ABSTRACT
Tourists and travel serve to symbolise generic concepts within tourism studies. The places tourists travel to, and the activities they offer, form the very receptacle wherein experience is construed; one that is often particularly intense when far away from home. By travelling to different places and exploring different cultures, an evocation of the familiar and the unknown becomes compared and contrasted. In this sense, the tourist experience is a socially constructed term whereby cognition can denote meaning, derived from the multiple interpretations from social, environmental and behavioural facets that create the overall encounter (Tussyadiah and Fesenmaier 2009).
