Introduction: The tourist gaze 4.0: uncovering non-conscious meanings and motivations in the stories tourists tell of trip and destination experiences

Abstract

This special issue includes unique contributions sharing advanced concepts and tools immediately applicable to building theory that describes and increases understanding of practices in tourist travel and destination experiences. Articles in this special issue focus emic-to-etic reporting on naturalistic drama-enactments that enable tourists as storytellers to experience powerful myths in actual destination settings (also recognising that mythical qualities imbue aspects of both travel and destination sites, e.g., ‘The Orient Express [train]’ and Machu Picchu, Peru, respectively). Tourists’ stories provide intimate tourist travel insights regarding destinations as well as the enactments they engender for tourists. Such insights offer the material for guidelines for productions of ‘authentic’ tourist-destination relationship engagements. This special issue contributes to developing a comprehensive understanding of non-conscious influence-paths that impact tourist-destination behaviours and experiences.