Consumer Tribes in Tourism

Book excerpt: This book adopts a collectivist perspective on special interest tourism consumption, bringing together research on ‘special interest tourism’ and ‘niche tourism’ as well as more recent research into the interdisciplinary applications of the sociological concept of neo‐tribes. It promotes a shift in perspective away from special interest tourism understood as a sum of similarly motivated individuals, to a collective view of special interest tourists who share common characteristics (e.g., shared values, beliefs and mutual interests) and group structures. This approach provides a better understanding of groupings that are not unified by a common tourism motivation, but brought together by otherwise conditioned commonalities in actual behavior triggered by supply-side contexts (e.g., Airbnb). The book considers tourism micro‐segments as consumer tribes (i.e., as symbolic communities) in which individuals are embedded and loosely bound together. As there is limited research on the collectivist perspective on special interest tourism consumption, in the first part the book’s conceptual/theoretical discourse contributes to a better understanding of ‘groupings’ in tourism behavior but also collectives that are not unified by a common tourism motivation. Presenting international examples, the book explores in Part 2 the group culture of a range of tourist tribes by describing emerging tourism micro-segments, identifying shared identities, and analyzing their collective mechanisms.