1164 | 43 | Travel into my future: narrative aspirations of university students on their imagined journey in 2069 | Márk Miskolczi (1); Jácint Farkas (1,2,3); Gábor Michalkó (3,4)
Literature and cinematography are full of works about time travel. From Julie Verne to Michaels J. Fox, there are those who jump forward and those who rewind time. Time travel is a figment of the imagination, where both the journey taken and the place visited are based on the creativity of the traveller’s mind, sometimes mixing the past, the present and the future. Despite the obviousness of the subject, limited research builds on today’s young tourism professional’s aspirations for the distant future, the results of which could guide development._x000D_
At the boundaries of tourism innovation and future research, our objective is to explore tourism and hospitality university students perceptions of the more distant future of tourism. In this context, our research question is the following: Based on the current perception of young professionals, what characteristics will have a travel in 50 years? The research is framed by narratology, which has become a multidisciplinary data collection method in the last decades, thus providing scope for the scientific interpretation of stories in consumer behavior and tourism. Within the framework of the research, short, future-looking narratives (n=300) have been analyzed, which provide a general insight into the socio-demographic, technological and service-industry settings in which the subjects imagine themselves in 50 years, and how these factors might affect their travel patterns and the scope of tourism destinations._x000D_
To analyze the database, the grounded theory (GT) methodology has been applied. The coding process was performed using NVivo software. As a result of the GT-based approach extended with sentiment analysis, a theoretical framework has been developed that identifies technological, social and environmental phenomena that significantly affect the future tourist experience and patterns of travel behavior. Based on the narratives can be predicted, i.e., what the definition of a “good place” in future tourism might be.
Márk Miskolczi (1); Jácint Farkas (1,2,3); Gábor Michalkó (3,4)
(1) Corvinus University of Budapest; (2) Budapest Business School; (3) CSFK Geographical Institute; (4) University of Pannonia
ID Abstract: 43