ABSTRACT
Slow travel has emerged over the last decade as an alternative to mass tourism. Slow travel strongly embraces experiential elements of travel, appeals to environmentally concerned tourists and embraces modes of transport other than air and car. Should it gain momentum as a new form of tourism, slow travel has the potential to address some of the environmental concerns posed by existing tourism structures, most specifically tourism’s contribution to climate change. However, whether slow travel has the potential to make a significant contribution to low carbon tourism depends to a large extent on how it is defined. At the time of writing, although the term ‘slow travel’ has established a level of common usage in the media, on web communities and within academia, there are many different interpretations. Some interpretations are not so different to the consumptive forms of tourism that slow travel claims to replace.
