Tourist skills

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2022.103387Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Extension of theoretical debate on tourism as a practice, focusing on tourist skill.

  • Commonplace skills, mundane forms of know-how, are essential to tourism practices.

  • Tourist skills are learned and portable.

  • Tourist skill-kit contains both specialist and commonplace skills.

  • Skill-kit emerges anew in any given tourism situation to facilitate practice.

Abstract

This study extends the theoretical debate on skills as an important element of tourism as a practice. Analysing qualitative data on train and canal boating tourism in the UK, we discuss how some tourism practices require both specialist and commonplace skills, while others only need the latter. Moreover, every tourism practice is skilled, and all skills are learned and portable from the context in which they were acquired to new situations and practices in tourism. Any tourism practice requires a skill-kit: a complex of skills that emerges to facilitate a given tourism practice. Therefore, the tourist skills make tourism practices largely effortless and enjoyable, allowing tourists to respond creatively and with confidence to the variations of the surrounding environment.

Keywords

Tourism practices
Practice theory
Tourist skills
Skill-kit
Train tourism
Canal tourism

Cited by (0)

Ilze Mertena is Senior Lecturer in Tourism Management. Her research interests are train tourism mobilities, transport tourism, tourist experience and ethnographic methods.

Maarja Kaaristo is Researcher in Tourism Mobilities. She has published on water mobilities, rivers and canals, transport tourism, rural tourism, materialities and qualitative research methods.

Tim Edensor is Professor of Social and Cultural Geography. He has written extensively on national identity, tourism, ruins, mobilities, materialities and landscapes of illumination and darkness.