Grindr Tourism Among Tourists, Locals, and Immigrants: Dating App Impacts for Social Relations, Gay Tourism, and Digital Convergence

Abstract

Dating app tourism is a phenomenon that intersects both digital mobile media applications and tourism networks. As such, it represents a new but little-examined frontier in the study of sexuality, technology, and identity formation. Using a qualitative sociological approach, this exploratory study identifies Grindr tourism practices and their consequences for gay tourism, tourist-local relations, and digitally mediated social life. With Tel Aviv as the research site, Grindr tourism practices were analyzed using 19 in-depth interviews and six audio diaries. The concept of embedded learning is used to understand the communication that results from contemporary mobile media-integrated tourism. Grindr tourism practices are viewed as mutually beneficial by tourists, locals, and immigrants. Findings indicate that Grindr tourism contributes to tourists’ embedded learning about travel destinations, immigrants’ acclimation and friendship networks, and locals’ self-ascribed cosmopolitan, multicultural identities. The research also uncovered wider issues affecting sexuality, communication, migration movements, ethnicity, and the economic bodies that support large-scale tourism. Specifically, Grindr is used as a tool to arrange independent, mobile, non-institutionalized travel that serves as an alternative to LGBT + tourism industry institutions. Not only is Grindr tourism indicative of shifting travel practices, but it also reflects dating apps’ overarching tendency toward the convergence of multiple social functions into one platform.