Children's and Families' Holiday Experience by Carr Neil;

Author:Carr, Neil;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The issue of who pays for school tourism experiences and why is important when set alongside the issue of user satisfaction. In traditional consumer and tourism research it has generally been assumed that the person consuming the product or experience is the one who must be satisfied. Within the case of school tourism, however, the situation is somewhat more complex. While it remains the case that the child, as the direct consumer, should have a satisfactory experience, it is also arguably necessary to ensure that the teachers, schools, educational authorities and parents are at least equally satisfied with an experience that they may not have directly taken part in, but may have contributed to in a multitude of ways. As in the case of the family holiday experience, but on a larger scale, the problem is that the various people and bodies who buy in to the idea of a school tourism experience may have different notions of why children participate in them and what they should gain from them. Consequently, it is important for the tourism industry to understand fully these complex and potentially conflicting motivations in order to be able to cater successfully to the school tourism market (Ritchie et al., 2008).

It is also important for the tourism industry, whose attractions and services are widely utilised by schools, to recognise that the children on these trips do not necessarily see them as holidays. Indeed, among the aforementioned group of university students interviewed in the UK in 2000, there was a strong tendency not to view the domestic and international school trips they had undertaken as children as ‘holidays’. For example, when asked if she had even been on a holiday without her parents before she was 15 years old, one student said ‘don’t think so no apart from school trips, which don’t really count’. When asked to explain why they did not count, the student responded by saying ‘they’re not really holidays for a start because our school trips were always some higher educational … our school trips would just be boring ’cause we never went anywhere that didn’t have like some educational value’. Unfortunately, the research with the students was not focused on understanding people’s perspectives on school trips, so it is not possible to do more than speculate as to why they did not see these trips as holidays. Potential reasons include the presence of teachers on the trips, which linked them with the school environment instead of being tourism experiences ‘free’ from the constraints associated with the school as workplace. Recognition of the distinction drawn in the minds of school trip participants between these trips and holidays is important, as it may have implications for how the tourism industry caters to this market as distinct from the tourist one. More work is obviously required to gain a deeper understanding of how all participants (e.g. schoolchildren, parents and teachers) in the school trip experience view it and how they see it as similar to, or distinct from, a holiday.

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