Conceptualising tourist skills

Mertena, Ilze ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2135-0467 and Kaaristo, Maarja ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2803-0418 (2022) Conceptualising tourist skills. In: T²M Annual Conference ‘Mobilities: disruptions and reconnections', 21 September 2022 - 24 September 2022, Padua, Italy. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Tourist mobility is dependent upon the acquisition of diverse skills – intuitive, practical forms of know-how – that facilitate an effective interaction between individuals and their surroundings as they engage in various mundane and habitual tourist practices. Tourists become competent in performing tourism as they follow a variety of skill-dependent norms by learning how to travel, negotiate cultural differences, attend to key points of interest, and engage with spatial and material worlds. While other elements of practice (meanings and materialities) have been increasingly studied in recent tourism literature, competences – and, in particular, skills – have received much less attention. In this presentation, we therefore theorise skills as an important element of tourism practice, showing how they allow tourists to respond creatively and with confidence to the variations of the surrounding environment. We discuss how all tourist skills are learned and context-dependant and propose that they could be characterised through four distinct dimensions: mastery, reflexivity, frequency of usage and the extent of recognition. We exemplify this by analysing qualitative data on two types of transport tourism: train travelling and canal boating tourism in the UK.