The backpacker experience: a review and future research agenda

ABSTRACT The shifting nature of backpacking and its increasing heterogeneity hinder attempts at deeper understandings required to keep pace with this dynamic phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to understand what is distinctive about the backpacker experience via a review of the backpacker literature and outline an agenda for future research. The unique contribution of the review is the insight into the backpacker experience, characterised by the pursuit of existential authenticity and freedom and manifested through social interactions within the backpacker culture. The review provided a meta-perspective of backpacking in which the search for experiences enabling existential authenticity and freedom remain consistent despite significant demographic, social, cultural and behavioural variation among backpackers. This relationship with experiences distinguishes backpacking from other forms of tourism. The paper highlights backpacker understandings of freedom to mean being free of temporal, spatial and social limitations imposed by their home societies. Backpackers experienced existential authenticity as involvement in the pursuit of self-development and self-identity. Heidegger’s “spielraum” (“playspace”) was applied to explain the ability of backpackers to experience this authenticity and to engage with the “other” including other backpackers in a safe manner.