Towards a social psychology of recreational travel

Abstract

This paper examines recreational travel from a social psychological stand-point. According to this approach, an individual's behaviours, cognitions, and feelings about travelling are analyzed against the social background, that is, how the individual influences and is influenced by others. The main question is addressed to the motivation for recreational travel: why do people travel for recreation? Why do they choose this activity over others? While variations in motives can be found between and within individuals and between various types of travel (vacation versus weekend travel), the basic psychological mechanism is likely to be the same for most of recreational travel. It is shown that like leisure behaviour in general, recreational travel is a dialectical optimizing process, in which two forces simultaneously influence a person: the desire to leave the personal and/or interpersonal environment behind oneself and the desire to pursue or gain certain personal and/or interpersonal rewards. This process is dialectical in the sense that the person has to solve the contradiction between the needs for novelty and familiarity in order to achieve optimally arousing experiences. It is also optimizing in the sense that the individual aims at an optimal amount and quality of contacts with others, to shut oneself off from others at one time and to open oneself up to interpersonal contacts at another time.