Exploring Tourists’ Accounts of Responsible Tourism

‘Responsible tourism’ has become an established area of tourism research and practice and is typically understood as a broad set of tourist interactions that engage with and benefit local communities and minimize negative social and environmental impacts. Extant research however has adopted a largely top down approach to understanding responsible tourism that has marginalized the voice of tourists. This study investigates tourists’ own accounts of the responsible tourism experience, finding that these intersect with but also deviate substantially away from established conceptions of the phenomenon. We show that tourists’ accounts can be delineated according to the extent to which they are driven by inner- versus outer-directed goals, and the degree of involvement in responsible tourism as a cultural identity.