Vacability and sociability as touristic attraction

Abstract

Researchers sometimes portray the tourist as someone who travels the world searching for authentic experiences and scorns both ‘being a tourist’ and other tourists. However, in drawing on two studies of seemingly mundane kinds of holidays, this article points to two under-researched dimensions. The first dimension is ‘sociability’ and relates to the skill or tendency of being social during the holidays. This dimension covers tourists’ searches for meaningful social interactions with other tourists and how some tourists, instead of scorning other tourists, actively and deliberately go on holiday in order to ‘be’ with other tourists. The second dimension is labelled ‘vacability’ and is defined as the quest to truly ‘vacare’ and to the tourists’ ability to be vacant. This dimension relates to some tourists’ wish to be ‘freed from experiences’ during the holidays and how the choice of a seemingly mundane type of holiday may prove superior in making the tourist able to indulge in vacability.