Abstract
The quest for tourist destinations that few have visited, and the experience of a journey that few can share, is becoming even more difficult for those individuals who seek a reputation as tourists. Although this search for authenticity has already been studied, there is still much to be explored. Tourists can enhance their identity as travellers by place attachment with destinations they have visited, and that no longer exist. The fact that these destinations have vanished makes their experiences unrepeatable, turning them into connoisseurs of a gone place. The narration of that past visit enters into a re-interpretation process, especially by those who have not been to these places. Through this transformation of the visit into a chance event, this article shows the connection between chance, tourism and social spatialization. Through a content analysis approach, visitors’ online comments to three tourist sites are used: the World Trade Centre in New York before 9/11, the historical sites of Nepal before the destructive earthquake of 2015 and the ‘Pioneer Cabin Tree’, a giant thousand-year-old sequoia in Calaveras Big Trees State Park, before it was blown down in a storm in 2017.
Introduction
Considerable research has been carried out on niche markets within the tourism field. The past-niche category of alternative tourism opposes the convenience of mass tourism (Butler, 1992) and highlights a desire to look for more authentic, original and meaningful experiences (Pearce, 1992). Within this generic niche, tourists have expanded their curiosity towards destinations that few would visit, longing for differentiation from the masses. This quest for distinctiveness has led to terms such as ‘dark tourism’ (Lennon and Foley, 2000), ‘last-chance tourism’ (Lemelin et al., 2010) or ‘doom tourism’ (Shapiro, 2007). The first relates to tourist sites associated with suffering, tragedy or death, based on their impact on visitors’ perceptions of life and inevitable mortality (Stone, 2012). Examples of these destinations are the Katrina tours in New Orleans (Pezzullo, 2009) or Robben Island (Strange and Kempa, 2003). The two latter terms refer visiting destinations before they disappear. This is a tourism segment that seeks destinations with a social and/or natural heritage that is in danger of disappearing for the next generation. In contrast to those seeking originality, the goal of last-chance tourists is not to be one of the first to visit an original setting, but one of the last (Expedition News, 2008). Examples of such destinations are the eroding atolls of the Maldives (Shapiro, 2007), the ice cap on Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro (Lemelin et al., 2010) or polar bears in Toronto Zoo (Hume, 2009).
Dark and last-chance tourism refer to tourists who are aware of the disaster that has already taken place, or is threatening to do so. Therefore, they can choose to pertain to one tourist type or the other. Distinctiveness is not a value that can only be looked for through future decisions; it can also be sought through the re-interpretation of past decisions. Within the same macabre framework of dark and last-chance tourism, there is a third tourism type, which can transform a normal or even mass tourist visit into a unique one, leading to what is called here ‘chance tourism’ in this article, meaning the opportunity that some tourists had to visit ‘must-see’ attractions before a human or non-human intervention destroyed them; attractions whose lost magic can no longer be revisited. These tourists chose to do one of the many established types of tourism, for example, cultural tourism, and then – after the loss of the tangible environment of the place or part of it – they reinterpret their past experience as one that they were lucky to have had, since everyone, thereafter, is excluded from it. Examples of such cases are visiting New Orleans before the Katrina hurricane, or more recently, the cultural heritage of Iraq, Syria and Lybia. For instance, the ancient temple of Baal Shamin in the Syrian city of Palmyra, or the ancient ruins of the city of Nimrud in Iraq, both deliberately destroyed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
This article presents three case studies where tourists have re-evaluated their role as visitors to tourist attractions: the first is the World Trade Centre (WTC), an example of a human-induced disaster; the second, Kathmandu’s Durbar Square before the earthquake in 2015, an example of a non-human-induced disaster; and the third, the ‘Pioneer Cabin Tree’, a sequoia tunnel tree in Calaveras Big Trees State Park of California which fell after a severe storm in 2017. This third disaster was both human- and non-human-induced (human because its base was tunnelled after a lightning strike during the 1800s and non-human due to the storm on 8 January 2017). These attractions were chosen because the attraction in itself – even though characterized as one of the must-see stops in travel guides – was not necessarily the primary reason for the visit. Before 9/11, the WTC was not considered an aesthetic jewel of New York by many, including the American Institute of Architects, because of its similarity to the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building (Geist, 1985). Also, for tourist guides like Lonely Planet (1997), the Empire State Building was a better visitor’s choice. On the other hand, Nepal’s main purpose of visit in 2013 (after holiday pleasure) was pilgrimage, surpassing trekking and mountaineering for the first time (Nepal Tourism Statistics 2013, 2014). In Kathmandu, which was hit worst by the 2015 earthquake, many religious sites, such as Durbar Square, the Dharahara Tower and the Bhaktapur Durbar Square, were seriously damaged. Yet, according to Nepal’s official tourism website, the most emblematic religious tourist attractions were not the ones hit by the earthquake; they were Swayambhunath, one of the holiest Buddhist Chaityas in Nepal, Pashupatinath Temple or the Mayadevi Temple, which were not damaged by the earthquake. Finally, the Calaveras Big Trees State Park preserves two groves of giant sequoia trees and although the Pioneer Cabin Tree is one of the most important tunnel trees in the Park, in terms of age and height, it is not the only one (https://www.parks.ca.gov/).
Literature review
Why chancy?
One of the basic differences between this type of tourist experience and dark and last-chance tourism is the lack of knowledge that the destinations or attractions visited will no longer exist at some point after the visit and will no longer be visited by them or any other tourist. The absence of choice adds an element of luck to those who made the visit, as they were unaware that they had a choice. For philosophers, the notion of luck has been defined in various ways which presume three conditions: (i) the chance condition, meaning lucky events occur by chance, (ii) the significance condition, that is, how significant the event is to the agent, and (iii) the lack of control condition, by way of an agent having no control over the event (Broncano-Berrocal, 2015).
Considering in this case that lack of knowledge is the mainstay of luck, attention is given to the chance condition and, more particularly, epistemic probability (Broncano-Berrocal, 2015; Steglich-Peterson, 2010). The latter focuses on the notion of not being in a position to know that an event will occur and states that chance events are, from evidence available, unlikely to happen. The stricter the conditions for knowing that an event will occur, the easier it is to call that event lucky (Steglich-Peterson, 2010). Later, Stoutenburg (2015) introduced the epistemic improbability condition. This supports a less absolute level of knowledge (knowing or not knowing) and focuses on levels of chance condition, which are based on levels of awareness or obliviousness. In the latter case, the agent does not have an epistemic guarantee that the event will occur; therefore, there is knowledge, but not necessarily belief, that the event will occur. Hence, here the probability factor enters, where the lower the probability, the higher the luck, should it occur. This is known as probabilistic chance (Levy, 2015).
Regarding the cases studied in this research, the terrorist attack in the World Trade Center of New York in 2001 and the earthquake in Nepal in 2015 (the previous most important earthquake was in 1934) are events of which there was no prior knowledge that they would occur; that is, these cases approximate the framework of the epistemic probability chance (Steglich-Peterson, 2010). This lack of knowledge of what would happen to these destinations in the future alters the significance of the visit for the agent (Levy, 2011, 2015), whether we refer to an individual who has visited or an individual who can no longer make the same visit. As long as this visit matters to the agent, the fact that there are conditions out of their control dramatically changes the probability of visiting again, and thus, given its new significance, the visitor re-evaluates the visit (Stoutenburg, 2015). For Levy (2011),
an event … occurring in the actual world is chancy lucky for an agent if (i) that event … is significant for that agent; (ii) the agent lacks direct control over the event … and (iii) that event fails to occur in many nearby worlds; the proportion of nearby worlds that is large enough for the event to be chancy lucky is inverse to the significance of the event for the agent. (p. 36)
This strong mutual relationship between epistemic probability and significance turns the experience of unrepeatable past events into chancy lucky events and, in this study, the agents who experienced them into chancy agents.
Thus, a chancy event is a lucky event, but not necessarily the other way around. For Levy (2011), luck can also be non-chancy when – maintaining conditions (i) and (ii) of the chancy definition –
(iii) events or states of affairs of that kind vary across the relevant reference group, and (iv) in a large enough proportion of cases that event or state of affairs fails to occur or be instantiated in the reference group in the way which it occurred or was instantiated in the actual case. (p. 36)
That is, non-chancy luck occurs when events vary significantly across nearby worlds or reference groups like the ones in this study, discarding the third condition of the chancy definition. This study considers the event as the visit to a tourist destination – socially known for one or more attractions – that will cease to exist after the visit, in contrast to visits where the attraction is not altered significantly, this event fails to occur in many nearby worlds. Thus, this study focuses on the chancy sense of lucky.
The aim of this article is to see whether a chancy event can create, and influence, a tourist’s attachment to a destination visited to such a level that they unconsciously produce a new typology of tourism, which differentiates them from other tourists. However, this typology, in contrast to previous ones, like dark or last-chance tourism, is not a typology that insinuates a conscious activity on the tourist’s part, but rather a tourist identification typology, based on the re-interpretation of an existing type of tourism, such as cultural tourism.
Social spatialization and place identity
The role of place can be seen in several ways: directly, as a natural region, with a front and back stage (Goffman, 1959); indirectly, as a protagonist of photographs and postcards; as a measurable unit for assessing tourism impacts – an objective of marketing strategies and budgets; or as an influencer of tourism identity and behaviour, which, undeniably, has been a well-studied area (McCabe and Stokoe, 2004; Mullins, 2009; Twigger-Ross and Uzzell, 1996). The importance of the interaction between individuals, in general, or tourists, in particular, and place has been a research focus for many years. For Snepenger et al. (2007), places represent ‘the venues for tourism experiences, the context of social psychological interaction, and the phenomena by which this behaviour can be described, explained and predicted’ (p. 310). They can also be seen as storehouses of meanings that create expectations for experiences (Snepenger et al., 2004). Representing a less abstract form than space – which for Lefebvre (1991) is a combination of systems of land territorialization, the ‘toolkit’ of the built environment and human interaction, because of the meanings people invest in them (Cresswell, 2004) – places are socially and culturally constructed a priori, in situ and a posteriori (Rakić and Chambers, 2012); thus, places are characterized as relational and fluid (Hubbard and Kitchin, 2011). Meaningful types of places incorporate a broad range of physical settings, like built environments, natural environments and non-residential indoor settings (Scannell and Gifford, 2010). These meanings, which allow for the symbolic consumption of places (Urry, 1990), refer to hedonic (pleasure provided by a place), utilitarian (usefulness of the place), social (human interaction at the place) and novel (uniqueness of the place) characteristics (Snepenger et al., 2007). Therefore, the special relationship individuals can develop with a place is not related directly to its physical features, but with the meanings that they symbolize through the experience-in-place that is had (Stedman, 2002). On the other hand, the experiences that meanings reveal, and that places host, are inherently personal interpretations, which no two people can share (Hubbard and Kitchin, 2011).
Thus, places are personally produced and consumed by tourists who wish to exhibit, enact and retell their experience of consuming them (Haldrup and Larsen, 2010). Perceptions of how visitors benefit from this experience define their level of satisfaction and, consequently, the level to which they will share and recommend that experience (Johnston and Kong, 2011). During this process of talking about a place, individuals use connotations they associate with it to describe their images, popular etymologies and spatial metaphors of the place, producing Shields’ (1992) ‘social spatialization’. Spatialization focuses on the connection of institutionalized discourses on space, their social imaginary embodiment and their interpretation in material practices, while examining the changing significance of place and space-myths (Shields, 1992). Space discourse creates images through the over-simplification and stereotyping of products and services available in these places, and the activities people were engaged in there, as well as the final labelling of them (Shields, 1992; Urry, 1995). Social spatialization does not require a profound analysis of how meanings are attached to places, but more of a lateral thinking between social imaginary and landscape interventions (like buildings) commonly used in everyday talk.
Therefore, the social discourse around a place, which is based on the personal meanings people attribute to it, can lead to its labelling and create and project place attachment. The latter is typically divided into social and physical, meaning the connection between place and people at a social level, and the rootedness, which refers to the length of residence and frequency of visits (Stedman, 2002). Rootedness can be the result of long-term interactions (as in the case of residents), short-term visits to a location (as in the case of tourists; Gross and Brown, 2006), but many visits in number (Simpson and Siguaw, 2008), or through ‘place-congruent continuity’, where people transfer characteristics of a prior location to a new environment that resembles the previous one (Cheng and Kuo, 2015).
Place attachment comprises affective, cognitive (George and George, 2004) and behavioural levels, the first being the most studied (Lewicka, 2008). More particularly, affective attachment can develop through emotional investment in a place, as a prerequisite of psychological balance and good adjustment (Rowles, 1990), or through a general sense of well-being (Brown et al., 2003). Therefore, it takes more than just liking a place to lead to emotional attachment. These affective ties between sentiment and place are also known as topophilia (Tuan, 1977). Cognitive attachment mostly refers to memories, ideas, attitudes, values and meanings of behaviour, which connect place meaning, that is, representations of the past to the self (Proshansky et al., 1983; Scannell and Gifford, 2010). As Urry (1995) points out, space can transform time into memory, when the latter is embodied in physical elements like buildings, or non-material elements like celebrations, creating ‘sites of memory’ at an individual and/or group level (Stedman, 2002). Therefore, cognitions of the physical environment are incorporated into an individual’s self-definition, since memories are the reminders of the self (Shields, 1992). These individuals, in their search for unique features of a place, can enhance their self-concept, through the process of ‘place-related distinctiveness’ (Twigger-Ross and Uzzell, 1996), thus being similar to in-group members and distinct from out-groups. Finally, behavioural attachment is expressed through actions, such as proximity-maintenance, place reconstruction when lost and relocation to similar places, based on the desire to stay close to that place (Scannell and Gifford, 2010).
The dynamic status of these actions, practices and meanings is what triggers interest in places and, thus, an ongoing discussion, generated by a postmodern approach, focuses on its non-static nature, as it is continuously reconstructed by tourists’ evolving interpretations of place (Lefebvre, 1991; McCabe and Stokoe, 2004; Stokowski, 2002). The varied demographic and psychographic profile of tourists, the fact that places are constantly adapting to new modes of leisure consumption by locals, or for locals, or commercialization by locals for tourists as well as the types of mobility within places, modes of travel over time (Mullins, 2009) or the type of activities that are developed locally (Mullins, 2009; McAvoy, 2002), are the most studied reasons for the explanation of meaning re-establishment. Therefore, social communication between place, locals and tourists can create new place meanings and value of experience (Snepenger et al., 2007) at any particular moment.
Focusing on time, the past seems to preserve its appeal, through the expression of nostalgia of particular times and places, expanding from long gone ages, to objects of the last decade. For Lowenthal (1985), nostalgia refers to the longing of an idealized past, while it diminishes the importance of the present (and the future’s representation in it). The focus of attention is on places, objects or cultures that have been lost and on the desire to revive them. The quest for the past can be divided between a past unknown to the individual, but intriguing to explore, and an individual’s past, motivated by nostalgia. In the latter case, nostalgia is activated by the commodification of memories, meaning the heritage industry, organized around Lefebvre’s toolkit of built environment, and by the production of social memory, when events make people remember together (Urry, 1995).
For discursive psychologists (McCabe and Stokoe, 2004), talking about place, whether it is where we were, where we are or where we will be, which centres on issues of belonging to a place, creating membership and, thus, a social bond – underlines talking about identities. Even for geographers, the shared dimension of remembering leads to the re-interpretation of the meanings of a place and allows people to look for a coherent identity (Hoelscher and Alderman, 2004). This membership is expressed in two forms (Twigger-Ross and Uzzell, 1996). The first is through place identification, that is, being a member of a group of people who are defined by location, for example, a person from New York is a self-named New Yorker, or people being from the city negatively labelling people from the countryside. The second is through place identity; a sub-structure of self-identity (Proshansky et al., 1983), meaning a person’s socialization with the physical world in which they live, based on their ‘environmental past’ cognitions and their cultural context, which determine what is familiar or unfamiliar, for example, the association with the physical qualities of a place like London, leads to positive self-esteem and, consequently, positive distinctiveness (Twigger-Ross and Uzzell, 1996). Therefore, place identities of individuals from different cultural contexts and memories reveal different experiences and meanings associated with space and place. This article focuses on this last type of place identity in the particular case of tourists.
For Proshansky et al. (1983), the cognitions that compose place identity change over the length of a lifecycle. This can occur on a gradual level, where identities of long-term travellers pass from a transitional experience, when life stages or ways of life come to an end (White and White, 2004), but it can also occur on an abrupt level, when physical settings, for example, change radically through unexpected events, like technological developments or ecological changes, or the first signs of physical decay. More extreme examples by Fried (1966) and Twigger-Ross and Uzzell (1996) documented the sense of grief and loss experienced by people who were forcibly relocated from their familiar residential contexts to more up-scale, yet unfamiliar, neighbourhoods within large-scale urban redevelopment programmes. When the possibility of revisiting a place is eliminated, some individuals create an intense emotional attachment to these places, which then act as memorials of the individual’s past, further enhancing place identity (Cheng and Kuo, 2015; Twigger-Ross and Uzzell, 1996). This loss, which refers to a negative emotion induced by a place (Pan et al., 2014), implies a disruption of place-referent continuity due to an alteration of the space where actions are oriented, cutting off the link to places that refer to past selves (Korpela, 1989) and, consequently, influencing place identity.
These disruptions – varying from grief and mourning, to anger and alienation (Erikson, 1994) – have profound impacts on people, depending on their degree of loss, thus altering their relationship with place, and their emotional and psychological attachments to it. For Brown and Perkins (1992), the significance of place bonding is recognized in some cases after a disruption occurs. This is because it ‘operates in the background of awareness’ (p. 283), which means the individual is unaware of what the place means to him or her. Furthermore, disruption, regardless of its nature, creates a need for the individual to express an acknowledgement for the value of the loss experienced (Brown and Perkins, 1992), emphasizing issues of self-determination and place identity even more.
The online narration of social spatialization
As previously mentioned, place becomes an important part of self-concept. The experience of self in place and the sharing and recommending of these experiences, is highly related to the benefits one perceives from them (Johnston and Kong, 2011). Travel experiences are particularly considered as biographical markers of place and identity, leading to self-transformation (McCabe and Stokoe, 2004). The public exposure of people’s experiences creates their reputation, which, sociologically speaking, refers to the ‘collective agreement on an individual’s attribute or achievement, based on what the public “knows” about the actor’ (Marchiori and Cantoni, 2012). This objective of sharing behaviour is rather common among tourists (Munar and Jacobsen, 2013). This very recounting of the travel experience offers the tourist a unique opportunity for social reputation, self-recognition and ego-enhancement (Dann, 1977), engaging them in a social determination battle with others through their personal interpretation of the place visited, or simply the labelling of the prestigious destination. After self-negotiating and constructing social meaning, the narrator reflects on who they have become (Noy, 2004) at the time of recounting their experience.
Telling comes between the experience and the final story (Langellier, 1999) and its construction is based on both the events themselves and the present event of narrating (Noy, 2004). It is a process through which people give meaning to their experiences by reinterpreting and personalizing the events (McGregor and Holmes, 1999), especially in the case of once-in-the-lifetime or transformational experiences.
The global expansion of travel narration after the introduction of Web 2.0 technologies is irrefutable. An unlimited number of tourists are able to join virtual networks and share their experiences of places through their own eyes (Goodman, 2007). This makes previously private, and generally undisclosed, experiences visible (Munar and Jacobsen, 2013), together with people’s social positioning within a group (Arenas-Gaitan et al., 2013). Online content creation, even in the format of a single narrative, is motivated by self-centred reasons (among others), such as positive self-enhancement, and gaining respect and recognition (Munar and Jacobsen, 2013). Besides knowledge, this content may be shared to disclose emotions and sentiments towards self and others, whether positive, like pride and hope, or negative, like regret or envy (Chua and Balkunje, 2013; Weiner, 2002). The self, in relation to this information, is claiming publicly – directly or indirectly – a positioning towards others. The sharing of experiences related to one’s good luck has been studied as the possible generator of other-directed non-malicious envy to those characterized by bad luck, through a process of social comparison (Teigen, 1997).
Research has shown that social media influence the process of individual reputation management (Deephouse, 2000), indicating the importance of social positioning and acceptance. Virtual communities and review sites represent spaces where tourists share their travel-related stories, experiences and opinions (Xiang and Gretzel, 2010). The basic difference is that in virtual communities, self-enhancement is achieved through group support and entertainment, whereas in review sites it is attained through information spreading (Schindler and Bickart, 2003). Facebook is the world’s leading social network, with an average 1.23 billion daily active users for December 2016 (http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/). YouTube is a multimedia sharing platform with over a billion users (https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html) which has managed to transform travel experiences by stimulating fantasies and bringing back travel memories through its videos (Tussyadiah and Fesenmaier, 2009). TripAdvisor is one of the largest sites for reviews of travel-related content (Kusumasondjaja et al., 2012), with more than 250 million reviews and opinions, operating in 47 countries worldwide (https://www.tripadvisor.com/PressCenter-c4-Fact_Sheet.html).
The basic content that is being shared through social media networks is first-hand knowledge and opinions of users, under the names of e-Word-of-Mouth (e-WOM) (Litvin et al., 2008) or user-generated content (UGC), which for Blackshaw and Nazzaro (2006) represent ‘a mixture of fact and opinion, impression and sentiment, founded and unfounded titbits, experiences, and even rumour’ (p. 4). On one hand, UGC acts as both an information source and a recommender and is considered as more credible and trustworthy than traditional media (Kusumasondjaja et al., 2012) On the other hand, it constitutes instances of reputation for the content creator (Marchiori and Cantoni, 2012). Its importance within travel-related online discussions has been analysed at length. (Ayeh et al., 2013; Litvin et al., 2008). Through the format of travel narratives, UGC expresses identity, and sharing this is vital for social interaction.
Considering that new media have enabled users to recount experiences during their trips, rather than after them (Pudliner, 2007), remembering a past visit to a place that no longer exists ‘forces’ tourists to recollect, restructure and narrate these experiences through the process of social spatialization. This study uses UGC as a reputation tool to determine whether tourists who had visited previously existing attractions self-attribute the chance variable of luck to their place identity through their online narratives of social spatialization and, if confirmed, which types of place attachment are being used.
Methodology
Considering that the focus of the study is on tourists’ re-evaluation of their visit to a lost attraction and the connection to chanciness, the public expression of their experiences on social media platforms was regarded as an appropriate space for data tracking. For the purpose of this research, three cases were chosen for study: the WTC before the 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001; Nepal before the destructive earthquake of 25 April 2015, particularly the areas of Durbar Square, Hanuman Dhoka Square, Bhaktapur and Basantapur Tower, which were damaged the most; and the fall of the ‘Pioneer Cabin Tree’, a thousand-year-old sequoia, in 2017. The online platforms that were used were YouTube, Facebook and TripAdvisor (Table 1). The initial intention was to study and compare the type of comments narrating past visits in these gone places within and among these online platforms. Yet, the online space visitors decided to use for the spontaneous development of the studied social discourse was not the same for these three cases. Thus, the lack of one platform for gathering data is justified by the fact that there was no one social media platform that collected comments on these three case studies. On the other hand, it is found interesting that three social platforms with different uses and objectives gather comments of the same content; that is, the need to socially communicate past experiences that can no longer be repeated. Data were gathered from the following sources: YouTube for the WTC, TripAdvisor for Nepal and Facebook for the Tunnel Tree.
Distribution of 1178 analysed comments.
WTC: World Trade Centre.
From YouTube, the first 12 tourist videos before the attack at the WTC were chosen. These videos were the ones with the most comments related to previous visits and appeared after keying in ‘World Trade Center before attack’. All videos related to documentaries on the WTC, and the terrorist attack, were eliminated, as these topics were not related to the tourist experience before their loss (Carley, 1993). On Facebook, only one profile from National Geographic was found, but it was excluded due to the low number of comments and their relation to luck to survival (‘9/11: the Day Before’). In this case, no relevant information was found on TripAdvisor. In the Nepal case, comments from TripAdvisor on four discussion forums were used as data for analysis (Plaza Durbar – Katmandú, Plaza Durbar – Bhaktapur, Basantapur Tower and Hanuman Dhoka Square). No comments for analysis were found on YouTube videos of these sights (keywords ‘Kathmandu before earthquake’), and all comments referring to the earthquake on Nepalese Facebook pages were for solidarity purposes and thus excluded. Finally, in the Tunnel Tree case, comments on Calaveras Big Trees National Park Facebook page (Calaveras Big Trees Association) after the official notification of the fall of ‘Pioneer Cabin Tree’ were analysed. No comments were found on either YouTube or TripAdvisor.
The unit of analysis comprised the online comments, whether words or phrases, as long as they captured the broad-based concepts studied (Carley, 1993) and were made by tourists after the loss of physical elements of the places. It did not matter whether they had visited the places themselves, or whether they wanted to comment on the past visits of others. The choice of online comments as a unit analysis was based on the need to find a rich database of tourists’ publicly expressed opinions and feelings about these previously visited locations after their loss. All comments related to luck and surviving the disaster, that is, comments made on visits near the time of the terrorist attack and the earthquake, were considered irrelevant and were eliminated (Carley, 1993) because the aim of the study was to focus on the chance of having made the visit, not on surviving it. The timeline of the gathered data is from the time of the destructive event until 15 January 2017.
For the codification process, deductive category application was implemented (Mayring, 2000), using the existing theory’s predictions about the variables of interest and the relationships between these variables. This means that prior theory was applied to create the categories and themes of the coding process and to identify the statements that could correspond to each category. Categories refer to groups of content that share a commonality, and sub-categories are generated based on various levels of abstraction (Krippendorff, 1980). For the sub-categories, codes and sub-codes, emerging content coding was applied (Charmaz, 2003). Subsequently, these categories and their underlying meanings were linked together into the three predetermined themes of the chancy definition (significance, lack of control and social definition of chancy). Qualitative data analysis and codification were conducted through the use of the EdEt software program.
Conceptual content analysis (Carley, 1993) was used to analyse the relationship between chanciness and tourism to a lost attraction. This approach looked at the occurrence of selected terms to establish the existence and frequency of concepts related to chanciness and the limits of subjectivity. The purpose of this analysis was to identify the content themes and categories that came out from individuals’ argumentation (making the technique more subjective). The significance of and control over the event as well as the social acceptance of the latter as chancy were chosen as content themes, while issues of place attachment, place evaluation, knowledge and chance were selected as categories. The meaning units, that is, the constellation of words or statements that refer to the same central meaning (Baxter, 1991) and were codified, will be identified below as statements; each comment may have more than one statement. From the 1178 comments by visitors to the WTC, Nepal and the Tunnel Tree before their human- and/or nature-induced disaster and the 248 comments by the online users who answered them back, 1765 statements have been codified into 89 sub-codes, as shown in Tables 2 to 5.
Number of sub-codes and statements per category/theme.
Codification of the significance of the event and number of statements for each sub-code.
WTC: World Trade Centre.
Codification of lack of control and number of statements for each sub-code.
WTC: World Trade Centre.
Codification of characterization as chancy and number of statements for each sub-code.
WTC: World Trade Centre.
Results
As previously explained, the construction and consumption of place through the choice of meanings attributed to it can occur a priori, in situ or a posteriori. This study focuses on a posteriori online discourse, developed and expressed by tourists and based on their satisfaction and desire to share their experience of those places that are gone. The meanings used to testify that social spatialization, meaning the changing significance of the re-interpreted places, are searched for within various themes: significance of the visit to the agent, their lack of knowledge regarding the transformation of the visit into a chancy event and the very attribution of chancy by visitors and non-visitors. For the purposes of this study, what we consider to be the event refers to a past visit to a tourist attraction that no longer exists, leading to the re-interpretation of the visit due to its partial or complete loss. The cause of this loss triggers a process of re-evaluating the place bonding, due to the ability to create a before and after era. Meanings within the theme of significance of the visit relate to categories of affective, cognitive and behavioural place attachment. Meanings within lack of control over chance refer to a lack of knowledge of the change to come, and meanings within the theme of the event being called as chancy connect with the attribution of the chance of having had an experience that cannot be repeated.
Significance of having visited gone places
According to the results shown in Table 1, 64 percent of all statements are related to the significance tourists attribute to their visit in Nepal, the WTC and the tunnel tree. The majority of statements (549) fall within the theme of cognitive place attachment and mostly describe why these were a must-see attraction for them, professing the importance of what is lost. Very few statements evaluate the attractions in a standard or negative way. Particularly, in the case of statements on Nepal from TripAdvisor, for example, ‘The zone was like a film setting by itself, marvellous, so pleasant to spend hours and hours’. ‘This place is simply a definition in the history of Nepal. Being here you can re-live history!’ or ‘Its history, corners, people and all its art is something unique that you can find only here’. These statements indicate that tourists focus on elements of beauty, history and social context to explain the value of the meanings in this place.
Beauty is the sub-code that gathers most statements. In the WTC and Tunnel Tree, beauty and uniqueness are mainly attributed to specific elements; that is, the Twin Towers and the Pioneer Cabin Tree, with statements such as ‘amazing things only come ONCE. There will never be another world trade centre that will compare’ or
This is one of our favourite parks and we have spent many days hiking there!! This is our family in July 2016 in front of the tree. We will miss seeing it when we go as they (sequoias) are truly one in a million!!
The dominating nature of the WTC and the Tunnel Tree is the fundamental feature justifying their past beauty. The praising details describing a historically unique setting, or an irreplaceable attraction, are then followed by evaluations of the entire experience of the visit with statements like ‘Without a doubt it was one of the most incredible experiences of my life’.
In addition, the social recognition of the (at least) touristic importance of these attractions before their damage makes unnecessary for the visitor the detailed description of every factor that added value to the destination, since their rumour got ahead of them. For this reason, not much is explained about what is lost; its social significance is considered as known.
Affective place attachment (Table 1), with 543 statements, receives the same numerical value as cognitive within the online social spatialization discourse. A variety of positive emotions, where love dominates, are shown during a visit, for example, ‘She was a beautiful and faithful friend that we all loved visiting whenever we did the North Grove trail. She will be missed’ (for the Tunnel Tree). The majority of statements (Table 2) that focus on clear emotions, without many sub-codes, are detected in the feelings developed after the loss of the attraction, where sadness is highlighted, for example, ‘This makes me sad. I’ll never forget the sheer presence of that building’ or a mixture of emotions somewhere between sadness and gladness is expressed, ‘Sad about this. Glad I had a chance to visit this tree in its lifetime’. Therefore, on a narrative level, the description of affective attachment is richer during the visit in terms of meanings, but these feelings are repeated more afterwards as new emotions about the place emerge. Finally, in terms of behavioural place attachment, a few statements either encourage others to make a visit, even though the place may be different, ‘I was fortunate to visit Durbar Square the week before the earthquake. The history, the spirituality, and the importance of this part of Kathmandu will continue despite the quake. If you have the chance to visit, visit’, or confirm a future visit on their part.
Therefore, as Table 1 shows, the significance of the event to the agent is of highest importance, in comparison to the other two variables in the chancy event definition, and this importance is portrayed by sub-codes which describe why the gone places studied were a must-see in terms of their unique beauty and the positive feelings they gave them and sub-codes which depict the personal, emotional upset they experience from the loss. Based on memories of the visit, tourists used various sub-codes to describe the characteristics of the place and, to a lesser degree, their emotion in situ, making the cognitive place attachment stronger than the emotional one. It is only after the loss of the tourist site that affective place attachment gains ground, converting sadness into a force that brings back memories.
Lack of control over the event
Visiting destinations that may not exist in the future, like the ones studied, is a possibility, but not a certainty; the latter, certainty, is present in last-chance tourism. Tourists in Nepal, the WTC and the Pioneer Cabin Tree did not know that they were visiting a place that would have a before and after era. Tourists could not have foreseen the WTC terrorist attack, as the indications for such an event to occur were poor. Statements like ‘I regret not appreciating them when I used to occasionally visit NYC with my family during the 1980’s mostly. I was only a small boy then and had no idea what would happen to them on 9/11/2001’ clearly manifest their lack of awareness of the significance of the site during the visit, which contributed to their inability to properly value the visit.
Nepal, on the other hand, is a seismic zone and the occurrence of an earthquake is not surprising. Nonetheless, the last big earthquake prior to 2015 was in 1934, when most of today’s tourists were not even born, thus lowering the expectation of experiencing one. This is indicated by how surprised tourists felt afterwards, ‘It was therefore a shock to see the extensive damage inflicted by the 2015 Earthquake on this World Heritage Site’, which illustrates an unexpected reaction. On the same level, the fall of the Pioneer Cabin Tree after the storm could be expected because of the tunnel through it, but considering that sequoias can live up to 3000 years, and others have been tunnelled and not fallen, makes an improbable case ‘just, wow! The things we never realize will happen’ or ‘I can’t believe it! Glad we got to visit it together before this happened!’
This lack of knowledge indicates the lack of control people have over the event, an element in their statements that represents only 10 percent of all statements, as Table 3 shows. According to Levy (2011), because of the fact that tourists made a visit unaware of the features that made it significant to them, they did not exercise relevant control over the event. This lack of knowledge and control is particularly evident in the comments on the WTC and the Tunnel Tree, where in the first case the construction of the ‘One World’ Memorial gives no possibility for restoration, and thus a revival of the old scenery, ‘I will never forget that moment I was there. I wish I could go back to that roof to see the skyline again’, while in the second there is no way of bringing a fallen tree back to life, ‘Very sad … an end of an era … We really enjoyed visiting this tree’. This loss is highlighted by the most cited sub-code, big change, where the unexpected damage is confirmed.
However, in the case of Nepal, restoration in the future is a possibility that some visitors hope for but do not believe is very likely. Statements like ‘I still hope that maybe somehow they could restore this historical buildings to its original state’, ‘However, I have heard that the people of Nepal are going to rebuild it – slowly but with the aim of bringing its grandeur’ or ‘If magic can be restored, that needs to be seen’ demonstrate the concern over the difficulties of these restorations, whether they refer to the long time it may take, to the complications of restoring something original or directly doubting the result. These comments, albeit few, focus on the fact that restoration will not bring Nepal back to its original state, declaring, ‘It will never be the same’.
Socially defining the visit as chancy
The evolution of a visit into a chancy one was considered unlikely during the visit, a fact expressed in the way tourists characterize themselves or others for having made these visits. As shown in Table 1, 26 percent of all statements feature the chance factor of having experienced a place that no one else can visit. In general, tourism destinations tend to evolve gradually over time, not suddenly, making repeated visits to the same place highly likely if the tourist chooses so.
Once the loss of the place is confirmed, 462 statements focus on indicating how unique and significant this event is, and consequently affiliate it with the concept of chance for those who took the opportunity and for those who missed it. This category is the third most stated after cognitive and affective place attachment, indicating the importance people give to the probability of not experiencing this visit for some reason, ‘I remember a family trip, driving through it and climbing on it. Very sad that I never got the chance to show my kids. I was lucky to have seen it’.
Statements in the category of chance are divided in two sub-categories: those who praise the tourist for taking the chance and making the visit and those who regret missing that same chance. In both cases, chance is either self-assigned or assigned to others. In the first case, chance is connected in a positive or a negative way. In the second case, luck is simply a matter of having visited in person, ‘I’m so glad I had the chance to see them (Twin Towers) in person’, and it can also be connected to the amount of times the same chance has been taken, ‘Guess we got there in good time! How many times did we walk through it on the North Grove Trail? Memories!’ That is, the higher the number of times visited, the more the memories. In the second case, the visit is presented as an unfulfilled future plan (193 statements), ‘Sad, it was on my bucket list for this year’, and as regret for not going when the chance was given, ‘Didn’t visit the underground mall … and didn’t have time for windows of the world since we were on a schedule. It was one of those places I planned on visiting again someday. But alas … didn’t get a chance’.
In the second case, chance is assigned positively to others who have experienced visiting a gone place, a place they wanted to visit and thought they eventually would, ‘You were lucky … I’ve missed my chance to see this magnificent giant standing tall. I sure regret that!’, and negatively to those who did not make it, ‘Many people living both in and outside of New York City never saw this. You would have loved it, while many others in this world didn’t have that opportunity’. The latter statement makes a clear indication of what those many who lost the chance would feel insinuating that they should feel envy for losing that opportunity.
Thus, the social attribution of the concept of chance through 462 statements indicates the significance of the event, the low probability of repeating something similar and the importance in terms of place identity. For those who have not experienced the event, the emotional disclosure on a self-directed level refers to personal regret (stated as such), while on other-directed level to non-malicious envy for those who have, acknowledging their chancy situation and confirming Teigen’s (1997) results on the luck and envy correlation.
Conclusion
We are in a time when every possible place can be commercialized as a tourist destination. This significantly limits the range of authentic places no tourist has been to before. On the other hand, the dynamic evolution of our social worlds, the lifecycle of destinations and the gradual transformation of the tourist experience have created a tourist expectation of reassurance that the actual space will alter in such a rhythm that repetition of the similar is highly probable and the only variable that may affect is our own decision to visit a destination. Ego-enhancement and place identity are currently connected to the quest of future experiences to places of socially unknown significance. Yet, human- and non-human-induced changes to places – whether by climate, political or social conditions – when abrupt, remind this ephemeral existence of places. The latter seems to direct the search for uniqueness in past experiences; that is, to gone places. Ego-enhancement, in terms of visited places, will not be so related to destinations hard to reach, as to destinations no longer existent. That is, distinctiveness is sought in the fact that tourists took the chance to visit these places, places that were not necessarily the main reason for the visit. This indicates that tourists’ relation to a place in retrospect represents a second chance to make the past visit significant to them and to others, while visiting any destination as a probable chancy event could be a new way of experiencing travelling.
The cases in this study are the sudden losses of the WTC in New York, the Pioneer Cabin Tree in California and various emblematic temples in Kathmandu after a human- and/or non-human-induced cause. These disruptions of place-referent continuity (Korpela, 1989) have a negative nature, in that they make the previous era better than the present one, and contribute chanciness to the past. Even though nothing lasts forever, and the ephemeral nature of physical settings is a fact, people – without a specific warning of a soon-to-come disaster – tend to take for granted the existence of these settings. Earthquakes in seismic zones and the fall of tunnelled trees may not be as surprising as a terrorist attack (at least in 2001), but in tourists’ perceptions, as reflected in their comments, they were not actually expecting it to happen. When the threat is evident, tourists do what is known as last-chance tourism (Lemelin et al., 2010) because they are aware that they will probably not be able to return to that place in the future. Any factor that raises the probability of knowing, and thus controlling the event, reduces the element of surprise and eliminates the chanciness of the event (Stoutenburg, 2015). Having enough time – albeit little – to respond to a threat and visit a place before it enters a new era means that there is a warning of the change and those who make the visit from that point on do not form part of chance tourism.
This study shows tourists’ desire to use the re-interpreted meanings they attribute to consumed places, after the sudden loss of a symbolic physical quality of these places. This is achieved through place identity transformation to gain positive distinctiveness (Korpela, 1989; Twigger-Ross and Uzzell, 1996). This loss became what Urry (1995) mentioned as an event that made people remember together their past visit, activating through memories a nostalgic discourse. The higher the significance of the event for the tourist, the stronger is the reference of nostalgia on the comments and, thus, the higher the chanciness of the event. The cognitive and affective attachment visitors recall publicly based on this nostalgic narrative dominates among comments to convince others over the importance of the loss. The chosen attractions were considered up to a point must-see stops of the visit, a fact which made easier the projection and social recognition of the chance of having visited them. This does not mean that less known destinations cannot be part of chancy visits; it would simply require higher effort from the narrator to describe, provide evidence and convince over the significance of the unknown gone place. Once the experience is projected as special, the expression of this nostalgia has become the trigger for communicating negative feelings of regret and envy by those who lost their chance in sharing that nostalgia. Shields’ (1992) social spatialization became the context within which connotations related to cognitive and affective place attachments were expressed online as experiences, which were transformed into chancy lucky events.
Tourists’ desire to enhance self-esteem is expressed through publicly sharing statements that express the importance of these gone places, not only for them but also for others. This importance is expressed through 549 statements on cognitive attachment, associating with these places novel (and social for Nepal) meanings and a focus on why it was significant, and 543 statements regarding hedonic meanings, where, on an affective level, negative emotions provoked by the loss of these places and their meanings dominate. In addition, 462 statements label a visit to a gone place as chancy, the majority of these focusing on self-reflection and whether they went (140 statements) or did not go to the place (301 statements).
The desire to share this experience is also evident from the diversity of social platforms people used to communicate issues of spatialization. It is thought-provoking that 225 comments about Nepal were published on TripAdvisor after the earthquake by tourists who had previously visited. TripAdvisor is a website offering vacation tips; thus, these tourists assign a new use to this online community, where people who show an interest in visiting Kathmandu gather and are likely to read short descriptions of gone places. On the other hand, 208 comments on YouTube communicate the experience of visiting the WTC, based on another user’s uploaded video or photographs, and 743 Facebook comments, recounting memories and feelings, were published under two notifications from the Calaveras National Park regarding the fall of the Pioneer Cabin Tree. That is, place-related distinctiveness – related to the chance of having visited gone places – creates in-group membership within asynchronous online communities.
Although previous research has mostly focused on the emotional level of place attachment, this study contends the importance of cognitive place attachment as a factor of distinctiveness. It could be argued that the short duration of a tourist visit or of the contact in situ with these attractions did not generate important emotional capital, but the latter was produced after their loss, through the re-interpretation of their meanings and values. Additionally, when the frequency of visits is higher, people’s comments show stronger cognitive place attachment, making the visit no less chancy. That is, the concept of chanciness is used as a marker of significance and distinction and is not based on the strength of place attachment, but on the mere existence of one, since in all cases tourists were unaware of the place re-interpretation to follow.
Moreover, although this study focused on disasters as the turning point where chanciness in past experiences is rising, it does not necessarily mean that sudden or unexpected changes related to macabre and a negative transformation of the space are the only elements of disruption of place-referent continuity. For the sake of improvement in social terms, many decisions of fast implementation can be politically made, transforming the nostalgia of a problematic era into a chancy event. Further investigation is needed for the analysis of that side of chanciness.
Finally, it is important to point out that chance tourism – representing a particular type of luck based on lack of control over the event to follow – is not a type of tourism that people can choose, like dark or last-chance tourism, but a typology made up of people who have already done something, unaware of its future significance for them. This significance is highlighted through a nostalgic remembering of the past visit to gone places. Nonetheless, this study has only focused on physical elements, and non-material aspects have not been dealt with. Suggested future research would be to identify the values and meanings tourists attribute to social and cultural factors that can no longer be repeated in the places visited.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.