Mobility and Bounding the Traveling Imagination: A Cultural Analysis of Visiting Friends and Relatives Tourism

Abstract: Tourism can be a difficult form of travel to define. In order to make working with tourism easier, the tourism industry often uses criteria and definitions that can limit understandings of tourism. An example is an often-common view in the tourism industry of visiting friends and relative (VFR) as unimportant. The purpose of this thesis is to offer research showing why VFR can be important to the tourism industry. This thesis presents a research project that uses ethnography and cultural analysis to study the visits of friends and family of foreign-born residents in the city Malmö. The focus is on how residents and visitors attempt to articulate questions such as, are visits tourism trips or family and friends get togethers? How does one present Malmö to friends and family so they feel welcome, and hopefully comeback? By focusing on mobility, the cultural processes that guide answers to these questions are revealed. The research demonstrates that during visits lines between tourism and migration and tourist and local are blurred. Residents and visitors, guided by rules of hospitality, switch between roles of host and guests as they co-create complex place experiences that draw on aspects of daily life and tourism and migration. These experiences are explained as residents and visitors attempting to construct a new sense of place based on mobility. The research also demonstrates insight into what consumers can value as tourists as well making the case that the tourism industry can benefit by working with different forms of mobility.