A gift from travel: The shift of gift-giving in the new mobilities paradigm

This study explores the tourism gifting practices, examining their patterns, experiences and social benefits under the New Mobilities Paradigm (NMP). Through interview and observations, it investigates Chinese domestic tourists' gift-giving practices with the destination of Dali, Yunnan Province, China. We reveal that tourists casually purchase lightweight, practical, and regionally featured tourism merchandise as gifts, engaging in gift exchanges-both online and offline-during fragmented time. Tourist gift donors and recipients tend to share and consume tourism gifts briefly, with easy opportunities to reacquire the same goods online. This dissolves traditional gift-giving, as represented by the three-stage tripartite circulation model, into a fluid relational network with decentralized and diversified experiences, which brings about “network capital” for all involved actors. By introducing the NMP perspective, this study enriches and extends the research boundary of the tourism gifting. It also refines the explanatory power of the NMP in the materiality studies of tourism mobilities.