Critical Hospitality Symposium, Critical Hospitality Symposium II: Hospitality IS Society

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Experiences for senior tourists with physical impairments visiting Bali
Yayu Indrawati, Cheryl Cockburn-Wootten, Mary FitzPatrick

Last modified: 2018-07-02

Abstract


With the ageing of society, tourism providers have a social responsibility to provide and create spaces of inclusion, welcome, and advocacy for senior customers, including those with impairments. Most research on seniors foregrounds marketing strategies for this segment and prioritizes the tourist typology, neglecting more inductive aspects such as  embodiments, emotions, identities, and narratives (Sedgley, Pritchard, & Morgan, 2011). While there have been discussions related to the body in general, the ageing body has remained relatively under-researched (Andrews & Phillips, 2005). Moreover, the majority of these studies tend to neglect the embodied experiences of older people who travel and interact with the environment on holiday (Buhalis & Darcy, 2011; Gaete-Reyes, 2015). This presentation will provide preliminary results from a study examining the understandings of both seniors and tourism providers of Bali as an accessibility destination. The aim of this PhD research is to gain a better understanding of the experiences of senior travellers with physical impairments visiting Bali and, in particular, to examine how their experiences are hindered or aided by the physical and/or social environments of their visit.   The research paradigm adopted in this study is social constructionism as it captures the subjective, inductive nature of experiences related to how seniors understand and interact with the environment(s) at the destination. It also supported understanding how the tourism providers create, facilitate, and restrict the environment for these tourists.

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