Modern vacations – modern families: new meanings and structures of family vacations

ABSTRACT

Ideally, vacations constitute special times together offering families the chance to participate in novel activities and break the routine of daily life and scheduling while concentrating on each other, having fun and experiencing new things. However, families are changing and consequently, so are family vacations. Vacations traditionally included all of the immediate nuclear family, but with busy lives and differing work schedules, vacations might now only include some members of the family or expand to include extended family members. Families also increasingly take technologies and therefore other aspects of their lives with them on vacation. The question is whether these new technology-equipped family assemblages lead to fundamentally different vacation experiences. This study is a qualitative study from accounts of 10 family groups who have gone on vacation. It explores the structure of the modern family vacation, the role it plays in the lives of families, how families enact vacations, how modern families experience time together, what role technology plays and what meanings and traditions have emerged from modern family vacations.

KEYWORDS:

• Role of family vacation
• vacation experience
• time spent together
• bonding
• tourism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Heather Kennedy-Eden is an Assistant Professor for the School of Business, Hospitality & Tourism Program at Indiana University, Kokomo, IN, USA. She completed her PhD in Marketing from the University of Wollongong and is a member of the Laboratory for Intelligent Systems in Tourism. Her research focuses on the influence that smart phones have on family bonding in daily life and on vacation, family tourism, technology adoption in event management and other issues related to technology and tourism. She has 15 years of experience working in the tourism industry, specifically event management, hotel operations, environment interpretation, and the travel industry. She uses qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Ulrike Gretzel is a Professor of Tourism in the UQ Business School, University of Queensland, Australia and a member of the Smart Tourism Research Centre at Kyung Hee University, South Korea. She received her PhD in Communications from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focusses on technology use in tourism, with an emphasis on social media, both from organizational as well as consumer perspectives, and the design of intelligent systems, in particular recommender systems. Her research has been published in major tourism and eCommerce journals. She has also co-authored and co-edited several books related to technology in tourism.