Deconstructing backpacking

This chapter deconstructs the well-established tourist categories. Specifically, this chapter questions the inherent tendency of previous classifications to couple together the meanings that tourists assign to their experiences and their external practices of travel. To illustrate this analytical position, the chapter presents the theoretical distinction between types and forms of tourism that Uriely et al. (2002) employ to deconstruct backpacking tourism. This analysis finds that those tourists who comply with the external travel practices associated with backpacking (form) differ in the meanings they assign to their experiences (type). Accordingly, Uriely et al. (2002) suggest that the backpacker tourist category can be further segmented by the meanings that backpackers associate with their tourist experiences.