ‘sharing’ food and lodgings with friends and acquaintances” ( Cohen, 1973 , p. 95). He notes how their involvement in the host community sets them apart with time spent in one place an important determinant of social involvement.

Cohen’s (1973) paper also described the emergence of what he describes as a subculture of drifters who travelled and congregated in “drifter communities”. He argues that these drifter tourists were a different kind of social category. They were not as ideological, but individualistic, and as drifter itineraries formed, “fixed travelling patterns, established routines and a system of tourist facilities and services catering specifically to the youthful mass-tourist” ( Cohen, 1973 , p. 95) came into existence. Drifting became encumbered by all the “paraphernalia of mass tourism” ( Cohen, 1973 , p. 95) against which his idealised drifters rebelled. These drifter tourists were not as motivated to seek to mix with host populations, customs and landscape. While the idealised drifter did not die, Cohen recast the category into a typology based on work by Keniston’s (1968) about countercultural drug users, and work by the sociologist Yablonsky (1968) . Cohen utilised the dimensions of involvement and time to create a four-fold typology of drifters. His “Adventurers” corresponded to the idealised drifter as they were, outward oriented and full time. The inward oriented “Itinerant Hippie”, drifted aimlessly from one “hippie” community to another in search for drug culture and was oblivious to the native environment. The part time outward oriented “mass-drifter” was linked to college youth, with limited time and stuck to the “drifter-tourist establishment” ( Cohen, 1973 , p. 98). He argued they were “almost the complete opposite of its original prototype” ( Cohen, 1973 , p. 103). Finally, the part time, inward oriented “Fellow Traveller” merely associated with the “hippies”. Cohen (1979) later provided a typology of modes of tourist experiences by situating drifting within what he called the experimental mode. He suggested those who travelled on his mode were pre-disposed to try out alternative ways of life as part of a quest for meaning. By 1982, Cohen argued that only a few fulltime drifters remained, and in a 2003 paper, he noted few backpackers had the competence, resourcefulness, endurance, fortitude, or ability to replicate his idealised drifter. Rather than the drifter tourist, he argues it was the “original; idealised drifter” which was the “ideal” ( Cohen, 2003 ) to which backpackers are attracted, but cannot succeed. He argues backpacking has been stripped of its countercultural leanings, and comparable to conventional mass tourism.

5. A retrospective analysis of drifters

A retrospective analysis identifies issues with the concept of the idealised drifter. While Cohen (1973 ) noted he conceived of the drifter in 1968, it was not until the early 1970’s that he became interested in the phenomena of unconventional travellers. An anthropologist by training, his interest in tourism was marginal, and the intrusion of these travellers into his anthropological studies antagonised him ( Cohen, 2007 ). The label drifter had been around for some time, with the novel Drifters by James A. Michener (1971) , e.g., following six young characters from diverse backgrounds as they travelled together through parts of Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Mozambique. Cohen’s (2003, 2007) conceptualisation of the “drifter” was influenced by one personal encounter in 1969 whilst carrying out anthropological fieldwork on poverty in Ayacucho, in the central Andes of Peru and linked this encounter to an anthropological study of Arab boys and tourists girl in Acre, Israel in 1966 ( Cohen, 1971 ). However, Cohen’s work lacked fieldwork, given he did not perceive himself as a tourism researcher ( Cohen, 2007 ). There are contradiction is his work, as he describes the emergence of the drifter tourist as both sudden and gradual ( Cohen, 1973 ). While he notes drifter tourists follow into areas which “individual drifters already started to penetrate in the earlier period” ( Cohen, 1973 , p. 92), it is difficult to establish timelines and whether drifters and drifter tourists interacted. This may be because Cohen never travelled with drifters, did fieldwork, or immerse himself in drifting. Given the lack of literature to substantiate the drifter conceptualization, his work obscures whether the idealised drifter existed or how drifter tourism emerged. Without forming a complete picture of drifting ensures our understanding of the emergence of backpacking remains fuzzy. There is little evidence for his idealised drifters, although there is evidence of new forms of travel in that period ( Alderson, 1971 ). There is little evidence to suggest links between drifters and drifter tourists. This paper, therefore, re-align’s backpacking to drifter tourism and the counterculture from which they emerged, rather than Cohen’s idealised drifter. Cohen (1972, 1973) did link the drifter tourist to the counterculture, and mentioned links to the drug culture, the Vietnam War, economic affluence and broader alienative forces. He described the “loosening of ties and obligations, the abandonment of accepted standards and conventional ways of life, the voluntary abnegation of the comforts of modern technological society, and the search for sensual and emotional experiences […] [that motivates them] to travel and live among different and more ‘primitive’ surroundings” ( Cohen, 1973 , p. 93).

Drifting emerged out of a disjuncture and a period of societal flux we call the counterculture.

There is considerable debate as to when the counterculture began as a cultural construct with most commentators placing it between 1960 and 1970. Marwick (1999) places it between 1958 and 1974. Roszak (1969) places the “1960s” within a broader setting that stretches from 1942 with the Beats, who sought mobility and experiences to escape from the predictability of suburban life. Emerging out of the “hipsters” who formed around black jazz and swing performers, a Bohemian counterculture began to evolve around North Beach in San Francisco in the early 1950s. As rental prices rose in the late 1950s and early 1960s, remnants moved to Haight-Ashbury, a neighbourhood in San Francisco near Golden Gate Park. This new “scene” ( Irwin, 1977 ) attracted the white, middle class and the college educated, who were reacting to a loss of an overriding societal purpose. Fuelled by increased leisure time, societal affluence and the rapid postwar participation in the university system, these now relabelled “Hippies” sought escape – both literally and metaphorically ( Miles, 2008 ). Previous temporal rhythms governing study, graduation and employment were shattering, suspended and replaced by a developing “socio-political-cultural concept” ( Stephens, 1998 ) known as the counterculture. It was a “literal” escape from the consumerist suburban lifestyle, while metaphorically it was an escape from America ( Miles, 2008 ). The district, which had an estimated 800 hippies in residence in 1965, had 15,000 by 1966 and 100,000 by the summer of 1967 ( Falk and Falk, 2005 ). By the mid-1960s, the countercultural imagination was driven by the idea of “flowering” cities and creating alternative structures and enclaves where networked individuals and groups of similarly thinking people could coalesce. By the end of the 1960s, the “intense, spontaneous internationalism” ( Neville, 1970 , p. 14) saw enclaves across America and Europe develop ( Lewis, 1972 ; Mills, 1973 ; Neville, 1970 ).

[…] proclaim a new heaven and a new earth so vast, so marvelous that the inordinate claims of technical expertise must of necessity withdraw in the presence of such splendor to a subordinate and marginal status in the lives of men. To create and broadcast such a consciousness of life entails nothing less than the willingness to open ourselves to the visionary imagination on its own demanding terms.

Cohen over emphasised alienation as the main motivating factor for drifter tourists, and under emphasised the importance of self-reliance, personal development and self-expression to individuals of the time. Detachment from the social structure was meant to be a graceful, temporary, selective and active attempt to create/find social structures that could carry and sustain their shared understandings and individual visions. Cohen under emphasised the counterculture outside the United in the UK, France and Australia, and the role of niche and mass media (like the music and style press). The media along with commercial interests from record companies to transport companies ( Mills, 1973 ) drew in India, Nepal, Morocco, etc., into the countercultural orbit ( Roszak, 1969 ). These countries symbolized freedom and independence ( Cavallo, 2001 ) and escape from restrictions, laws and obligations and the beginning of “something wilder and weirder on out on the road” ( Wolfe, 1968 , p. 103). A new constructed (countercultural) imaginative map of the world gave “prominence to countries perceived to be spiritual and marginalized” ( Stephens, 1998 , p. 52); with “new possibilities derived from drugs, sexual freedom and a vague spirituality”.

These drifter tourists were not as homogeneous as Cohen suggests, with the retrospective review indicating it would be more accurate to suggest that the drifter tourists were made up of various non-conformists, antiwar militants, counter-culturists, radicals, heads, “wanderers” ( Vogt, 1976 ), “travelers” ( Teas, 1974 ), dropouts, freaks, hippies and beatniks who had tapped into a countercultural mobility fantasy and a shared imaginary ( Tomory, 1996 ). Adler (1989) notes how a single code need not be fully shared by those whose efforts yield a recognisable style of performance. Cohen over emphasises the role of idealised drifter, as it was the drifter tourist ideas and infrastructure (bars, restaurants, hotels, shops, sites) which were projected onto maps, novels, movies, images and guidebooks, and became embedded in western social imaginaries, which people would aspire to. Cohen also failed to describe why drifting reproduced itself, why it declined or explain why drifters rejoined the system (social structure) ( Turner, 2006 ). Deflation in the late 1970s, a resurgence of neo-conservatism in many western countries, cold war conflicts, military dictatorships and proxy “hot” zones in many regions, combined to make the drift less popular. In addition, countries who had once welcomed the drifters now labelled their mobility “criminal”, “deviant” or “alternative”, with a number of countries refusing them entry visas and deporting them. This was further exasperated by the decline in value of western currencies and severe recession and stagflation between 1973 and 1983. However, there is no evidence to suggest drifting died ( Hail, 1979 ) and backpacking did not simply appear in 1990 when introduced to an academic audience.

The death of the drifter label was linked to a tourism industry happy to de-link a new wave of travellers in the 1990s with anarchistic drifting, with some researchers loath to connect the reemergence of budget travel to “drifting” given the perceived end of the countercultural era ( Cohen, 1982 ; Smith, 1992 ) and “hippie travellers” ( Riley, 1988 , p. 316). However, this type/form of travel had now been embedded in western social imaginaries as an organised field, with its building blocks, key story lines, narratives, cultural representations, affinities, performative conventions, understandings, regularities, ethos and practices in the public domain. This world retained its fluid and irregular shape and retained the core principles of its drifter tourist predecessors, by way of schemas of interpretation rather than explicit ideologies. Reignited desires in the late 1980s meant this world could again emerge, primarily in Australia, Thailand and the Philippines ( Cohen, 1982 ; Riley, 1988 ; Smith, 1992 ).

Just as the drifting was enabled by low unemployment between 1946 and 1973, the mid-1980s saw the global economy improve once more. Combined with the fall of communism and the cold war; a period of affluence swept the western world. The countercultural imagination, from the beatniks to drifters and backpackers, has long been associated with “mobility fantasies”, and drew dispersed individuals with different backgrounds and expectations that saw movement as a vehicle to explore new subjective experiences. Lonely Planet publications, always on the brink of bankruptcy found financial stability again as their guidebook sales took off in the 1980s ( Wheeler and Wheeler, 2007 ).

Despite technology taking over, guidebooks were not evidence of backpacking, but the necessity of proximity and face-to-face contact. It indicates that “[u]topian desire doesn’t go away […]. in fact never really went away” ( McKay, 1996 , p. 6). It offered individuals an opportunity to travel as a form of “escape” ( Pearce, 1990 ), with Cohen noting the drifter tourist “often goes abroad in order to get away from his homeland” ( Cohen, 1973 , p. 93). Iso-Ahola (1982) argues that people escape from such things as the dullness, stresses and monotony of everyday life, jobs, career decisions and/or relationship responsibilities ( Riley, 1988 ) and are motivated by ideals of freedom, independence and adventure ( Cohen, 2003 ).

6. Future of backpacking

People continue to be caught at the intersections of social pressures, education, career and family such as breaks between school and university, deaths in the family, divorces, marriage break-ups, career breaks/changes, workplace arrangements, retirement, health scares, redundancy, sabbaticals or post-military service. People will seek to escape oppressive, patriarchal and heteronormative structures, and “get distance” from former lives and identities (student, son, employee, husband, wife). Like the drifter tourists, some are transformed, self-induced mobility becoming a “substantial content of the reflexively organised trajectory of the self” ( Giddens, 1991 , p. 85), while others may merely buy into a temporary commodification of difference and otherness that is neither permanent nor long lasting. Many lack the time and inability to withdraw from economic necessity, or lack unrestrained freedom of travel, because of passport and visa restrictions imposed upon them. While some backpackers separate comfortably from the social structure, others are forced from it. Backpacking remains characterised by “audience-segregation” ( Goffman, 1961) , so that family, friends and employers do not figure, at least physically, during travel. Drifters and backpackers were never the free-floating individuals idealised by Cohen, with all those who travel tied into a network of regulations, conditions, provisos and obligations, tied up “with caring, guilt, responsibility and negotiation” ( Larsen et al. , 2006 , p. 261).

This paper finds that backpacking’s future can be found in its drifter past, but not the one idealised by Cohen or in codified criteria. Drifter tourism is backpackers past, but also its future as the countercultural imagination and the motivation to escape continues to drive contemporary backpacking. As individuals act on the basis of a shared imaginary that is culturally shared and socially transmitted, by those who purposefully enter this world, backpacking will continue. It is they who will inevitably modify and change backpacking over time as people, structure and contexts change. This is despite a market and managerial focus driven by lifestyle entrepreneurs, governments, consultants and academics that flatten backpacking’s meaning and depth, strip it of its original countercultural symbols, and rewrite it within educational and touristic discourses. While it makes backpacking legible in a modern society, which is a prerequisite for governance and governance systems, it also seeks to blunt any meaning beyond that of mainstream disposable play ( Cohen, 2018 ). While Cohen failed to address how interaction amongst drifters who shared the same cultural representation continually reproduced drifter tourism, backpacking’s encounters of conflict and collaboration between inexperienced and experienced (recognised by those who enter backpacking as competent, credible and relevant) backpackers continually reproduce, rejuvenate and even transform backpacking through new myths, gossip, stories, routes and understandings. It is a formation that must continually shapeshift and transform to avoid co-option.

As long as backpackers are codified as objects of knowledge and separated from their near past, a business and managerial focus will dominate research. It is the failure of the scholastic imagination to adapt to a world on the move. Research needs to explore new overlapping imaginaries such as ecovillages, intentional communities, new age travellers ( Kuhling, 2007 ), the Rainbow Family ( González and Dans, 2018 ), Woofing ( Ince, 2016 ), nomad houses, transformational festivals ( St John, 2001 ; Saldanha, 2002 ), hospitality exchange ( Ince and Bryant, 2018 ) and hitchhiking, but also mechanisms of exclusion and inequalities of mobility for different groups (females, disabled, LGBT, locals, older travellers) within these worlds. There is little understanding of backpackers beyond the western context and how other backpackers learn and interact. The future of backpacking is assured until those active in backpacking’s past, present and future share a new imaginary that transitions towards new ways of escape. Some who engage in the above practices argue that climate change, pollution, the birth of artificial intelligence will possibly lead to societal upheaval and instability ( Mannermaa, 1991 ) and a new social imaginary that is transnational in nature. The Rainbow Family prophecy, e.g., tells of a new tribe of “Rainbow Warriors”, with values of wisdom, unity, harmony and love emerging after a revolutionary transition caused by environmental destruction ( Niman, 1997 ).

7. Conclusion

The paper traces the development from “drifters” to backpackers, by reconnecting them retrospectively. This paper finds that backpackers inhabit a world endowed with history, desires, representations, understandings and intentions from its near past, to create a distinct type and form of tourism, with a memory of its own that has been represented, transmitted and recycled for nearly 60 years. Using scenario planning, this paper found an inherent power in the countercultural imagination, with continues to shape backpacking today, and also its future.

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Further reading

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Corresponding author

About the author.

Michael O’ Regan, PhD, worked alongside the National Tourism Development Authority of Ireland before joining Gulliver, and later, Wicklow County Tourism. He has a PhD from the School of Sport and Service Management at the University of Brighton, UK (2010). His research interests are slow, alternative, historic, future and cultural mobilities.

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Backpacker Tourism Faces a Changing Landscape Post-Pandemic

Rashaad Jorden, Skift

February 23rd, 2021 at 1:00 AM EST

While some popular backpacker destinations will target high-end visitors after the pandemic, this category of outdoor tourism is not dead. Far from it, as backpacker tourism will evolve and attract new markets.

Rashaad Jorden

For decades, hordes of travelers have explored vast sections of the globe with a backpack in tow. Whether they were hitting up the tried and true Banana Pancake Trail in Southeast Asia or memorably losing a journal during those travels , many people have viewed those trips as seminal moments in their lives.

But backpacker tourism faces an uncertain post-pandemic future. Several destinations, like New Zealand, that are popular with backpackers may focus more on attracting high-end visitors.

Moreover, the death of backpacker tourism has already been foreshadowed as the cheap flights many young travelers have relied on may become less frequent as airlines seek to recoup massive losses they’ve suffered.

But is such fear warranted? Maybe not. Outdoor tourism remains a popular option for travelers looking for socially distanced activities.

“I don’t think that anything will ‘kill off’ youth tourism,” said Wendy Morrill, the research and education manager at the WYSE Travel Confederation. “And I say, ‘youth tourism’ as ‘backpacker tourism’ as what I consider Australia and New Zealand’s branding/labeling of the segment of travelers who are 30 to 35 years old or younger and utilize their working holidays schemes,” she added.

Milford Sound, Fiordland, New Zealand. Credit: Will Patino.

Nikki Scott seconds Morrill’s opinion. “I think that backpacking will certainly change after the pandemic,” noted the creator of Southeast Asia Backpacker , an online community geared toward travelers to the region. “But backpacker tourism could be one form of tourism that bounces back quicker than others.”

How Backpacking Will Change

So if Covid-19 doesn’t kill backpacker tourism, how might it change?

Strangely enough, the pandemic might help create more backpackers. “Once travel is allowed again, people will be so desperate to travel that there will be a travel boom!” predicted Scott. “Many people have realized during this time that they can do their jobs effectively from home using only their laptops, so why not do them from the road?”

She added with “working from home” being a modern norm, more travelers will likely become backpackers and digital nomads, the latter which Morrill said “a lot of people are scrambling to understand” if that market brings any value.

But regardless of whether more backpackers become digital nomads or not, Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) should have a vested interest in ensuring the long-term viability of backpacker tourism (Tourism Research Australia classifies a backpacker as a person “who spends at least one night in either backpacker or hostel accommodation”).

For one, the youth travel market is incredibly lucrative. According to the Backpacker Youth Adventure Tourism Association , an advocacy group for the backpacking and adventure travel industry in New Zealand, the youth market (defined by Rebecca Annan, the general manager of the BYATA, as travelers between 18 and 35 years old) is worth $1.5 billion annually to the country. Meanwhile, across the Tasman Sea, the 2.4 million youth visitors to Australia in 2019 represented 45 percent of all visitor spend in the country, roughly $20 billion.

Enhancing Communities

Furthermore, backpacker tourism can enhance local communities. Research has revealed that it generates less economic leakage than customary mass tourism as businesses geared toward backpackers tend to be locally owned, thus keeping the profits in the country.

“The backpacker tourism industry is definitely high net worth to New Zealand as it’s not just one dimensional,” BYATA’s Annan noted. “It affects our whole economy as a number of small-to-medium sized businesses also make their living by people traveling, purchasing and staying throughout New Zealand.”

But before blessing locations financially, backpackers will have to overcome some hurdles before hitting the road. First, getting vaccinated. “Travelers will very likely have to be vaccinated for Covid-19 before they fly and they will have to have travel insurance that covers Covid-19,” Southeast Asia Backpacker’s Scott noted. In addition, she feels that backpackers won’t be able to cross international borders as easily as they could pre-pandemic.

But globe-trotting may not be as challenging as it seems. “I think that even if flights from Europe to Southeast Asia doubled in price (which they show no sign of doing at the moment), I think that backpackers would still fly West to East regularly,” predicted Scott. “Perhaps, it would mean that backpackers are forced to plan longer trips in order to make the most of their expensive plane ticket. However, I do not think that the price will put them off traveling to Asia in the first place.”

She added that those prospective backpackers will simply stay at home a few more months and save money for their travels, which they’ll need because “travel insurance, flights, and Covid tests will make travel more expensive than it used to be. Because of this, perhaps hostels and tours will become more expensive as local tour operators and hostels will not be able to rely on the numbers like they could in the old days.”

Making Plans if Western Backpackers Don’t Return

If Western backpackers don’t visit Southeast Asia in large numbers as they did pre-pandemic, destination marketing organizations in the region need not despair as they can target Chinese and Japanese backpackers. “I think that there will be a push by governments and tourism boards to attract these types of backpackers before the return of the Western backpackers,” Scott foresees. “This will be encouraged via travel bubbles and special visa arrangements. As most of Asia seems to have much better control of the pandemic than Europe or the USA, I think we will see Asian countries teaming up to promote tourism between themselves, especially countries that have managed to get Covid cases down to practically zero.”

During the pandemic, destination marketers have been able to go back to the drawing board—New Zealand being one of them. “Recently, Tourism New Zealand redefined its focus to ensure that tourism enriches our home and people via four well-beings—nature, economy, society and culture,” said a representative of the agency.

Nugget Point, Caitlins, Otago in New Zealand. Credit: Miles Holden.

Likewise, a similar shift will probably come to Southeast Asia. “During lockdowns across the world, many famous tourist destinations became empty and many locals saw the benefit of fewer people traipsing around local beauty spots. Many tourism departments are promoting sustainable tourism and focusing on the revival of natural wonders,” Scott said.

Such a development could kill one of the major events on backpackers’ itineraries: the Full Moon Party. “I can’t speak for the islanders of Koh Phangan,” Scott acknowledged, “But perhaps once the pandemic is over, they will be looking to replace the Full Moon Party (which has attracted thousands of possibly alcohol and drug fueled travelers to the island) with a more nourishing form of tourism that brings fewer people paying more money to stay for longer.”

Meanwhile, back in New Zealand, “our tourism stakeholders are looking at other ways to improve the general backpacker experience,” noted Annan. “From a cultural and sustainable perspective, they are looking at their product mix, providing a better and more rewarding experience.”

Part of ensuring a better experience for everyone is nipping problems in the bud. New Zealand Tourism Minister Stuart Nash raised a fuss when he announced his desire to ban the lease of vans lacking toilet facilities to international visitors, saying “If the driver or the passenger wants to go to the toilet—we all know examples of this—they pull over to the road and they shit in our waterways.”

However, Annan doesn’t seem worried about the issue. “The point we need to make here is about educating people in New Zealand who use campers, and people who visit [the country] and travel around in and hire campers. Our industry currently regulates camper vans, so we are the ones who can make the change that’s needed. The removal of campers that don’t have bathrooms isn’t going to necessarily fix the problem. Let’s educate, regulate, provide facilities, so in that way, we’re actually containing the problem.”

Reconsidering the Budget Traveler

Tourism stakeholders should also reevaluate preconceived notions of the youth travel market. “I think countries like Australia and New Zealand actually have made an effort to make the tourism industry understand what you may think of as a budget traveler—particularly in the age category of under 35—is actually not a budget traveler,” Morrill said. “These could be people who are coming for long stays and they’re spending quite a lot of money compared to people in Europe making weekend trips or a one-week stay.”

Having a decent amount of money separates today’s backpackers from those of yesteryear. “For many years now, backpackers have not been the cheapskate, traveling on a shoestring hippie stereotype of years ago,” Scott said. “Backpackers these days have money, and something that many other types of travelers don’t have: time. Unlike your average tourist, backpackers have the time to put up with a two-week quarantine in order to enter a country and stay there for three months.”

Travelers being able to spend a long time in a certain destination creates new avenues for destination marketing organizations. “New Zealand is trying to connect the international student market with the tourism industry,” Morrill said. “You have these visitors who are there for a long time to experience the destination and to learn new things. They were working on this before the pandemic.” A strategy that she said is totally different from that of places like Amsterdam, where school groups taking short trips have been considered a nuisance.

Nuisance … sometimes appropriate to describe backpackers as such. But they have been missed in many locations. Not to worry, they’ll be back.

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Tags: outdoor tourism , tourism

Photo credit: A visitor hikes in the Denali National Park & Preserve, Alaska. Kent Miller / Flickr/GPA Archive

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July 22, 2022

How the digital backpacker can positively impact tourism

by David Bradley, Inderscience

In many ways, the travel industry has tended to focus on business travelers and richer tourists, ignoring travelers such as backpackers who tend to travel on a tight budget and have little to spend on their journey. However, there is a subset of backpackers, informed and educated and highly active on social media that the industry would do well to find ways of engaging with. These digital backpackers commonly review and report on the places they visit and the sights they see, often as video bloggers, or vloggers.

Research in the International Journal of Knowledge Management in Tourism and Hospitality , has investigated the vlogging backpacker and how some of these people have become so-called "influencers." The influencer effect could have a positive impact on tourism especially if the industry can engage well with those people who might encourage others to visit a particular destination.

Hasliza Hassan of the Multimedia University in Cyberjaya and Abu Bakar Sade of the Universiti Putra Malaysia, both in Selangor, Malaysia and Muhammad Sabbir Rahman of the North South University in Dhaka, Bangladesh, point out that already many vlogging backpackers have been recruited as ambassadors. For tourist destinations in many parts of the world that are perhaps not on the usual commercial travel itineraries this could mean a big boom in travel to those places in years to come. This could help reverse much of the decline in tourism caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the team suggests.

The researchers point out that travel vloggers tend to have a positive outlook on the places they visit, the sights they see, and the food and entertainment they take part in while traveling. Followers of the big influencers expect and anticipate this positivity, the team says. The suggestion from the research is that tourism agencies must keep travel vloggers in mind as digitally savvy allies who might be supported through an offering of accommodation and transport and so have an influence on a particular destination or travel route. This could make the digital backpacker a powerful component of promotion in the travel and tourism industry , the team adds.

Provided by Inderscience

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The developmental impacts of backpacker tourism in South Africa

• Published: July 2004
• Volume 60 , pages 283–299, ( 2004 )

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• Gustav Visser 1  

1368 Accesses

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South Africa has recorded considerable growth in tourism activity over the past decade. In the light of the vast range of economic sectors that gain from tourism development, the national government has instituted a range of incentives and initiatives to stimulate tourism development, with the expansion of tourism infrastructure aimed at high-end tourists forming a key component of this strategy. Little investment has, however, been made in tourism infrastructure targeting those markets that prefer to avoid high-end tourism facilities. In this respect backpacker tourists and their preferred accommodation type, backpacker hostels, are a case in point. Despite backpacker tourism being largely ignored in national tourism development initiatives, backpacker tourism is increasingly popular in South Africa. This paper focuses on the recent proliferation of backpacker tourism in this country and seeks to convey the results of the first nation-wide exploration in this regard. The paper has two main objectives. Firstly, it seeks to present broad-ranging empirical data concerning this tourist cohort and their preferred accommodation type- backpacker hostels — in the South African context. Secondly, it aims to demonstrate why backpacker tourists and hostels hold much potential for local development initiatives in South Africa. In the light of the findings of this study, the paper concludes that the expansion of backpacker tourism to this country might form an appropriate means by which to achieve a range of local development objectives.

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Visser, G. The developmental impacts of backpacker tourism in South Africa. GeoJournal 60 , 283–299 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:GEJO.0000034735.26184.ae

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Tulum Issues New Rules for Visitors in 2024

T here's a reason that millions of visitors flock to Tulum each year. It has a reputation for having the most spectacular natural beauty in Mexico-with jewel-toned turquoise water, fluffy white sand, and swaying palms. What could be more dreamy than that?

Of course, no visit to the town of Tulum is complete without a visit to its eponymous archaeological site, where 800-year-old stone towers and temples sit perched like sentries atop coastal clifftops, gazing down at bone-white beaches and a blue sea. The Mayan ruins at Tulum are among the top tourist attractions in Mexico. But with that popularity comes a tremendous amount of foot traffic, which has taken a toll on Tulum over the years.

According to ASUR, the official site of the airports for the southeast of Mexico, the Mexican Caribbean saw nearly 21 million international visitors in 2023 . While that figure encompasses travel everywhere from Cancun down through Bacalar, it still makes this part of Mexico one of the most heavily trafficked in the country-and its hundreds of attractions, including Tulum, are suffering.

To protect the archaeological ruins and combat the effects of overtourism, the Mexican government implemented a new set of rules as of January that travelers must observe when visiting the ancient Mayan site at Tulum, according to Travel Off Path , a travel news source.

Visitors are now prohibited from consuming food and drinks purchased outside of the park during their visit in an attempt to reduce the amount of waste in the preserved park area . Those coming to view the archaeological site are also being reminded that they are not supposed to disturb the local flora. This means no picking flowers or stepping off the designated paths. Feeding local animals is also forbidden.

The list of rules isn't particularly lengthy, but the repercussions for breaking the rules can be costly, with fines of up to 5,000 pesos (US$300) depending on the level of infraction.

The rules do not clarify if visitors will be able to bring water purchased in the park's snack area into the area where the ruins are. For those who are familiar with the archaeological park, they know that there is little to no shade and that the weather can be extremely hot.

The new restrictions for visiting the Tulum ruins may seem small in the grand scheme of things, but it is an attempt to bring in some regulation, particularly as tourism to the destination is only set to increase following the opening of the new Tulum International Airport at the end of 2023.

They come as a controversial new rail project, the Maya Train (or Tren Maya) also aims to boost travel to the region.

Tulum is no stranger to overtourism. The once idyllic coastal escape has changed dramatically over the years, and sadly, not entirely for the better. What started as a sleepy, dusty village on the side of Highway 307 has exploded in the past 20 years. Visitors have transformed from budget backpackers and bohemian free spirits seeking remote stretches of sand to high-end luxury visitors to now more mass-market tourism.

What began as an eco-friendly haven has devolved into what some feel is eco-chaos with sewage runoff from overdevelopment, the destruction of the reefs and sea life, and the displacement of Indigenous communities. The current reality there is described as a skyline of construction cranes, litter on the beaches, and unwarranted high prices-overall, Tulum "ain't what it used to be."

South-east Queensland faces wet Easter weekend but campers still game for budget holidays

Rain is set to continue over the Easter long weekend but campers across south-east Queensland are not letting the threat of sodden days dampen their spirits.  

Bookings for tent, caravan and cabin sites are holding strong as the cost-of-living pressures are blamed for a downturn in hotel occupancy rates.

Holiday parks across the Sunshine Coast region are running at 97 per cent occupancy over the Easter period.

Queensland National Park camping grounds are also tracking well with campers packing extra wet weather gear but not cancelling.

"At this stage there has been no obvious effect from the wet weather," a Sunshine Coast Council spokesperson for holiday parks said. 

But figures for hotel occupancy across the Sunshine Coast, Noosa and the Gympie region show bookings are down 10 per cent.

Visit Sunshine Coast Chief executive Matt Stoeckel said after a bumper few years recovering from the pandemic, demand had now dropped.

“Whether that's cost of living pressures being real for many households, or some unusually wet weather, they've taken a toll,"  he said.

Campers game

Emma and her partner Robin have recently returned from a camping trip at Booloumba Creek National Park, south of Kenilworth in Queensland.

Emma said she wanted to beat the Easter crowds and enjoy time away on a budget.

"You still have a good time regardless of the rain," Emma said.

"It's so good for the soul and away from the screens."

Emma laughed when asked about whether she thought camping in wet weather was harder than expected.

"Of yes, of course, it was a muddy pack-up and unload," she said.

"But it's so worth it — a holiday we won't forget."

British backpackers Harry Tongue and Theo Artus have been travelling the east coast of Australia in their home on wheels for the past three months.

They said wet and windy conditions on the Gold Coast this week had been among their most testing days yet.

"It's not ideal when you're living in a van because you don't have space," Mr Tongue said.

"We don't really have any dry clothes at the minute so we're just hiding inside."

Mr Artus said it felt a lot like being back in England.

Gumboots packed out west

Kate Willson from the BIG4 Breeze Carnarvon Gorge Holiday Park said the wet weather had not deterred campers, and the park had not received any cancellations for the Easter long weekend.  

"The Gorge is just beautiful no matter what time of year and it's a lot cooler as well," Ms Willson said. 

"No torrential rain — [a] little odd shower here or there can cool you down a bit when the sun comes out."

Sandstone Wilderness Parks senior ranger Bob Campbell said campers should keep up to date with park alerts. 

"It's pretty wet obviously. We've had up to 100mm around the place," Mr Campbell said. 

"[Park alerts are] our best way of communicating with people and letting them know the conditions."

The Queensland Department of Environment has released a warning to all campers to prepare for wet conditions and follow advice from the rangers on site.

"Rangers will visit camping areas to provide advice ... particularly during inclement weather," a spokesperson from the department said.

Hotel occupancy rates down

Figures from Visit Sunshine Coast showed occupancy rates at many hotels were at 70 per cent, 10 per cent lower than levels recorded during recent peak periods.

Chief executive Mr Stoeckel said the fact it was one of the wettest seasons in recent years had affected booking rates.

"We're seeing demand really stabilise across the Sunshine Coast," he said.

Mr Stoeckel said holiday intention research suggested people were still booking but were changing their habits under tighter financial circumstances.

"They might book for a shorter period or downgrade their accommodation," Mr Stoeckel said.

He said if travel was down at Easter, it affected businesses right across southern Queensland. 

Weather outlook for Easter

Currently no records have been broken, however in Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast, the Bureau of Meteorology confirmed there had been 23 days of consecutive rain.

In south-eastern Queensland, some rain falls exceeded 100mm in the Gold Coast hinterland, but elsewhere falls ranged from 20 to 80mm.

Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Kate Doyle said it would be a wet Easter weekend but would improve over the coming days.

She said much of the rain was from the remnants of Ex-Tropical Cyclone Megan. 

"We have a weakening ridge over the east coast and a slow-moving trough over eastern parts and interior parts of Queensland, which is drawing that tropical moisture south and enhancing the rainfall," Ms Doyle said.

"[This is] leading to significantly cooler, below average daytime temperatures of mid to high 20s underneath this extensive cloud cover," she said.

Ms Doyle said the trough was expected to drift a little bit further east before shifting back west later in the week.

"We've got plenty of moisture and it is hanging around," Ms Doyle said.

Ms Doyle said the Sunshine Coast was expecting 5 to 30mm of rain.

"But we are expecting things to start clearing up," Ms Doyle said.

She said the coastal waters would continue to be choppy, with winds reaching 10 to 25 knots over the next few days, and up to 25 knots over the weekend.

Boaties have been advised that there will be an increase in south-easterly winds.

"That swell is increasing to around 1.5m offshore also," Ms Doyle said.

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