Hi all, like Renee, I feel that some background information about myself is needed before I talk about my research interest. I began my undergrad as an Environmental Science major but found myself liking what I learnt in an elective Anthropology course so much that I decided to complete a major in Anthropology as well. I would probably have to credit my mother for this interest because she believed in the value of teaching me about other cultures and different way of lives since I was a child. This meant that I was fortunate enough to be brought along on a lot of her trips to other countries, and those experiences have turned me into this person who's always looking forward to her next big adventure.
I am always thinking of where to go next, and I am never not planning trips for when I get to go on them. Over the course of many years of trip planning, I realized that technology and the ease of online publishing might have caused a change in how people plan their trips. Publishing something online is so easy that everyone and anyone can post a travel guide or a review of the places they have visited. It makes me wonder if traditional sources of travel guides such as the Lonely Planet series, and Fodor's have any value to them. These traditional sources of travel information are also getting digitized (there are both hard and soft copies available now), so how has their value changed? How has the way people used them changed?
Also, self-published travel blogs often have such detailed, personal accounts that you would already know how Singapore's chilli crab dish look like even without ever being there. Do such detailed accounts set people up for disappointment or surprise? I would love to follow people around when they plan their trips and when they go on their travels to see if their experiences are affected by what they have researched before.
Some may disagree, but I think some of the best travelling experiences are also the most intimate and unpredictable. This makes me feel that there is something unnatural about the in-depth travel research that technology has enabled, because when people check out all these reviews and all these travel experiences of strangers, they go to the destination expecting something "magical". Yet these expectations almost always take away the magic of travelling.
I really like your topic, as I am an avid traveller myself! I find travel books to be a really interesting topic, as it seems like a lot of information is researched about what goes into travel books, but not necessarily information about them, which leads to a unique topic. I myself have used the Europe Lonely Planet book and found it extremely helpful for finding cheap and unique places. But I have also looked online, for example finding Hostels, I used Hostel World to book, it just seemed the most convenient to have one place and account to use. At the same time, I took advice from my sister of places to visit, and discovered my own places on my travels.
ReplyDeleteI think an ethnographic approach to this topic would be really interesting, along with interviews and surveys. A narrower scope might help specify your research, maybe separating the question of "how do people research travel destinations?" with "how do people use new technological resources to establish their travel destinations?" and "Do new technological resources and the abundance of travel information take away the experience of the avid traveller?".