Slow adventures for wellbeing

This abstract reports on a research study that aimed to examine how outdoor adventure tour guides facilitate psychological wellbeing of tourists, as their clients. Psychological wellbeing is defined both hedonically, as pleasure, and eudaimonically, as meaning or a sense of purpose in life. The research sample involved ten outdoor guides who were involved in choreographing so called slow adventure experiences for tourists in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. These adventure experiences are typified by activities such as stargazing, canoeing and similar activities associated with mindful, slower passages of time. Slow adventure normally involves small social groups and nearly always necessitates immersion in the natural world by tourists and their guides. Unlike previous tour guide research that examined psychological wellbeing in high adrenaline activities like skydiving, research on wellbeing in slow adventures is scant. There is also a gap in understanding how adventure tour guides in natural settings influence tourists’ wellbeing as much of previous research examined tourists’ perspectives on wellbeing. This study has filled these important knowledge gaps. At a broader level the study adds to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 3 on good health and wellbeing. The study
utilised semi-structured, in-depth, interviews with ten outdoor adventure guides. Adopting a hermeneutic, interpretive approach to analyse the interview data, the results revealed three key themes that emerged from the interview findings: quality time, as a predominantly hedonic wellbeing theme, and two principally eudaimonic themes: flourishing through meaningful moments and a sense of togetherness. Collectively the findings show that interpretations of time
in natural settings, meaningful moments and a sense of togetherness are all influenced by the adventure guides to enable tourists’ psychological wellbeing. The slow adventure experiences are highly immersive. They help the tourists re-establish their contact with the nature. Theoretically, the research study adds to the literature in tourism and positive psychology (or positive tourism), especially to the body of knowledge on mindfulness (sensitivity to context and high levels of engagement) and savouring (a form of emotion regulation used to maintain and extend positive emotional experiences). The findings on eudaimonic wellbeing also add to current understandings of eudaimonic tourist experiences, as opposed to tourist experiences characterised by fun and hedonism.