Slow travel: issues for tourism and climate change

TLDR

Slow travel is positioned as a climate‑change response, given that travel contributes 50–97.5 % of tourism emissions. The study aims to analyze slow travel’s evolution, key features, and to develop a framework for future holiday conceptualization. The authors use in‑depth interviews with self‑identified slow travellers and theoretical analysis of time, identity, and web communities to build the slow‑travel framework. Slow travel requires specific holiday styles and transport modes; walking, cycling, bus, coach, and train support it, whereas air and car do not, prompting a reassessment of tourism‑transport interfaces.

Abstract

This paper analyses the eclectic evolution of slow travel, examines key features and interpretations, and develops a slow travel framework as an alternative way of conceptualising holidays in the future. The paper focuses on slow travel's potential to respond to the challenges of climatic change: travel currently accounts for 50–97.5% of the overall emissions impact of most tourism trips. In-depth interviews with self-identified slow travellers illustrate and underpin the concept and note that slow travellers form a continuum from "soft" to "hard" slow travellers. The paper explores time as a social institution, timeless time and fragmented time, travel as an integral part of the tourist experience, and the links between tourism and the travellers' self-identity and lifestyles. Special attention is given to people and place engagement, to behavioural choice and decision-making psychology, and to the role and growth of web communities. Slow travel is shown to require both holiday type/style choices and travel mode choices. Walking, cycling, travel using bus, coach and train all facilitate slow travel, while air and car travel do not. Slow travel prompts a reassessment of how tourism interfaces with transport.