ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes video diaries as an innovative methodology in tourist experience research. Tourism is a highly visual experience, yet word-based approaches dominate travel and tourism research methods. Video diaries are one innovative methodology to understand the tourist's experience; they capture visual and verbal representation of the participant's reality, as participants choose the scenes worth filming based on personal meaning. Thus, this approach is underpinned by the ontological hermeneutic assumption that understanding and interpretation are part of human existence, and that participants may therefore interpret their own experiences. Such participant-driven methods are rare in visual methodologies generally, and even rarer within tourist experience research and, thus, this chapter aims to introduce video diaries as an approach which supplements traditional word-based approaches used in tourism research in order to privilege an insider's perspective of the tourist experience. A case study of research interpreting ‘home’, a complex, value-laden and personal concept, among returnees from long-term travel, is presented within the chapter to demonstrate the effective application of video diaries and associated issues and challenges.
