Hospitality in Adventure Tourism:

: Being, dwelling, guiding

Abstract

This thesis, through narrating outdoor guiding as hospitality work, brings together two broad areas of academic inquiry – adventure tourism and hospitality studies. Building on existentialist propositions of dwelling as a way of being in the world, more-than-human sociology and a poststructuralist philosophy of fluidity and flux, it aims to advance outdoor adventure guiding scholarship. In so doing, it addresses the client-guide and client-client
dynamic in the context of commercial, multi-day ‘adventure’ tours in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, and questions the fetishised, commodified relations within them. Granting attention to embodied experiences of being in the outdoors, it takes a hermeneutic phenomenological approach and employs the ethnographic method of inquiry. Through corporeal and sensual situatedness in the research setting, the space is created for interrogating the processes of creating and co-creating experiences and meanings of hospitality. Through renderings of the material and immaterial, human and non-human,
personal and collective, the embodied, affective, relational and contextual nature of human experience is discussed, the attention now being shifted to more existentialist aspects of being in the outdoors in particular, and being in the world in general.
The thesis concludes with thoughts on the messy and negotiated nature of hospitality services in 21st century societies, in particular those enacted in outdoor environments. It provides an original contribution to extant hospitality and adventure studies through questioning hospitality through philosophical and sociological concepts such as ontological security, existential comfort, being, dwelling, communitas and hygge. The findings aim to enable commercial tour providers to develop a better understanding of customer needs, and thus give recommendations for adapting the practices of guides with frontline contact with
guests in order to foster the overall hospitality experience in natural environments, and beyond.

Date of Award	4 Oct 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Edinburgh
Sponsors	Moffat Charitable Trust
Supervisor	Peter Varley (Supervisor), Steve Taylor (Supervisor) & Melanie Smith (Supervisor)