CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2007
| Author | Luca, Lucian Claudiu |
|---|---|
| Title | Staying without Paying. Heading towards free tourism? |
| Summary | This paper looks at one strand of alternative tourism that has witnessed a great boom in the last decade: decommodified tourism. In trying to explain for this rapid expansion, this study first analyzes some of the basic aspects of the tourism industry and then goes on to follow the birth of alternative tourism. This strand tourism selected out of the very heterogeneous category of alternative tourism pushes for the replacement of the money economy within the sphere of tourism with one economy based upon gift-exchanges. The study then goes on to examine two Internet-based networks that promote this sort of alternative tourism: HospitalityClub and CouchSurfing and to look at the factors that contributed to their fulminating growth. Using Maffesoli’s concept of the ‘neo-tribe’, this article argues that the loosely bound communities of tourists that are formed around these two sites adopt a more sustainable and more critical form of touristic consumption. Nevertheless, the conclusions of this research address the clear-cut distinctions that are being drawn in the literature between the tourist and the post-tourist, and strive to overpass the gap by pointing at some of the similar patterns of consumption which all tourists share. |
| Supervisor | Bodnar, Judit |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2007/luca_lucian.pdf |
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