In my quest to make donor trips and site visits more equitable, effective, and empathy-enabling, I have poured over research. Every once in a while, I find a great piece of academic research that has immediate and practical application in our daily work. In this article, I share some of the best research on experience and empathy from my colleagues in anthropology, and I help you contextualize it so that you can immediately begin applying what you’ve learned to your programs.
This article is derived from the work of anthropologist Dean MacCannell, who put for three “Modalities of the Urban Symbolic” in his book The Ethics of Sightseeing (2022), which I have – with his permission – adapted into three “Models of Traveler Engagement.” Then, in collaboration with Tanner Colton of the Transformational Travel Council, we collectively created a forth model based on the premise of MacCannell’s work. .
Using a framework of four modalities of traveler engagement, you can evaluate your own travel programs and their promotional materials and then adjust and revise what you’re already doing well to make each trip more and more transformational.
Model 1: Attraction as Ego Reinforcement
S = Sui=bject (the traveler)
A = Attraction (the destination or site)
O = the local people at the destination
MacCannel uses the term “attraction” to refer to the thing that the traveler has come to see or experience – whether that be a monument or museum, an event like Carnival, or a heard of caribou – that is considered the “attraction.” “S” represents the “subject” or the “self,” that is, the traveler. And “O” represents the “other,” or the people at the destination, regardless of how similar or different they may be from the traveler.
In this model, the traveler uses the attraction to reinforce their own self-image (“check this off my bucket list”) and status within their own community (“bragging rights”). While all travel can be considered somewhat self-serving, this model has the traveler engaging in the most superficial manner.
A prime example of this would be selfie-walls: people going to a famous, uniquely decorated café just so that they can take a photo of themselves or of their item with the café as backdrop. The food or coffee is not really the attraction – at least not the taste (but the design may be as it serves to enhance the photo). The traveler is also not at that location to meet other people, or even to enjoy the environment with their own friends. They’re really there to get that photo so that they can put it up on social media and show off that they’ve been there.
Often, everyone involved is in on the gimmick, and the restaurant/café certainly appreciates the publicity, so while it may be performative, the café selfie-wall usually isn’t exploitative. The problem with this model occurs when travelers use sacred spaces, fragile natural resources, and even other human beings, as their own form of a selfie-wall.
A few years ago, the board of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in Australia banned climbing Uluru because so many people were going up there to take selfies without regard for safety, the environment, or the culture that holds the rock sacred, and harm was being done.
Or consider all those photos you see of people (usually white) going to Africa and taking selfies with local children—and yes, I’ve deliberately not used a country or community name because that’s part of the problem. These travelers don’t care where exactly they are or who they’re taking photos with. They care about their friends and family back home praising them for simply being in proximity to Black bodies. Humanitarians of Tinder provides ample examples of this type of engagement.
So, in this model, we can see that attraction as ego reinforcement has a relatively harmless side, like taking selfies in front of a vista or taking pictures of drinks in front of a café sign as well as a harmful side when people are degrading the environment to get the kinds of footage that they want or when people are disrespecting locals to get that “perfect” bragging shot.
Model 2: Attraction as Instruction about Oneself
Here, the traveler visits the attraction and doesn’t just take a photo with it but is changed by it. They still, though, have not interacted with or learned much about the local culture or community or the full reality of the place.
They may go on a solitary retreat to a cabin in the woods. They read and write—never leaving the cabin or interacting with anyone else—and leave transformed because of all the great thinking they did. Or they may travel to a destination that has resource scarcity and poverty. They are exposed to the depths of poverty for the first time in their lives. They recognize the extent of global inequity. They have a new degree of gratitude for what they themselves have. They may even feel a new connection with people leading such a different existence from themselves (“Oh! Those kids look just like kids in my neighborhood. Kids are kids anywhere!”). They have learned something about themselves and even changed thanks to the attraction, but they still haven’t learned much about poverty or the people there. They can’t, just by viewing it.
In this model, the “other,” refered to other people, or other cultures, remains elusive. The local people haven’t spoken to the travelers about their lives. Instead, there’s a great deal of projection as the traveler connects what they see at the destination only to what they know from home.
Model 3: Attraction as a Catalyst to the Other
In this model, the attraction serves as a vehicle for the traveler to engage with the host community more deeply. When I lived in Japan, I observed many people from around the world visiting Japan or moving there because of their love of anime, a Japanese form of animation. They’d go to Japan for the ultimate cosplay experience, which is dressing up like characters, this time in the place where the characters live, but once they were there and living and working with the local community, the superficial, materialistic appreciation was transformed as they realized a deep and profound love for Japan, for the people, for the culture—many would study the language and come to understand Japan in a much deeper and richer way than simply one facet of its culture, such as anime.
Many of us have similar experiences, where you initial traveled to a place, but ended up forming long-term connections with the people and community. Usually these experiences occur organically, but travel planner and operators can facilitate them by creating opportunities for dialogue and two-way engagement. Not every interaction should be staged and rehearsed – find ways to connect your visitors with local people for conversations, and don’t try to over orchestrate or intervene.
One of the best examples I have of a two-way encounter comes from a lodge in Namibia. The staff joins the guests during every dinner, and guests may ask questions of the Namibian staff. That’s a pretty common practice at destinations. What’s fascinating about this lodge is the staff also ask questions of the guests. It’s not just what it’s like to be an American, for example, but it’s “How did you meet your spouse?” In answering the types of questions the staff has chosen to ask, the guests learn a lot about the local culture—both from what the staff chooses and doesn’t choose to ask and then by comparing answers (“You met your spouse on the internet? That’s very rare here!”) It becomes a rich experience, and it’s multi-dimensional. There’s an actual exchange. No one is performing their culture.
Model 4: Attraction as a Catalyst for Transformation
MacCannell’s original work concludes with the third model, but Tanner Colton of the TTC and I created a forth model that brings the traveler from engagement to ongoing evolution. They experience the attraction as it catalyzes their engagement with the local community—and then they bring that transformation back home for further development, in themselves and by sharing what they learned with others.
The journey doesn’t conclude upon the traveler’s return home; rather, it marks the genesis of transformation. In the words of Janet Ferguson, transformation unfolds when “the learning collides with your everyday life.” This metamorphosis can occur instantly or evolve over years. Importantly, it is an ever-evolving process without a definitive end—an ongoing, perpetual state. This essence is encapsulated by the fourth model, emphasizing that transformation is a continuous, boundless journey without a final destination.
Now that we’ve explored these four model of traveler engagement—from only taking selfies at a destination to learning, understanding, and returning home transformed and ready to keep evolving—let’s talk about tips for putting this information into practice:
- Evaluate your current activities via these modalities. Do they support traveler engagement of a modality one, two, three, or four type? There’s no “bad” answer here. In fact, I suggest that you actually need to provide experiences that fit all of the modalities. You can’t totally stop travelers from operating in modality one or two, and you can’t drag them to three or four. You can’t force a certain type of engagement on people. You can only provide the opportunity. Even if they want to be transformed, they might also want to get that social media–worthy photo. Some folks are solo travelers or introverted; many travel with their friends and family, and they just want to spend time with those people they already know. Not everyone travels in the same way or for the same reasons, but that doesn’t mean that we follow their lead—we offer the chances to get to modality four.
- Evaluate your promotional materials. Are your trips delivering the type of engagement that your materials promise? If travelers expect the transformation of modality three, but once they’re on-site, all of the interactions with locals seem staged and scripted, with only the tour guides talking, the travelers will be disappointed, and rightly so.
- Elevate some of your offerings to be more transformational. Here are two ways to do so: Take more time: At the destination, allow people to move more deliberately and intentionally, physically and mentally, with both structured and unstructured activities. Allow time for organic, unexpected developments. Debrief and reflect: both together and quietly. People want to talk about and process aloud what they’re experiencing. Instruct your guides to ask more questions. They’re used to telling and performing a lot of information for the traveler. But they should be asking questions too.
Be sure to also download the free Worksheet that accompanies this article!
