Reflections on Judgment: an Analysis of Tourists' Contributions to Guest Books

Abstract

This article analyses 17 years of entries in tourist guest books to gain detailed insight into perceptions of experience. The study site is an Outback region of South Australia admired for a number of contrasting aesthetic qualities. The words and phrases offer more than standard comments to hosts; they represent emotional outpourings and reflections that double as public displays of touristic experience and judgment. The judgments made on place and experience reveal an appreciation of an immersion in a natural environment aesthetic, distinct from the built environment. The research explores the benefits tourists gain through contact with nature as it reflects on a social construction of the natural world. The article also suggests how, in engaging in the process of reading other tourists' entries and individually writing one's own entry for an expected audience of hosts and future tourists, the tourists themselves become part of a larger discourse about place and the meaning of the nature-based experience at that place. The method provides a flexible tool for investigation to complement other research methods used in studies of the tourist experience and provides for an analysis of the tourists' environmental awareness and engagement. The implications for tourism marketing and management are discussed.