Reflexivity: The Future of Tourism Experience Research Or, How do tourists achieve well-being?

This theoretical paper discusses the concept of self-reflexivity (i.e., “deliberations that take place through internal conversations” (Archer, 2007:3)) in the context of tourists’ strategies for creating their own well-being. It is suggested that this concept helps in understanding how moment-by-moment experiences can create transformational changes and as the tourist involves herself in activities. The concept is then applied to an existing model of experiencing (Gnoth and Mateucci 2014) revealing that its different modes correlate with different types of (no, recursive, participatory, disruptive) reflexivity. Using other descriptive criteria for transformational change, future research propositions are outlined