Call for abstracts - Drive tourism in rural areas

©Þórný Barðadóttir

Call for abstracts on drive tourism in rural areas

The ITRC is hosting a session on drive tourism in rural areas at the 32nd Nordic Symposium on Tourism and Hospitality Research, held in Stavanger, Norway 18 - 20 September this year.

The session is titled Pushing or pulling the lot. Knowledge creation on drive tourism in rural areas

This session sets focus on drive tourism in rural context. Tourism is dependent on transport systems but tourism mobilities have the tendency to be path dependent. This at times results in overtourism at popular destinations, while other areas are unnoticed. Transport systems can significantly impact tourism potentials by pushing or pulling tourism travels. In rural areas roads are often the main ways for travel, resulting in drive tourism being the dominant genre. Setting out to affect tourists’ travels, and hence expand the spread of tourism, path creation through new tourist routes has become ever more pronounced. However, the actual impacts, potential advantages and consequences of such routes and other aspects of drive tourism in rural areas still remain somewhat obscure.

While rural drive tourism has the potential to have a shaping effect on the future of rural areas, it remains an understudied subject. In the session we aim to open for discussions on the highlights and challenges of rural tourism development in relation to drive tourism. The session sets forth inquiries on the effects of self-driving tourists navigating through sparsely populated areas, on the pushing or pulling effect of rural roads, the impact off and on the, at times, meagerly maintained rural roadways, and the ramifications of established and emerging tourist routes on rural host communities.

The session is open to papers discussing some of the diverse aspects and issues of drive tourism in rural areas. The aim of the session is to broaden and build relationships between researchers interested in this field in the Nordic countries and beyond.
Session topics include, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Rural self-drive tourism
• Roads in rural tourism
• Impacts of (branded) tourist routes in rural areas
• Developments in rural drive tourism
• Rural host communities

Keywords: Rural tourism, roads in tourism, drive tourism, tourism path dependency, tourist routes

The call is for abstracts of 200-220 words, to be submitted 15 April the latest, to rmf@rmf.is.

Information on the conference available here