ABSTRACT
The “new mobilities paradigm” has attracted increasing attention from tourism researchers in recent years, with a growing interest in how studies on particular mobilities (including the movements of people, objects, capital and knowledge) can contribute to a better understanding of tourism development and vice versa. There is an inherent connection between mobilities and tourism which has been evident in many fields of (tourism) research, including studies of tourist flows and travel patterns (Holyoak, Carson, & Schmallegger, 2009; Lew & McKercher, 2006; Zillinger, 2007), tourism-related labour mobilities (Duncan, Scott, & Baum, 2013; Lundmark, 2006), lifestyle and second home migration (Müller & Hoogendoorn, 2013; Thorpe, 2012) and the use of transport and communication technologies (Ali & Carson, 2011; Hannam, Butler, & Paris, 2014), amongst others. More importantly, there is an increasing recognition that tourism plays an integral part in people’s overall mobility choices as it contributes to the ongoing reconfiguration of the relational networks that facilitate movement. As a result, the boundaries between tourism and “ordinary life” mobilities are becoming blurred (Larsen, Urry, & Axhausen, 2007). The constant movement of people – for various purposes (leisure, work, residential, social or service related reasons) and within multiple temporal and spatial parameters (short-term vs. long-term, one-off vs. seasonal, circular vs. ongoing, single vs. multiple localities) – no longer allows for a clear distinction between “home” and “away” or between “residents” and “visitors” (Cohen, Duncan, & Thulemark, 2013). New research approaches are, therefore, required that do not consider tourism-related mobilities in isolation but as part of a larger, integrated mesh of mobility configurations and relational networks that constitute place.
