Enabling home and destinations for the well-being of seasonal retired tourists

Abstract

This article focuses on the complex relationships among mobility, aging, and well-being among seasonal retired tourists. By adopting the notions of mobility turns and enabling places, it investigates how seasonal retired tourists maintain their well-being between their hometowns and destinations throughout their seasonal mobility. The cities of Sanya and Harbin in China were selected as study sites, and 54 retired tourists who engaged in annual seasonal mobility between these cities were interviewed. Four situations of seasonal retired tourists’ experiences of well-being in their home and destination were identified based on the characteristics of tension, balance, interpenetration, and reconstruction. This study demonstrates the dynamics and complexities of how seasonal retired tourists mobilize and assemble material, social, and affective resources, which further influence their well-being experiences between their homes and destinations. Its findings contribute to the literature by mobilizing the enabling places perspective to explain how seasonal retired tourists construct relations, generate enabling resources, and maintain well-being between different places.

Keywords:

• Seasonal mobility
• relational well-being
• enabling places
• aging
• space
• time

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Institutional review board statement for the exemption of ethical approval

To whom it may concern,

As it does not belong to the type of study legislated by the national law ‘Regulations for Ethical Review of Biomedical Research Involving Humans’ (涉及人的生物医学研究伦理审查办法), the fieldwork and data collection of Ke Wang, Lirong Kou, and Honggang Xu’s article ‘Enabling home and destinations for the well-being of seasonal retired tourists’ have been granted exemption of ethical approval from the Ethical Review Board of Sun Yat-Sen University.

Ethical Review Board of Sun Yat-Sen University

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 41771145] and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [grant numbers 2023M733991, The influence of portable smart technology on old floating people’s health].