Anti-shopping tourism: a new concept in the field of consumption

Abstract

In this article, based on qualitative research in Hungary, we propose a new phrase for the field of tourist consumption. Our notion ‘anti-shopping tourism’ refers to the resistant attitude towards consumption and spending money during shopping-related tours. The research discussed in the paper analyses participants’ motivations, attitudes and behaviour on one-day coach trips that include various programmes, for example, sightseeing, lunch, spa visits and even a range of gifts, for a very low price, in exchange for participation in a professional sales show during the trip. Our main goal is to explain and, from an economic and anthropological point of view, conceptualise this form of tourist attitude, and to show how this unique way of travel may be situated in a certain historical setting in Hungary, more than two decades after the collapse of the socialist regime. In order to understand how the participating individuals negotiated this unique form of travel that exists in a grey zone of the institutionalised travel industry, notions such as debt, sacrifice, resistance, gift, seduction and informal contract are discussed and connected to the phenomenon.

Keywords:

• shopping
• tourism
• sacrifice
• gift
• debt
• Hungary

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The study presented in the paper was carried out within the framework of a 4-year-long research project entitled ‘Invisible tourism in Hungary: investigation of the social, economic and environmental aspects of unconventional tourism mobility’. The phrase ‘invisible tourism’ is an umbrella term used for those touristic activities which last less than 24 hours or when travellers do not use the officially registered accommodation system. As these travels do not appear in tourism statistics, the destination management organisations (DMO) do not regard them as a potential field for development; consequently, they will not invest in their marketing.

2. This database is not analysed in this recent article as it derives from a pilot study which was conducted in order to collect preliminary information for the main study, mostly for formulating the interview questions.

3. The interviews, containing 31 open-ended structural questions, were proceeded by content analysis method and in some cases answers were coded and quantified.

4. Graeber (2012, p. 21) argues that the difference between debt and obligation is simply money. Debt can be precisely quantified and this requires money. Here, though money is also involved in different forms, we use the words debt and obligation equally to describe the observed phenomena.

5. It is also important to know that (souvenir) shopping could occur outside of the sales show during sightseeing; however, as this was very unlikely, we did not investigate this option during our research.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Hungarian National Research Fund (OTKA K100953) and also by the BISA Research Grant of Keimyung University, South Korea.