The Role of Tourism in Shaping the Business TRIP Experience

Previous studies have indicated that business travelers considered tourism-related pursuits only as a byproduct of their travel. By contrast, recent studies that use the term “bleisure” suggest that pleasurable and recreational experiences emerge as important components of the business trip. To advance this discussion, we inquire the role of tourism in shaping the business travel experience. Specifically, we ask when, where and how the features of tourism shape the business travel experience.

In this paper we summarize and re-conceptualize the insights of a sequence of studies about Israeli business travelers that were conducted over a decade. In-depth interviews with business travelers were first conducted and analyzed between 2011-2014, and a quantitative survey was distributed and analyzed between 2014-2016. A third phase of research took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, between 2020-2021, in which grounded business travelers spoke about their hypermobility before the pandemic and their life under lockdown.

The first insight derived from these studies suggested that “moments of relaxation” and a sense of “time-off” are experienced during the passenger phase of the trip (Unger, Uriely and Fuchs 2016). These experiences appear to reflect needs and desires of the “true self” and, thus, exemplify the pursuit of intra-personal existential authenticity in tourism (i.e., Wang, 1999). The second major insight suggested that the opportunity of business travelers to experience the destination beyond “the tourist environmental bubble” (i.e., Cohen 1972) via their contacts with local colleagues generated a sense of “constructive/symbolic” authenticity (i.e., Wang, 1999). but did not enable inter-personal existential authenticity (Unger, Fuchs and Uriely, 2019). The third insight suggested that beyond the motivations of the trip and the type spent for tourist-like activities, the significance of tourism-related experiences concerns their role as anchor points for the reconstruction of memories, evaluations and anticipations of business travelers (Unger and Uriely 2022).